The dog park across the street

There's a fellow who leased the land across the road from my farm gate and has made a free off-leash dog park there. It's been very popular, and now there's traffic jams and cars parked on both sides of the road as people take their dogs to the park and use it.

So today I drove up and saw a woman let two dogs out of her car without a leash. The dogs saw turkeys inside my fence, and immediately ran down the fenceline, through the bars of my gate and into my property, chasing the turkeys. One of the dogs was a labrador, the other was a border collie.

It only takes a few seconds for a medium-sized dog to kill a turkey, or injure it enough that it won't survive, and the turkeys that these dogs were after are my only bourbon red toms. If I lost them I won't have any bourbon red poults this year. Finding adult heritage breed turkeys for breeding this time of year is very difficult, and the window for poults is pretty small. If I lost the birds I might not have a crop of that kind of turkey.

So I took all that in while I was opening the car door and sprinting towards the woman. "GET YOUR FXXXING DOGS. CATCH YOUR DOGS. GET YOUR DOGS OUT OF HERE!!", I yelled, and then realized that she didn't have them under control and wasn't doing anything to get them under control. She was watching them chase my turkeys. They weren't responding to her in any way.

She's standing there watching her dogs. "GET YOUR DOGS. I AM GOING TO SHOOT YOUR DOGS. GO GET THEM NOW!". I ran back to my truck and grabbed my rifle, and turned around and ran back to the gate. At this point, with the rifle in my hands, she's doing something. She's running towards Andrea, "Please don't shoot my dog!! Please". Andrea managed to grab one of her dogs to prevent it from grabbing a turkey, but the woman thought that Andrea was bringing the dog over to me to be shot. "GET YOUR DOG NOW OR I WILL HAVE TO SHOOT IT. RUN! GO!" The other dog noticed that the first dog was being held, and turned around, and the woman was able to go grab it. "PLEASE DON'T SHOOT MY DOGS!"

Keep your fxxxing dogs out of my property. I raise animals, and if your dog kills one of my breeding turkeys I'll have to spend another year waiting for another one. "But I always keep my dogs on leash!" They're not on leash now. I don't want any excuses. If I find your dogs on my property chasing or killing my livestock I will shoot them. Keep your dogs on leash until you get inside the dog park fence. "But I don't want you to shoot my dogs". I don't want to either. Keep your dogs under your control, and if you can't, learn to control your dogs.

The fence around the offleash area is that orange plastic construction netting, that's 30" tall. It's short enough that a medium sized dog can jump right over it. So even if the dogs are inside the "offleash area" they're still able to get out. Guess I've got to talk to the guy about the offleash area perimeter fence.

The best part of this is if I ended up shooting one of these dogs killing my livestock that I'd show up in the local paper. "Evil farmer kills cute puppies". Love that.