Law and Order: DCU (Dog Crime Unit)
By: Rachel Brown
Tags: Humor, True Crime, Dogs, Engineering

Long, long ago, when the kids were young and involved in weekend sports activities, we had an incident. Not on the field or court, but a domestic incident while we were away from home.

It was a balmy day and the whole family departed for a day-long outing to my son’s soccer game. Because it was warm and sunny and ideal, I decided to allow our dog, Peppy, to stay outside in the backyard to enjoy the day.

Peppy, our then four-year-old Border Collie mix, was the benevolent queen of our backyard. She guarded the perimeter of our yard daily with obsessive-compulsive thoroughness. No squirrel went unchased. No bird safely rested in our trees. No child went unherded. No neighbor could ever walk their dog down the sidewalk that ran parallel to the eight-foot wooden fence without hearing her frantically running up and down the fence barking, but they could not see her. Until…

It was much like the Shawshank Redemption — lulling your warden to sleep with a slow and methodical plan. Peppy dismantled the wooden latticework of the backyard fence. Even though the huge windows in our kitchen looked out on it directly, I never once saw her chewing on it. Did she do it in the cover of night with a headlamp?

One day, I was mowing the lawn on the side of the house outside of the fence when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. It moved. It was Peppy’s head poking through the head-sized hole in the lattice fence. She was barking at me excitedly as if to say, “I love you so much I chewed this hole so I can see you when you are on the other side!”

I immediately blamed my 10-year-old son, Sam. This had him written all over it. I imagined he felt bad for Peppy and somehow broke or sawed my fence! But upon further inspection, this was not Sam’s handy work. This was too clean — too exact. Peppy’s head fit so perfectly and at her exact height. My Dad used to say that Peppy was the smartest person in our house and now I had to agree with him since she engineered the perfect hole. I had visions of Peppy bent over meticulous plans — much like Wile E. Coyote — except her plan actually worked.

As the year went on the “head hole” increased — again without me noticing the new gap until it was so big that she slipped one day barking at a passerby and fell through the hole and into the side yard. Any other dog would have made a run for it. But not Peppy. She was a worker dog, dedicated to protecting the family. She panicked because she didn’t want to try to jump back through the hole up onto the deck, so I led her around the house. And she never fell through again.

I do not know why I wasn’t furious with her for ruining my fence. I think it was part pride and part disbelief. I saw that gaping hole, not as an eyesore to be fixed, but as a constant reminder of her love for us.

But I digress. Back to the fateful day — to the scene of the crime.

We arrived back home from the soccer excursion five hours later to find Peppy sleeping on top of the table on the screened-in porch. Happy to see us, she greeted us with the proper amount of jumping and whining. Just another day, until….

The next afternoon, there was a knock at our front door. No one ever came over unannounced, so I was curious to see who it was. Peppy was barking at the uninvited knock from her perch in the brown chair in the living room. It was her indoor look-out for all things moving in the neighborhood. The blinds on that window were broken to prove it.

I opened the door to find a police officer on my porch. My mind raced…was he here to deliver the news of an untimely death in the family? Was he here investigating a robbery in the neighborhood? Was I going to be falsely accused of a crime?

“Hello, ma’am. I’m Officer Smith from the Greenwood Police Department,” he said over the non-stop barking of Peppy. “One of your neighbors called us yesterday to complain about a disturbance. Your dog was outside all day yesterday barking.”

Well, I could not feign ignorance by saying, “What dog?” or “My dog?!” since Peppy was barking crazily in the background.

I told the officer that we were not gone “all day”, just five hours from 10am-3pm. I left her outside to enjoy the day — because she is a dog. “Who called you to complain,” I asked.

“We don’t give out that information, ma’am. I’ll issue a warning this time, but please don’t let it happen again or it will result in a fine.”

We lived in our neighborhood for 13 years and never got to know our neighbors. But it didn’t take Matlock to figure out who had called the police. The masterfully chewed hole faced the snitch’s house. They were not a friendly family. The idea of Peppy staring out of her hole barking at them all afternoon actually made me proud of her. Dogs know. They sense this in people.

Now Peppy had an open file at the Greenwood Police Department. We had to be careful not to let her bark “all day” for fear she would be taken to the pound. I didn’t want her to have to spend years on the lam, running from the cops.

Years later, we moved, and I told people it was a witness protection-like precaution to keep Peppy out of the clink. She had slowed down by then. Completely deaf, she could not hear the doorbell or fireworks — things that usually made her go berserk. Her cloudy eyes hid most of the moving critters in the yard. She was quiet now and spent her days napping with running paws and moving muzzle that showed she was dreaming of her glory days in the backyard.

Peppy passed away in 2019 after thirteen years in our family. I am waiting for Purdue University to bestow a Master of Engineering degree to her posthumously. I would proudly accept it in her honor and even set up the “Pep E. Brown Scholarship” awarded to the student who was most loyal, loving and persistent in their studies. Bark all day in the big fenced-in yard in the sky, my sweet Pep.