Rube Goldberg

Sure, it’s not Sunday. But this is definitely a “Sunday Story”, even on a Friday!!!

New Hampshire

So here’s the story.  There’s these two Great Pyrenees, big overgrown white Labrador looking dogs, roaming the flattened countryside of Western Ohio.  They’ve been “out” for months, two “puppies” (they don’t look like puppies anymore) that dug their way under their kennel.  And over the past couple of months they wandered across the now empty cornfields, from near Lima all the way to a tiny “burg” called New Hampshire, almost twenty miles away. 

In Allen County (and now Auglaize County next door) there’s a dog trapper.  She’s dedicated the past several years to rescuing the wandering dogs of the “plains” of Ohio.  And she’s incredibly successful; spending time, money and effort to find a way to bring those dogs in.  But the Great Pyrenees have eluded her, even as she tracked them twenty miles from Lima to New Hampshire.  Her regular trapping techniques didn’t work.  So, she needed equipment, and she needed help.  She called Don, the leader of Lost Pet Recovery, the group my wife Jenn and I belong to.  (All of this is volunteer by the way, the Allen County trapper, Don, us.  No one is making money in finding lost dogs).

Traps and Panels

Normally we catch wandering dogs in self-contained traps.  They look like cages, with a trap door at one end and a pressure-plate trigger at the other.  Often, a couple of McDonald’s double cheeseburgers (plain) at the back of the trap past the trip-plate is enough to make a lost dog “safe”.  Those traps come in sizes, from four-foot Chihuahua size to six-foot extra-large Great Dane size.  But some dogs: some that have been trapped before and “won’t get fooled again”, and some that just won’t go in “the cage”, need a different technique.

Panel traps are big kennels, six foot panels bolted together with an actual door in the front.  Instead of the “confines” of a trap, a panel can be as small as six by three, and as big as eight by eight.  A dog that won’t go in a trap, might well go into the “room” of the panel trap.  That is, if the bait is right, and the panels themselves don’t remind them of “bad kennels” of the past.

Slam the Door

The Allen County trapper was well aware of the “origin story” of the twin Pyrenees, and was reasonably concerned about the panels.  So she set them up, a couple at a time.  And she baited it with the Pyrenees “food of choice”, deer.  There are plenty of dead deer around this time of year, hit by cars or shot by hunters but able to hide away and die.  So it took a couple of weeks, and moving the whole operation to New Hampshire, to get the “pups” into an eight by eight panel trap.

Now it’s “just” a matter of closing the door.  In the past, we would string a rope from the door to a car, a couple of hundred feet away.  When the dog went into the trap, you’d pull the rope, and slam the door shut.  But there were always the locations where we couldn’t get a “straight shot”, and the rope just wouldn’t work. 

That’s only part of the problem with the Pyrenees.  The panel trap is out in a field, completely exposed.  There’s a barn fairly close, but it’s not a good place to “hide” from the hyper-sensitive instincts of the wandering dogs.  But the bigger issue is:  can we catch two dogs at one time?  If we get one, but miss the second, we’ll never get another chance to get her safe, at least in a panel trap.

Here’s where creative “engineering” meets dog trapping.  All we need is an “automatic” closer, that will slam the door shut when both dogs are in.  And we have one of those, with a “sensor” that detects the dog at the back of the trap.  The sensor is the kind to keep the garage door from closing on kids and dogs, a “beam” that shuts off the power when the light is broken.  When the power goes off, an electric magnet, holding the door open, goes off as well.  The door slams shut, and the dog is safe.

MacGyver’ed

But the “beam” thing won’t work with two dogs.  What you need is a “switch” with a remote control, and a way to watch the trap “real time”.  So what we “created” was a remote “switch”, operated from a remote control (from as far as a quarter-mile away).  The switch powers an electro-magnet, holding the door open against the pull of multiple bungees waiting to slam it shut.  And the old “latch” is now replaced by a big wrought-iron privacy fence gate lock.  Hit the button, the magnet goes off,  the door slams into the latch, and the dogs are safe.  And it’s all powered by a tractor battery, set up on an upside down milk crate on the side of the panel.

Oh, and there’s three cameras stationed around the trap, to give us the best view possible of the scene.  Both dogs have to be at the back of the trap, for sure, enjoying their deer, before the button gets pushed.  It’s kind of like that scene from the movie Oppenheimer, except that there’s really zero chance that the world will catch on fire.

Describing the whole setup depends on your age.  If you’re old enough, you know what a “Rube Goldberg” is.  That’s my Mom and Dad’s generation.  A little bit younger, and maybe you remember the contraptions of Wylie Coyote that came from the “Acme” company.  Younger still, and you’d say the whole setup is “MacGyver’ed”. Today, maybe it’s “jury-rigged”, or “jerry-built”, or “thrown-together”.  

Margin of Error

But there’s little margin for error.  The camera signals have to go to cell towers, then back to the button pusher’s phone.  There’s at least a three-second lag.  And there’s the real concern of changing weather in Western Ohio.  The forecast: high winds, falling temperatures, changes from rain to snow.  “Perfect weather” to sit in a silent truck, behind the barn, waiting to push the button and slam the gate.  And hope your finger’s don’t freeze to the remote control (the dogs won’t come if there’s a running truck nearby). 

And, of course, once the gate does slam shut and the dogs are “caught” – what to do?  It’s not like their “happy puppies”; they’re near feral, and enjoyed their months of freedom.  And they’ve never had a leash on.  So somehow, we’ve got to transfer the  dogs from the panel trap to a crate that can be transported.  That’ll be another trick.

The good news is that there’s a rescue ready to take them in, day or night.  The bad news is the temperatures will start falling tomorrow, and hit single digits by Sunday.  I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Post Script – I put this addition to a later essay – but here’s the conclusion to the “Rube Goldberg” story

Hanging:  A couple of Sunday’s ago I left you hanging on a “Sunday Story”.  It’s now indoor track season and I’m officiating Sunday track meets for several more weeks in a row, so not much time to tell stories (just creating some more!!).   But our group, Lost Pet Recovery, was helping to trap two young Pyrenees who were out for months in Western Ohio (Rube Goldberg).  The short version is that, it took three days to finally get both dogs into the big panel trap.  Jenn and Don spent two long evenings sitting in the truck in sub-zero wind chill  waiting for the dogs to go in.  But it was on the third night, with the local trapper in charge, that the pups finally went into the panel, and the “Rube Goldberg” mechanism remotely closed the door (IT WORKED – WOO-HOO!!!!).

That was only the first problem:  next was how to get the dogs into smaller “traps” so they could be transported to a rescue.  It was cold, and the dogs weren’t mean, but not cooperative either. Eventually the trapper and friends were able to get them in the traps, and soon out of the cold.  Both dogs are now doing well in their new, and warm, home at the rescue. 

The Sunday Story Series

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.