Big Cheese Mega Sonic Woof Woof

The pack of wild dogs living at the bottom of our garden, the subject of previous posts "the dog catchers cometh.." and others, seems to have moved on. 

Returning from our summer holidays armed with a Big Cheese Mega Sonic Woof Woof dog deterrent, an ultra high frequency motion activated animal detector sonic zapper thingy, I was confident that I was going to rid my life of the nuisance barking that has been a feature of most nights since we came to live in this house. 

But the Kazakh authorities, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to change our charming mountain babbling brook into a high speed, metal gabion blocks filled with rocks industrial channel. So, instead of barking in the morning, we have the crashing of lorry loads of rocks being tipped into the river bed. And while walking up the river, instead of little beaches that the kids can paddle in, there are now walls of rock lining the channel in dead straight lines. 

All this activity must have put the family of 12 dogs off their onions at our gaff, because they have moved on. They no longer inhabit the tunnel, and even more exciting, the stupid old do-gooder granny who has been chucking plastic bags of soggy bread for them to eat over the river and onto our land (made me quite proprietorial!) seems to have stopped even doing that. There remain two uneaten bags of mush, and not a pup to be seen. 

Of course, you still hear a lot of dogs barking at night - this is the middle of central Asia after all. But nothing like the din that we used to get, which honestly sounded like we were neighbours with Cruela DeVil after a particularly successful dognapping adventure. 

So the Big Cheese Mega Sonic Woof Woof is now posing as a high tech burglar alarm because it has a little red light that goes on if you walk across its 12m sensor range.