April 27. Day 117. Prickly character

 You know that when relationships end, the classic line is apparently "it's not you. It's me"?
Everyone knows it's crap but somehow it is supposed to make the jilted partner feel better.
I have to say I have a "difficult" relationship with dog parks and in all honesty the problem probably is me.
To be fair it's not actually the dog park I have a problem with. Dog parks are fine in the absence of other dogs or more accurately dog owners. There just seems to be strange interpersonal relationships going on in the secret world of dog parks that I do not understand and I'm pretty sure I don't want to take the time to find out. The whole dog park clique thing turns me into a prickly character much more likely to interact with dogs than owners.
But occasionally I think the dog park is a rich untapped vein pulsing with pet stories I should take the time to investigate further. So today I was at this park far outside my normal patch and a very nice lady was most keen to tell me a story that goes like this. (names have been changed because I can not for the life of me remember any of them and that's not important right now).
".... so I went round to Sharon's to pick up her dogs to take them and mine to the dog chiropractor" (yes, that's a thing but that's not even the story). "The little one was pulling and backing away and refusing to come but eventually I got her out of the gate and she was just fine. When we got back, she started doing the same thing this time refusing to go back through the gate. Turns out, she was still wearing the dog collar and every time she crossed the electric fence line she got a shock. I shocked her three times, poor thing".
And I got that story because another dog in the park was wearing a collar that enabled the owner to deliver a shock via a remote control in the pocket if the pooch's behaviour got out of control.
So in five minutes I learned about car loads of dogs going to bulk billing chiropractors, electric perimeter fences for canine escapologists and zap collars for dogs inclined to get overly frisky. Like a said fertile ground for good stories but I suspect I might need a collar to deliver shock therapy to cope with it all.