This morning there was an attempted break-in in our neighborhood and Murphy, Kitty, and Tabby alerted me to it.
Murphy started it. He’s not much of a barker, but every once in a while he’ll let loose at someone walking by or at another dog strolling past. In fact, just a couple of minutes before he went nuts this morning he barked at this one woman out for her morning walk. (In her case, I told him it was okay to keep barking because she was the wife of a mean man who was nasty to us about keeping off his lawn.)
But I digress…
Not even five minutes later Murph starts in again. Like most neighborhoods, mornings are pretty active around here. In addition to kids getting to school and adults to work, there’s new construction going on. There’s never a shortage of people coming and going. Every now and then Murph won’t like the looks of a passing work truck and he’ll make some noise to let everyone know.
But this time the way Kitty and Tabby were acting also caught my attention. They were spooked, which I could have explained was due to Murph’s ruckus, but they were also sticking around instead of running away. Plus, they were focused on whatever Murph was barking at outside.
After the snake incident I’ve learned to pay heed to out of the ordinary behaviors like this so I went to check things out.
I got to the window in time to see a man in black rushing between two houses right across the street.
I freaked for a half a second until I spotted the cop car and realized the man in black was a uniformed police offer. The front door of one of the houses swung open and I saw my neighbor, clearly frazzled and upset, trying to figure out which way the officer went.
Moments later sirens sounded and it wasn’t too long after that before a second cop car screeched to a halt. That officer went to briefly talk to my neighbor before joining the other officer out back.
Apparently they didn’t find anything and my neighbor was okay, but what a wild way to start a Monday. I made sure to praise Murph on being such a good watch dog. And the cats too. They knew something was amiss. All I had to do was pay attention to their weird behavior to catch on.
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