This is the stock I come from.

One of my mom's cousins told a story this weekend about herself, her dog, and the electric fence surrounding her property.

There's a cat in her neighborhood that has realized that her dog can't leave the yard. So the cat stalks up and down the boundary of their property, antagonizing the dog. The dog barks at it constantly but can't cross the electric fence to go after it.

Well one day last week, the cat must have done something really outrageous to piss off the dog. Because the dog did cross the electric fence. But once it was on the other side, it didn't want to cross the fence to come back home. Understandably, of course.

The dog-owning cousin, once she realized this, went out to get the dog and bring it back home. When she got to the dog, she took its collar off, the one that reacts to the electric fence, so that the dog could run freely back into its own yard. Which it immediately and happily did.

Having done her duty, the cousin then went back home herself.

Carrying the electric dog collar in her hand.

Yeah. Just because you took it off the dog doesn't mean it stops working.

When she hit the electric fence, she said, she threw that goddamn collar as far as she could throw. But not before she got the shock of her life.

And as hard as I laughed when she told that story, all I could think was, "that's totally something that I would do too." My family: we come from smart stock.