I just moved into a pretty amazing house. Among its many features is a big outdoor spa in a corner of the massive back deck. Jackpot!
There’s just one problem: my twelve year-old giant poodle, Alto, is moderately blind, and can’t seem to come to terms with the concept of there being a safety fence enclosing the area. It looks pretty great, this semi frameless pool fencing (Melbourne style to the hilt, with its panes of glass floating between silver-toned metal posts), but Alto just can’t seem to differentiate it from thin air.
This isn’t really a problem, it seems, except when I’m using the spa. I took it for a spin for the first time last night, shutting Alto outside the pool fence while he hassled my housemate for pats. As soon as I was in, he barrelled over to see what I was up to, and got a face full of thick toughened glass. Thank god these things are designed for child safety, or we’d have more than a bit of cleaning up to do.
Although he learned of the the presence of some kind of barrier from running headlong into it, I’m convinced that he’s still unable to to see it – he continued to try and push himself through it to get at me until I opened the child-safety gate to let him in (it was either that or me getting out of the hot tub, which was obviously not an option).
I’m not too sure what to do about it at this point. I’ve never had much experience with pool fences, Melbourne being the land of share houses that tend towards delightfully crumbling, cheap and devoid of swimming pools and spas. I suppose I’ll give it a while to see if Alto can get his head around it before I resort to marking each artfully floating glass panel with a giant cross in gaffer tape.