The REAL Marley and Me!!!: Food Waste Bins!!

Do any of you own these delightful contraptions?!!! In our house they are Marley's favourite thing! This larger one lives outside with the other bins and is collected by the bin men every week and the smaller one lives indoors! Where the hell am I supposed to put the smaller one to guarantee Marley can't get it?!! He can reach all the kitchen surfaces and can open the kitchen cupboards!!! So my only choice is to put it into the kitchen cupboard and make sure the kitchen (not the cupboard) doors are barricaded when I am not in the vicinity as Marley can OPEN internal doors seriously!!!!!! The other day I turned my back for about a tenth of a second and he had a WHOLE chicken carcass out of the bin and I swear he swallowed it whole!

Now the outside food waste is not too much of a problem unless Marley decides to take himself for a walk! I live in a lovely courtyard that contains my house, a barn and several other cottages all of which have their own outside food waste bins! So imagine my surprise when not long after we were given them, I opened my front door one morning to find EVERYONE'S food waste bin in my front garden! It would appear that the previous evening (which was a summer one and therefore the patio doors had been open) Marley had gone for a lovely evening walk and dragged every single bin into the front garden! Luckily it was only mine that he had chewed open, let me say his toilet situation was not good for several days!!!!

How does he get out I hear you ask!! Well he can jump the fences but seems to only be inclined to do that if he is chasing a ninja animal! Our fences are old fashioned and have chicken wire over them to stop him being able to step through them but over the months he has done his best to force his way through them! I had one particular area of the fence by the back gate that wasn't secure so I blocked it up with heavy logs and so couldn't figure out how he was escaping until I caught him one day dragging the logs away with his mouth so that he could get through!!!!!!