Horrible evening and night. Along about 10 pm as we were walking in the neighborhood, some idiot’s out-of-control German shepherd dog charged across our main feeder street and down the side road where we were standing and attacked Cassie.
The shepherd belonged to the guests of some renters in a house on Feeder Street. This bunch were out in front of the house, apparently taking their leave of their hosts as they loaded stuff into the back of a small SUV. As we approached on Side Road, I could see they had a couple of dogs out there, one of them a shepherd, and that the shepherd was squirreling around their truck. I stopped to watch for a moment, but then decided we could get by since we were all the way on the other side of a wide road.
About the time we stepped forward from this pause—well before we reached the corner—this dog spotted us and shot across Feeder Street like a rocket. It grabbed Cassie by the nape of the neck and started shaking her, trying to kill her.
Wouldn’t you know, I’d decided to carry along a glass of tea instead of my coyote shilelagh, and I was wearing sandals, so couldn’t even kick the damn dog in the ribs.
I grabbed the shepherd but couldn’t force it to release her—she was shrieking and the shepherd was shaking her like a rag and I couldn’t stop it. Finally the moron owners came shuffling up, and the two of them were able to disconnect their fucking dog.
Effing morons! They claimed they had the dog on a leash. Yeah…they had a leash on the dog, all right: they just weren’t holding onto it! The animal was frolicking around the vehicle because they’d dropped the leash. I flew into such a high rage I turned the night air Day-Glo blue yelling at them for their stupidity.
Fortunately it was a fairly young dog, inexperienced, and it grabbed her not by the neck but over the shoulders. Her hair is extremely thick in that area and so the bite didn’t break the skin. By the time we got her free, she was ambulatory, and in fact did not want me to carry her far. She seemed to be able to walk OK, once I hauled her away from the scene.
The emergency vets tried to scare me, over the phone, into hurrying in for some expensive x-rays and tests, telling me she might have internal injuries. But I’m $450 in the hole as we scribble, no sign of my Social Security check, probably not going to get one next month, and after two weeks of entertaining freshmen four uninterrupted hours a day, tomorrow’s “lagging” paycheck from PeopleSoft will cover three, count’em (3) days. Since Cassie sleeps on the bed with me, I decided I could keep an eye on her until morning and then, assuming I didn’t have to rush her to the emergency animal clinic during the night, foist her onto La Maya to schlep to the vet while I was in class.
This morning she seemed sore but OK. So La Maya and I decided to opt the relay race to the vet’s, no doubt much to La M’s relief. Not as though she had nothing else to do… 🙄
From the campus, I made an appointment for 2:00 p.m. with the regular vet—fifty bucks just to walk in the door—but after arriving home from class I decided to cancel, because by the time I got home from class she was standing by the door and looking hale and hearty. Now she seems pretty well…bright-eyed and lobbying to chase her ball around. So I think she’s probably OK.
My throat is sore from all the screaming I did last night. Got to sleep around 3; had to get up at 5. I’ve been a zombie all day.
You know, if you own a big powerful dog that could pose a danger to you, to other people, or to other people’s pets, you have only two choices: either you have it so exquisitely, perfectly trained that it WILL stop what it’s doing under all conditions and come when called (few people know how or have the patience to train a dog like that), or you keep it on a lead at all times whenever it’s outside a fenced area.
Stupid, stupid, stupid people.
What the fuck is wrong with some people? It is like they are completely ignorant to the fact that they own an animal that can easily kill other people’s dogs.
I live in a development where half is first time home buyers and the other half is 55+ (stupidly designed this way), and there is the nicest little probably 65/70 year old (she is tiny) WHO OWNS A FRENCH MASTIFF. This damn thing, nice to people, has attacked 4 dogs already. Ridiculous. The woman can’t hold the thing back since it is 130 pounds of pure muscle.
I’m very glad to hear that Cassie is all right.
My husband and I just adopted a dog from the local shelter. His name is Barney and they suspect he’s a St. Bernard/golden retriever mix. He’s not super huge, but he does weigh 80 pounds. He is very sweet, and he hasn’t shown any kind of aggression so far, but I’m taking your story as a cautionary tale. I hope I never have to tell a story like this — and will be working hard with Barney to make sure that I won’t have to.
One word: lawyer.
We’ve contacted the police on two scary dogs that were running loose and threatening us. In both cases, the officers found the owners, talked to them, and dogs were kept in yards on leashes.
Poor Cassie, happy to hear she’s not injured and doing well. It’s amazing how expensive a trip to the vet can be. There used to be a vet that charged a lot less than others, but sadly he sold the business and moved. Every time I take one of the cats to the vet, I miss the old doc.
Long time ago my next door neighbor had a lab, a very friendly but very hyper dog. He would jump over the wall and wander all over the neighborhood. One morning a woman was walking her three small dogs on leashes and my neighbor’s dog jumped on them. The woman started to scream and I ran to pull the lab away from her dogs. It took me a while and the whole time she kept shrieking in pure terror. There were other people too but none of them came to her help. I’m assuming they were afraid. Anyway, when the dogs were separated, she kept asking me if the lab was my dog and each time I told her that the dog belongs to my next door neighbor. She didn’t believe me and announced loudly that she was going to sue me. Finally, my neighbor came out of his house and called the dog back into the house and went to apologize to the woman. Now you would think she would come to me and apologize for being so rude and thank me for helping her out, but no, she just took off. That was the last time I ever saw that woman.
That is very scary, indeed. I’ve had to break up scuffles between my own two dogs in the past. In those cases it was more about noise than damage, as most dog fights are. Still, I would be frightened of trying to pull away a dog I don’t know from an attack. (Heck, even my own dog once nicked my hand in the heat of the moment…and then hunkered in shame when she saw what she had done to me.)
Nonetheless, breaking contact between dogs has to be done and so I learned to grab one of them just behind the hind legs and lift up. This throws the dog off balance and they usually stop their forward attack motion because they’re instead trying to figure out what happened to their rear traction. The real trick is to grab the dog that initiated the attack.
I have one dog who is incredibly sweet with people but dog-aggressive. When I walk her, I use a head halter because it is easier to correct her if she tries lunging for another dog. And while I try very hard to never drop the leash, it has happened. Thank goodness she is mostly confused about why she doesn’t want the other dog around her and has never injured one in the few times she has gotten close enough to connect. Mostly she just snaps at their faces, and I can correct her and move her away.
It sounds like those folks are idiots, though. They didn’t accidentally drop the leash, they were simply not paying attention. I’m amazed at how well dogs can shrug off stuff like that. Seems like Cassie will be fine. 🙂
@ Evan: Yeah, we’ve got one of those in the neighborhood, too: an elderly woman (68+ ?) who ambles around with three big pit bulls or pit-bull mixes, any one of which is strong enough to yank her off her feet. Whenever they see Cassie, they eye her menacingly…they WANT that little dog.
@ frugalscholar: It’s hard to get the cops around here to do anything about dogs, even though there is a county leash law. They’ll tell you to call the county animal control people, who’ll brush you off.
@ Stephen: I was screaming a lot, not out of fear but because I was hollering at the morons to get over there and help me pull their damn dog off mine. Then I was hollering a great deal of exuberantly unprintable language AT them to the effect that they were morons, fools, and a**h*les. Really…I can’t recall when I’ve ever been so furious, and I’m capable of flying into an astronomical high dudgeon. This particular dudgeon reached the orbit of Jupiter, I’m afraid.
Like yours, my German shepherd also was dog-aggressive. It’s a very common trait among Ger-sheps. And there’s an easy way to keep from dropping the lead: use a leather or canvas leash with a loop for your hand. Slip the loop back over the lead to form a sort of slip-loop, and put that around your wrist. It will slip tight, so that it can’t fall off your arm even if your hand releases the lead.
Do not do this, obviously, if your dog is big enough to pull you off your feet and drag you, because you could get hurt if the animal bolts. But an adult man or a reasonably fit adult woman should be able to stay upright and control a dog the size of a medium-sized shepherd, even one with a lot of drive. This is why you need to have the dog well trained, of course: it should stop when the martingale or choke collar jerks, which it would do if the critter took it into its mind to shoot off abruptly.
This was not a dog-aggressive attack; it was predatory behavior. The dog thought Cassie was prey. If you’ve ever watched a dog or a coyote kill a rabbit or similar rodent, that’s what was happening. It wasn’t trying to fight; it was wanted to catch and kill.
Anna the Ger-shep was very dangerous around strange dogs. She truly hated them and wished nothing more than to rend their heads from their torsos. What was hilarious, if even more alarming to the human than simply knowing what was in her mind, was her habit of lulling other dogs into a false sense of confidence. She would lure them over to her. If a dog off the leash came up to us, she would wag. She would grin. She would pant cheerfully. She would wag some more. If the moron owner failed to respond to my increasingly urgent requests that he Call. His. Dog(!!!), she would wait until the unsuspecting dog was within about six inches and then she would go straight for its throat. It was very clear that she’d come up with this behavior on her own and was doing it on purpose…the damnedest thing you ever saw.
An even sadder cautionary tale for idiots who won’t watch their dogs. In the next neighborhood over was some middle aged loser who just turned his dog out the front door to poop and exercise himself. No walking for HIM.
The dog dashed out from underneath a car and I literally ran him over. I was practically hysterical and it did take me some time to find out to whom the dog belonged. I certainly wasn’t going to simply drive away.
This loser/owner refused to speak to me and gave me dirty looks for running over his poor dumb animal.
It’s been two years and I still can’t drive down that street.
Well I sort of think there should be regulations on people being licensed only to own dogs that they’ve proven they can physically control. But that’s probably along the same lines as requiring SUV or pick-up truck drivers to take extra driving training to handle a larger vehicle and I don’t see either of those realistically happening. Glad to hear your dog is okay.
I’ve biffed it walking a family member’s akita before when it got excited and bolted (and tried to drag me with it). I think people don’t realize how fast everything can change. I also have neighbors who I’m pretty sure are breeding pit bulls. They have small children and are always in the front of the house, presumably b/c the pit bulls are in the backyard. I’m just holding my breath and hoping nothing bad happens.
@ E. Murphy: That’s awful! Bird-brained “owners”: really, these people should be arrested for animal abuse.
Years ago I had something like that happen…was driving through a sketchy part of town when two dogs ran across the road right in front of my car. One of them got hit, glancingly, and ran off into the projects. I stopped and asked a guy if he saw where they went, but he said no.
Wouldn’t have mattered, because I had two German shepherds in the back of the sedan I was driving then. Even if there’d been room to put another dog in there to rush it off to some veterinarian, it probably wouldn’t have survived the dust-up that would have occurred back there…
@ FrauTech: An akita is another powerful dog. Above, I should’ve remarked that you ought not to secure the leash around your arm or tie it to your belt unless the dog is thoroughly trained to behave on a leash. My trainer taught me to let the dog go if it looked like it was going to drag me into the street — she said it was better to let a dog get run over than for the handler to get run over along with it. After about three to six months of steady training, Anna the Ger-shep got to the point where she could be stopped and controlled pretty easily on a lead. It takes some doing, though, with some dogs!
This has happened to me and my dog on a few occasions and it really is very frightening. You must have been a wreck – just reading about it made my heart beat faster. My little German Spitz is dog aggressive and he is NEVER off the lead, but other dog walkers allow their dog’ to run up to him and that is when we’ve had issues. There is a leash law here, but people disregard it all the time. It’s really frustrating. I’ve read online that carrying mace is useful if there are a lot of loose dogs about in your area. I haven’t tried it and I fear what the reaction would be, but a very well regarded dog trainer insists if your dog is on a lead and an aggressive dog is off the lead it is your job to protect your dog.
And yes, grabbing the hind legs and pulling backwards is the correct method of breaking up a dog scuffle – and keeps you well away from the mouth.
So sorry you and your dog had to go through this.
Were so glad Cassies ok. Last sept our mean ass neighbors pitbull rolled under the chain link fence seperating our yards. thank God it was his girl and she grabbed my smallest pup, a papillion around his neck but she gummed him. scared the hellll out of him. somehow the fence wasnt buried in the ground there. its fixed. he sent his “woman” (his wife, hes such a neanderthal) to get Heidi, we think it scared Heidi and my boys all. They were just raising hell with wach other at the fence and before she knew it she was in our yard and riley is a yipper so she grabbed him. no damage was done. Buuut if it had been his boy my boys would be dead now. He made Joey mean and aggressive. Heidi just passed away, she was the only part of him i liked. He never apologized or even acknowleded it happened. She did for him.
The last time my old dog was attacked by [unprintable words] who left their dog off leash in their front yard and it was clearly untrained, I nearly had to kick the thing to separate it from mine. Luckily mine was bigger and able to hold her own in the dog’s attacks but my fury was staggering.
Doggle is nearly my weight and so to guard against his pull against me in case of fear/nervous/excitement bolting, I wrap the leash around one hand, and then hold the rest of the length in my other hand/arm. It’s a firm grip, he may catch me off guard with one hand but not ever with both, and he can’t get further away than a foot from me at any time. As he learns better leash manners, I’ll always keep the extra precautionary hand on.
We have neighbors who just let their dogs roam off-leash, any size between the generally small to the pits and while most seem to be relatively well trained, not all of them are voice trained like they should be. One of them will respond to a sit/stay command at a distance, the rest don’t and that’s just a bad choice when you have this many other pets and neighbors in a population dense area.
And I hate how crappy owners give powerful dogs a bad reputation. Our pit is voice and hand command responsive and trained even when bouncing toward a new dog but because so many other idiots don’t take such precautions, he gets the side-eye. (And yes, bouncing. He loves other dogs. But he will HIT THE FLOOR mid-bounce at a shout from me.)
We have a GSD and he is trained for both vocal and visual commands but I would never have him loose on a street under any conditions. I’d send him up under a tree in the shade. Dusty, ‘STAY’ and he would.
Glad that your Cassie is fine. She will no doubt forget about this incident and continue to enjoy her walks.
Dogs don’t think like us, they have visual memories of the past.
@ George: Yes. Anyone with any understanding of the breed has more sense than to let their Gershep loose on a street.
🙂 I’m not at all sure I believe the business about dogs lacking this type of memory or that type of memory. If you believe these theories, how to explain the fact that Cassie (and other dogs) obviously remember (as opposed to rediscovering) where they left a ball hours before, where their doggy pals live (Cassie tries to drag me into La Maya’s house every time we walk by there), and who lives in houses to which you have to drive? It’s very clear she remembers what those places are, where they are, and who and what is inside them.
I think what’s happening is that because she wasn’t seriously hurt, she doesn’t understand how close she came to being killed. What a dog doesn’t have, at least until experience instructs, is full understanding of serious injury and death. She simply doesn’t know enough, lacking language, to be very exercised about the incident.