Warning: Rant ahead.

Last week I came as close as I’ve ever come to going West Virginia backwoods hood-rat on someone because of their off-leash dogs.

Here’s the scene.  Delilah and I are casing walking the neighborhood.  As I approach a house, I see a small brown head peeping out at me.  Just like little Ernie from FRANKly and ERNESTly speaking. 

Except this isn’t Ernie (and he wasn’t wearing bunny glasses.) Then I see another dog.  I pull Delilah in just a tiny bit closer, she’s paying no mind whatsoever to these dogs.  I hear the woman call one of the dogs, “Eli, Eli come here!”  I turn.  The little dog that looks like Ernie, is steadily, stealthily, coming at us.  Not barking or growling, just a dog on a mission.

The woman says, “Oh my God!  He’s going after her.”

At which point I turned around and snarled, “She will go after him!”  As if on cue, Delilah turns around, hair up and says, “RAR, RAR, RAR” which is dogspeak for “Get the woof away from my Mama.” Because I’m pretty sure she’s reacting to me reacting.

I spin my head forward urging Delilah to move away from the dog, but when I look ahead, here comes the other dog!  We’re trapped, being stalked by two weiner dogs, one from the front and one from the rear.  My heart is racing, I’m not sure what to do.  I reach around to my back pocket fumbling for my pepper spray when I realize those few seconds might  very well mean the difference between us getting away and a horrible altercation.  I urge Delilah to move faster and I yell over my shoulder, “GET YOUR DOGS!”

Delilah and I turn the corner and I hear the woman yell, “Sorry!”

The. Very. NEXT. Night. 

The next night Delilah and I head up the hill.  From about two houses away I see a small black bundle in the road, barking it’s fool head off.

Are you freaking kidding me? I say to myself as I turn around.  I look back and the small dog has run off.  Delilah and I turn back around and as I approach the area where we saw the dog, I see a woman working in her yard.  I call to her, “Is it okay to walk past?   Your dog won’t come after me?”

She indicates a pug sitting on the front steps and says, “Her? No.”

I say, “Well I saw a black dog just a moment ago.”

“That’s their dog,” she said pointing towards the house next door, ‘They just open the door and let it out, (don’t even get me started on this) he comes over and poops in my yard.  It’s not friendly,” she adds almost as an after thought.  

Great.  Just fucking great.  There’s a mean little dog with a Napoleon complex on my street.

I’ve worked super hard with Delilah to help her not react to other dogs.  Just the other day as we walked past a house, the garage door opened and out came a dog, who as soon as she saw Delilah started barking and running around like a nut.  Delilah gave her the dog equivalent of a raised eyebrow and turned to me for her cookie.  **Random useless thought…I call this look “the Legolas”   Legolas is an Elf in The Lord of the Rings and he rarely shows emotion, but sometimes he gets this quizzical look on his face and sort of raises his eyebrow. **End Random useless thought that is not relevant to this post.

I’ve also worked her hard on the dog in the e-fence who likes to peep at her.  There used to be two dogs there, the peeper and the posturer, but I haven’t seen the posturer in a while.  Still you can tell she’s watching for it as we approach the house and I usually just pull out a cookie and hold it in my hand as a redirect and we sail past it.  Except for the times she tries to get in front of me (but that’s a rant for another day.)

Back to the subject at hand.  I called the dog warden because my concern is one day I will not be able to prevent an altercation and I’m concerned that Delilah is going to be labeled as an aggressive dog and she is not.  I’m almost 100% sure she is reacting to me, who is freaking out that she will react.  I can change this.  It will take some work on my part, but I can do it.

Animal control did assure me in that situation, if Delilah (who would outweigh the dog by 60 pounds) were to hurt the dog, as long as she was on leash, licensed and up to date on shots, she would not be in trouble.  But that little dog very well could be.  

This is serious business people and one we’ve been writing about for what seems like forever, how do we get this message across?  It’s not just the dog that is being approached that is at risk, but the approaching dog could be injured or worse!

My next question is, what makes Delilah a target for these off-leash dogs?  But that my friends is a question (and quite possibly a ran) for another day.

Rant over.