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Location: Syracuse, NY USA
Joined: May 2008
Posts: 1,848
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Neighbors (a rant!)
Recently a lot of the dog owners with really awesome dogs have moved away from my little block. I live in a college town and they were students. They hope to be back in the fall, but there's no guarantee.
So that leaves a couple good dogs, but a lot more dogs owned by morons.
(This gets long -- sorry!)
Case #1: Kitty-corner from our house is a couple who have two pit bulls: Icarus and Peggy Sue. Icarus is a sweet dog. Peggy Sue is too, but she's afraid of people so tends to approach and then run off if you look at her wrong. These two dogs are ALWAYS LOOSE. And not because they just let them out to run, but because their owner is a braindead moron. Somehow they always break out of the house. I've seen animal control collect them at least 3 times in the past couple years and I know from talking to others in the neighborhood that it happens a lot more frequently than that.
So last night I was taking a nice walk with my dog, Dahlia. As we're heading up our street I see a loose Brindle pit running around. My first thought was that it might be Missy (another dog -- she lives down the road, is owned by an elderly woman who can barely control her and she's REALLY dog aggressive, has taken a chunk out of another neighbor's dog once when her owner lost control of her). So I went around to another street to get back to mine. No such luck. By the time we got around the block the dog spotted us anyway and came CAREENING TOWARD us. I jumped at it and it backed up and that was when I realized (a) the dog was a male and therefore not Missy and (b) it wasn't aggressive, just excited. So I squatted down and let him approach and gee what a surprise, it was Icarus (Peggy Sue was nowhere to be seen). Luckily this time he had a collar on (he often doesn't) so I unhooked my dog from her leash and hooked up Icarus and walked back to Icarus's house with Dahlia off leash. THANK GOD for my well-trained dog as she was able to stay at my side off leash, stop when I told her to stop, stay when I told her to stay and we were fine.
I get to Icarus's house and go to knock on the door and hear from inside, before I can even knock, "OH NO!!!!!" She then comes out to tell me he had "just gotten loose" (which was not true as he was apparently rushing someone's Doberman in the park a short bit before I found him and he had been loose for at least 20 minutes while I tried to avoid him and then hooked him up and walked him back). So I hand him over to her, release him from the leash I had on him. She grabs onto his collar, starts talking to me about "Oh he just gets out and I don't know what to do about it" (how about fix the door he can always push through?) and then what does she do? She LETS GO OF HIS COLLAR. It takes him a second to realize he's free and in that second, she takes a step toward him to regrab the collar and he's off like a shot, down the block. He practically barreled into some poor woman who was gardening (and she must have been scared to death to see him coming at her so fast!) and was blocks away before she could even get in the car to go after him. I guess at least this time she actually went after him instead of just expecting him to make his way home. Did I mention this was during rush hour and he headed for the busiest streets near us?
Argh!!
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Case #2: While I was collecting Icarus I saw these kids from down the block walking a very young puppy. Not a big deal right. But this family (a mother and two kids: daughter is probably 8 or 9, son is about 5 or 6) got a pit bull puppy last year. The kids used to walk it all the time until it got too big. Then they'd just tie it up out front on a chain that was so tiny, so frail, that I wouldn't even tie my parent's 20lb dog up with it. It might be suitable for a Yorkie, not a 40 lb 1 year old pit bull. The dog constantly breaks the chain and rushes up to other dogs. It's not aggressive, just excited and entirely unsocialized. So recently I realized I hadn't seen the dog in a little while.
And then the kids appeared walking a puppy.
What happened? Well, my neighbor across the street spoke to the mother yesterday and they gave the adult dog away because it was too out of control. And then got a puppy. Because, you know, the first dog was defective because it was out of control. The new puppy, also a pit bull, will clearly end up as a better dog. It had NOTHING to do with lack of training and socialization. The first dog was just simply defective. So it was dumped in favor of a puppy which will be dumped next year when this puppy will, amazingly, ALSO be defective.
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These people frustrate me SO MUCH!!!