Tag: dog tales

Call this the perfect ending to the perfect week, a dog fight that drew blood and left my arm with a painful bruise.

The dogs were outside, sniffing around in the grass and mud, much of the snow having melted. Everything was fine until they found an old, muddy piece of rawhide that they must have left behind before the snow came.

I was watching them from the window when I saw them stiffen and tense up. I went out, grabbed the rawhide and then — call me stupid — attempted to toss it over the fence. It missed, landed in the yard and the dogs got to it and then got into it.

I was outside by myself, which made it difficult to stop — I got behind one and lived her like a wheelbarrow, but the other one kept coming. AFter what seemed like an eternity, my neighbors came running over and Annie’s sister Susan came out of the house along with my brother Mark. Susan grabbed one dog and I had the other and we finally pulled them apart.

Both had bloody wounds, a gash on Rosie’s snout and a larger gash on Sophie’s leg, but I think they look worse than they actually are. We put peroxide on the wounds — which caused Sophie to scream from the burning — and we’ll monitor the situation for now and hope they heal on their own.

In the meantime, they have decided to be friends again, as the above photo shows.

It was the first fight since Christmas Eve and probably would not have happened were I able to get to them sooner or had I been smarter about disposing of the rawhide.

It was just a capper to a week that included a death of a close friend of my sister-in-law, bad news at work that will make paying my bills more difficult and a brutal cold. It has to get better, right?

I’m still shaking. Two-plus hours after the dogs went at each other, after Rosie grabbed onto Sophie near the ear and locked in, two-plus hours after Annie and I stupidly attempted to break them up by grabbing their collars — a horrifying couple of minutes — and I’m still shaking.

The fight, probably just the fourth since we have them (though four is four too many), made us realize that we need to bring the trainer back, that their willfulness, their jumping on guests as they come in, is just not acceptible. We need help.

So we’re bringing back our trainer, Pat, who knows her stuff. The problem has been us — we just haven’t followed through with the hard work.

If that doesn’t work, we’re going to have to call in Victoria Stillwell or Cesar Milan (he’s going to be at Barnes and Noble next week) for an emergency session.

It is quite depressing to find that, after owning dogs for 25 years, these two have us where they want us and not where we need to be.