Here is a story for you.
June 30, 2008We begin with Alice, walking her dog, listening to her iPod. Not bothering anyone. Turning the corner, she sees a small, furry blur rushing toward them. A dog, a comically tiny dog, is running out of a backyard, and headed right for Charlie. It's trailing a leash, so she figures the owner must be somewhere behind it.
Charlie, who is not a lover of other dogs, promptly freaks, attempting to get as far away from the other dog as his leash will allow. Alice tries to continue on, but the dog follows. Where is the owner? No one is showing up to explain why this puffball of a dog is free to accost the general public. The dog, whom Alice has named Teeny, appears to want to play, but the playing is taking the form of nippy neck-lunges. Charlie assumes that the dog wants to tear open his carotid. Unable to make a run for it, he finds himself running in frantic circles around Alice. Teeny follows. Yay! Fun times! thinks Teeny. (Actually, Teeny is probably thinking "tththththththththththththth" because Teeny has a brain no bigger than a nail clipping.) Having grabbed Teeny's leash, Alice is now thoroughly tangled. Her earphone cord somehow gets involved with the leashes. It's chaos. "Hello?" Alice calls out to the empty street. "Whose, uh, dog is this?"
Charlie backs away and slips out of his collar, freeing himself, and darts into the street. Teeny tries to follow. Alice screams for him to return, but he's no fool. And go back to that tiny scrabbly thing who wants at his precious neck parts? No thank you. He can still be seen at the far end of the block, peeing on a bush, eyeing that hateful tiny thing. Alice lets go of Teeny's leash and runs toward Charlie, but of course Teeny gets there first, causing Charlie to run farther away and cower behind a tree. Before both dogs run to the next town, Alice grabs Teeny's leash. She attempts to get Charlie to return to her using her most forceful tone of voice, and somehow he falls for it. Now she's managed to slip his collar back on him! Bet you didn't think that was going to happen! Meanwhile Teeny lunges and yaps and Charlie shrieks in horror. Someone's growling. Her? The dogs? Hard to say. She holds both dogs as far away as possible from each other. Now what?
There are at least two more minutes of Teeny lunging for Charlie and Charlie running in circles and Alice getting caught up in both leashes. There must be a smart way to solve this problem , Alice keeps thinking, I should be able to triumph over a dog who is the size of my fist. Is there anywhere to tie up Charlie for the time being? There is not. So she gets both dogs onto the porch of the house from where Teeny may or may not have come, and rings the doorbell. A larger dog barks and scrabbles at the front door. Charlie looks at Alice, as if to say, Are you inviting that dog out, too, because if you are I don't think I can live much longer.
She rings the doorbell. And rings again. Teeny tries to go for Charlie's neck one more time, and he lets out this mournful howl, as if he's calling out I AM TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. So Alice ties Teeny to a bench on the front porch of the house, and Alice and Charlie make their way back home. And either the owner of that house will arrive home and think, excellent, I see my evil tiny dog got out to wreak havoc yet again, or else, who left that curiously noisy koosh ball tied to my porch?
Reader Comments (66)
Seems only fitting, though-
Great story - My first time here, though I'm sure I'll be back around.
-The Rev.
One night while wrangling my dog and my father's 2 dogs I came across a friendly Great Dane all by itself with only a collar and a rabies tag. It was dad's neighborhood so I didn't know anyone and I wandered around until someone helped me out and brought me to the dog's house. The people answered the door and basically accused me of stealing their dog. I barely got out of there with my leash.
More treats for Charlie! He's been traumatized.
Thanks for the laugh!
My husband is convinced that if he could figure out a way to invent a tangle-free dog leash, we'd be able to sell enough to retire early!
But anyway, I used to HATE it when people would let their dogs trot right up to my dog. It never failed that when I scrambled to pick up my dog and hold it high out of reach, lest it chew off the big friendly dog's eyes as an opening gambit, the dog owner would shout, "Don't worry! He's friendly!"
It's not surprising that these big dogs are scared of smaller dogs, or that the small ones are so PO'd all the time. I always imagine the fierce, majestic ancestral wolf that lurks somewhere deep inside these tiny yappy, snappy creatures, yearning to break free.
We once found a cat with a tag with a disconnected phone number, but also a tag for the petsmart vet and when we tried to get the vet to look in their records to call the owner? They were all "we can't do that." It seriously took speaking to 3 people and finally the ACTUAL vet to get them to find this cat's owner's number to contact them.
My dog Mickey became the neighborhood dog. He was always jumping the fence and would make friends with other dogs. He would then proceed to go through their doggy doors and cuddle on the bed with the dog's humans. And yes, he had a tag with working phone numbers. They didn't call me though because they loved him, too. Their wasn't a fence high enough to keep him in, and unfortunately, Mickey found his was to doggy heaven via the wheels of one careless driver.
Our across the street neighbor at our old place has two tiny, fluffy, yippy furballs that rush everyone who crosses their path, yapping frantically and jumping all over them. The owner will occasionally come out of the house, cigarette dangling from her lip, yelling, "Get off! I told you not to do that!" as if the dogs can understand. I love dogs, but if they ran off and never returned, I wouldn't be too upset....