Monday, May 10th, 2010

The Day of the Dog Bite

Saturday morning, we decided to take the puppies for their first trip to the dog park. My mom was visiting for the weekend and we were all so excited for them to make new friends. When we got there, we decided it would be best to take the puppies in the small dog section. When we entered, there was a woman holding on to mutt. This dog was definitely not small. It probably weighed 60 pounds. So, I politely informed her that this was our puppies first time to the dog park with the intent of warning her that our babies were a little anxious and may not have the best social skills just yet. They've interacted a little with dogs in our neighborhood and in their obedience class and had no problems other than being a little timid at first.

After a few minutes, she let her dog go and they all sniffed around for a few minutes. All of the sudden, this dog pounced on Ollie and pinned him to the ground. I grabbed the dog and Ollie made a run for it, when the dog calmed a bit, I released him. He charged my poor little puppy and had him pinned on the ground aggressively biting his neck. Poor Inga was terrified with her ears back running in circles. As I scooped Inga up, Stephen and my mom ran toward Ollie. My mom grabbed the mutt by his collar and Stephen picked Ollie up by his harness. Poor Ollie was so terrified he had peed himself and he was in a state of shock. The irresponsible owner of the mutt, had the nerve to yell at my mom for touching her dog. Completely ridiculous considering the fact that her dog had attacked my puppy and she was just standing there! This woman was quite hateful toward my mom.

When I got close to Stephen, I saw that his arm was bleeding. He had been bitten when he broke up the fight. I felt like it needed medical attention, as it appeared quite deep. I informed the hateful woman that it wasn't appropriate for her to have a large, aggressive dog in the section marked "small dogs" at the dog park. What a jerk!

Once we got home and cleaned Stephen's arm, we decided to go to urgent care while my mom stayed and comforted the puppies. At urgent care, we were seen relatively quickly. They cleaned out his wounds, gave him a shot in the butt and a script for 10 days of antibiotics. They informed animal control (apparently it's the law) of the event and they sent an officer out to take a report. All we wanted was to get back home to our poor little babies!

While we were out and about later that day, we walked through the park and they were having a Puppy Mill Awareness event. We stopped over to see the rescued pups and make a donation. When we turned around we saw, Victoria Stilwell from the show, "It's Me or the Dog." We LOVE her show! We DVR it and use a lot of her positive reinforcement techniques with our puppies. We bought her book and got her to sign it. She signed it to Ollie and Inga and told them to behave! We told her about the incident and she was appalled. Love her!



Stephen's arm is healing nicely and the pups seem to be doing well. They are playing together as usual and we have had a few friendly encounters with other neighborhood dogs. We are not sure if we will go back to the dog park or not. We plan to talk to our trainer at the next obedience class to see what she thinks about the whole thing. It's sad that one irresponsible pet owner that is too lazy to train her dog can ruin it for all the pups. I wish we could have taken Victoria to have a word with this dog owner! A little training could probably change that dog's life and improve the dog park for the rest of us.

Totally unrelated, I found $20 on the ground that afternoon. We used it to buy london broil for the puppies.