Terrier Stricken

In my last post, I briefly mentioned my foot injuries that I sustained early on in my training, but these weren’t the only problems I faced.

In January, I was attacked by a vicious, savage beast. I say ‘savage beast.’ It was in fact a dog. I’m not sure what breed it was, as it all happened so fast and the brutal err...brute just ran at me. Also, I can't tell one type of dog from another. They all look virtually the same to me. It was a dog of some kind, I know that much. I believe it was attracted to the water bottle I was holding in my hand, as though it might be a bone or some sort of doggy toy, or something else that the archetypal dog might want. I could see the dog running towards me from a distance, but I kept on running in the direction that I was running, naively thinking that if I just ignored the dog and carried on regardless, it would ignore me back and just get on with the business of being a dog, doing those things that typical dogs do, like bury bones or urinate against a nearby tree. The dog wasn’t fooled. It kept running at me. I think it was running even faster than it was before. Having already run about five miles at this point and getting tired already, I wasn't sure I had the energy to sprint away.

I haven't the faintest idea what happened to the dog's owner. I could vaguely see a man in the distance, and if he was the dog's owner, he didn't seem to be doing much to restrain the dog.

I threw the water bottle in order to distract the dog, but to no avail. The dog still went straight for me. In the end I thought it was going to maul me to death and then feast away at my festering bloody carcass, gnawing at what remained of my tibia bones, but ultimately, all it did was scratch me on the knee as I managed to get away – and fast.

Which leads me to ask the question: Why don’t dog owners keep their dogs on leashes when in a public place? Surely, unless I'm not mistaken, there must be a rule or a bylaw that says a dog should be on a lead in public. It seems to me that every month, you hear a story in the news that some poor child (and even adult) has been brutally mauled to death by an out-of-control canine, usually a pit-bull terrier which was then “destroyed.”

How the authorities go about destroying a dog, I’m not sure. Do they dynamite it? I’m picturing the scene now. The dog police have rigged several sticks of TNT to the dog. They clear everything within a two-mile radius, and push the plunger down on the detonator. A deafening explosion is heard. BOOM! An eerie, ominous silence follows. Then, people in the street look up as small, pink bits of dog fall at them from the sky. After that, all the pieces are collected and burned in a large kiln.

And another thing I hate about dogs: fouling on grass and public pavements. It's something I’ve complained about relentlessly for years. It's bad enough that dogs crap on the grass because unlike other animal faeces which make good fertilisers, dog poo isn't even healthy for the grass. Dog shit on pavements is something else altogether. It is the bane of my existence. My bête noire. My pet peeve. I'd be pretty peeved to receive a dog as a pet. Man's best friend, my anus. If I ever went on that game show Room 101, I think dog shit would be the first thing that would be consigned to Room 101. Not only does it smell, it's dirty, it's unpleasant and it poses a number of serious health risks. Among other things, toxocariasis (never thought I'd end up using that word on a blog, but there we go) and salmonella and other bacteria. Toxocariasis is particularly nasty and it involves eggs and larvae and parasitic worms that can cause blindness. You definitely don't want that.

 

I accept that it’s not really the dog's fault – it's the irresponsibility of the owners who fail to scoop up and dispose of their pets' excrement. I can't work out if they're lazy or inconsiderate. But still, it's an issue that gets me worked up. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve accidentally trodden in dog shit as I’m running – on the bleeding pavement, I ask you! I shudder to think what the world is coming to.

So, yeah, I guess I'm not really a huge fan of dogs.