« All moved in! | Main | Relaxing at home... »
May 04, 2000
Dumb cats, bad dogs, good dogs. All animals, all the time.
So yesterday was Day of the Animals. When I got home from work, I looked for the cat in her usual spot on the windowsill (doing her little Happy Dance). No cat. I went in and opened the door -- no cat prancing around wanting to be patted and fed. Hmm. Heard a pitiful mewing, went to investigate... and found her stuck on top of the kitchen cabinets. Now, for a normal cat, getting up there wouldn't be unusual. I, however, have the world's clumsiest cat. When she tries to jump from the floor to the bed, she misses. Getting onto the windowsills tends to take her a couple of tries, because she falls off. So the jump from the counter to the top of the cabinet was pretty impressive, for her. Of course, a normal cat would have been able to jump back down easily, instead of haing to be rescued by me, standing on a phone book on top of a kitchen chair...
So I rescued Smoke, who was very grateful and happy, and fed her, and then went to watch the news. As I sat down, I heard screaming and yelling from outside. I thought at first it was kids playing, but after a minute, it got so loud and hysterical that I realized something was really wrong. I looked out the window, and saw a woman on the ground, trying to protect her toddler and her very small dog from a very large brown dog, which had broken down a chain-link fence and was attacking them. Several people were already out there trying to help -- one man had a fence post and was whacking the big dog with it, and others were trying to pull the little dog away, with no luck. I ran out to see what I could do -- by the time I got there, the big dog had been chased back into it's yard, and the owner was there. The man who'd had the fence post (who turned out to be my very nice neighbor) had been pretty badly bitten. The little dog actually seemed okay, given the fact that the larger dog had been shaking it back and forth like a rag doll. It had a deep bite on one hind leg, but was wagging its tail and looking alert. The woman and the little girl were okay -- slightly scraped and very shaken, but unhurt. The woman asked me to take her daughter so she could check the dog and call the police on her cell phone. I was worried the little girl was going to start screaming when I picked her up (she didn't know me, after all) but she put her arms around my neck and her head on my shoulder and just snuggled up. She was very good -- no crying, not even when the paramedics cleaned the scrape on her leg. From what people have told me (and what I overheard the police saying) this dog gets loose and attacks people at least once a month. The owner, who was very upset, said she was going to have it put to sleep, because she had tried everything to control it, and it still got loose. I wouldn't ordinarily favor putting a dog down because of bad behavior, but a vicious dog, well...
So I met some new neighbors, and they were all really nice. (The poor woman who got atacked had only just moved to the neighborhood too.) After all the excitement died down, I went into our backyard and played with more dogs -- the landlord's yellow lab and the third-floor tenant's dalmation. Very happy, friendly, slobbery dogs, playing fetch.
It's like living in a zoo around here, I tell you...
Posted by Mary Ellen at May 4, 2000 02:11 PM