Dog Attack!

     We would go nuts over strangers’ dogs and find excuses to hang with them, and we snapped up any house-sitting job with dogs we could find. That was usually a sweet gig – we got to stay in a house instead of our tiny freezing/roasting apartment, with a dog and access to unbelievable luxuries like cable television and full-sized ovens (things were even leaner in those days than they are nowadays, although we still have yet to realize that full-sized oven). There is a particular park here that's full of off-lead dogs because its financial founder decreed that it should always be a place for people to let their dogs run free. Lately, gentrification of the park has led to more-or-less continual protests about this, saying that the trendy roller-bladers need somewhere to impede foot traffic, and the tourists want to savor an ambiguously-cultured snack without some nasty local’s mutt enjoying a walk in the park all in their faces. It is what it is, but sometimes what it is sucks. Back in those days we picnicked there as often as we could and there were some pretty fun dogs, like the rottweiler who came to lie down with us because her owner was asleep, or the boxer that sat politely immobile, staring at our food and blowing a steady stream of bubbles out the corner of his mouth.

     We’d been through a couple of dogs by the time this happens, although the first one only lasted a week. He was a delightful dog, a beautiful brindled mastiff/bulldog cross we’ll call Tank, and his folks needed somewhere for him to go. Pretty sure there was (as in the case of the main canine character in this story) some considerable lack of disclosure. Don’t do that! If you have somehow managed to screw your dog up or if it’s one of those rarer ones with a genetic or congenital tendency to, well, whatever, and you feel things have gone beyond your ability to cope, do not under any circumstances misrepresent your dog. This only, and always, leads to suffering.

     This was one heck of a fun dog. We took him for a trial two weeks but he sadly only made it one. He would wake me up every day by walking up to the bed and dropping his chin onto my chest, whuffing up my nose and gazing earnestly at my closed eyelids. We had some great times over that week, bonding and playing and running in the grassy areas around our house. One day, though, we were just farting around having a good time and a woman came along with another dog, a golden retriever, and something immediately went very, very wrong with my brindle buddy. He went for that retriever like he was a dragon and it had eaten all his babies in an epic fantasy thriller. He took that dog DOWN, snarling and shaking him by a roll of loose skin and hair while I, a couple of months pregnant at the time, piled in there to try to haul him off. That’s when the retriever’s owner went crazy and started screaming at me and beating me up with her folded up leash.

we would be unable to keep him, his people sounded a bit cagey but they came to pick him up right away. I think his dog aggression may not have been such a surprise after all. I cried when they took him, and again when I found out they had opted to have him put down, but I was pregnant. We couldn’t have taken on a large, powerful, dog-aggressive animal at that time. It was a damned shame.

     After that we decided it would be a better idea for us to get a puppy. We knew what we wanted – a fawn Great Dane, for obvious reasons. I worked for a friend for seven months to pay back her loan for that puppy. That was our beloved Saskia. Many a story will be told about her in this blog, but her time is not now. She was our baby and she was taken from us far too soon (cancer, very shortly before her 7th birthday) but this story is not about her.

ad. The story, though – how could we not go look at this dog?

     We were met at the train station by a flighty, chain-smoking woman who tossed us into her car and handed me a smoked bull’s thighbone (or possibly something off a young elephant) “for the dog”, and away we went. She dropped us off at a lakefront where dogs can run free and went to fetch him. The first thing that was obvious about him was that he’d been in that run, lonely and pent up and grieving and young and powerful, and he needed to MOVE. When she brought him out of the car he was very happy to see us (good sign!), including our small child, but he was looking out at that lake and the dunes and we said, “Let him go.” That dog cleared four body lengths with each bound and was in and out of the water like a frisking sea lion, and before we could do anything, our kid also slipped the leash and they briefly ran together, us deeply concerned lest the dog prove untrustworthy or just clumsy. We got the kid back and let the dog go until, eventually, he was standing chest-deep in the water panting and heaving and smiling. Then he came to us and we found him to be sweet and affable and we agreed to take him.

     That was one hell of a train ride.

     I had done my best to wash him off in the water while we were getting acquainted but to be fair, that dog STANK. He’d been in a run for a couple of weeks and it was clear it hadn’t been a regularly-cleaned one. He was also terrified, of course, because the man who had been his world was gone (and we had, and still have, no way to know whether he knew he was dead or thought himself abandoned), a woman he knew somewhat had appeared (no doubt to his delight; a peripheral pack member is a pack member nonetheless) and taken him to a delightful wide-open place with a lot of water (we learned over our two weeks with him that he loved water with abandon), only to promptly hand him over to strangers who led him into a small compartment full of people and just… took him away. That poor, poor dog.

     One of the side effects of his misery was shedding. I have never in my life (and I speak as someone who has worked for vets, at boarding kennels, and at rescues) seen a dog shed that much. Dust bunnies closely resembling tumbleweeds, five and ten centimeters across, were drifting throughout the carriage, splashing onto the walls, and we were COATED in the stuff. The wretched young canine we were escorting seemed to take comfort in being held closely; he sat between my legs and leaned his shoulders and head into my torso and closed his eyes, so I held him, and gradually his hair and my clothing became one. We would be engaged in comforting him and keeping our six-year-old entertained, and locked into this smelly, hairy world, for three and a half hours, at which point we would spend a short time at a train station and then briefly cover the remaining 23 minutes to our home town on another train before transferring to a bus for another quarter of an hour. 

our kid entertained and our excitement about meeting what we strongly suspected would be our new dog. This time it was different.

     First Class here is never full, at least in my experience. We were four, three of us human and one dog, so we took one of those areas that have two-person benches facing each other. Obviously I and the dog, facing each other, took up the window side while my husband and kid sat at the aisle. But, again, that dog reeked, and the car was filling up with those hair-bunnies to a degree that would sound hyperbolic if I tried to actually describe it. Just understand that it looked like a minature version of tumbleweed country after a really wet previous year in there, and it smelled like a dead fish had gone for a coprophiliac weekend with some hakarl and had a love baby. And there was a six-year old. The rich people who happened onto this scene ran the gamut from the spoiled brat who openly sneered at us and called us filth to the oh-so-discrete posh woman who walked past us to the next car “without seeing us at all” (or so said her body language) to business yuppies to classily-hiply-schlumpy late-middle-aged hippie artist. All fled before our spectacle. It was hilarious, but I feel for the crew who had to clean that car. My dudes and/or dudettes, if this rings a bell from that time back when you cleaned trains, I am so sorry.

     I was so proud of that dog. Imagine what he’d been through. Imagine what he must have been feeling, how lost he must have felt. I’m so glad for him that we understood dogs, understood his agony, and gave him comfort. But he hung in there. He went through periods of shaking but he also went through periods of investigating us, enjoying that smoked dinousaur’s limb we’d been given and the treats we’d brought, and drinking the water we’d packed along. He was a god-damned trooper. I loved that dog.

     And it is at this point, my good readers, that I am going to deliver, as we say nowadays, a spoiler. My grandmother did this when reading to me when I was a child; she’d read ahead and if something was particularly heavy she’d tell me it was coming up, tell me it was going to be OK without spoiling the details. So this here’s going to be like that bit in My Friend Flicka, where the horse was dying and the kid had to lie in the mud holding her head above water all night long and then she didn’t die. OK? It’s here that shit starts gradually going to the really fucked but I want to tell you it’s going to be OK. Not about ME. About that poor dog. A lot of this is going to look like it was about me but no. It’s about that dog and I loved him and I’m telling you now this has a good ending because this is where shit starts getting real and I don’t want you to be too scared for him. 

     The first signs, I misinterpreted. At this point I had been (bearing in mind the em/immigration hiatus) actively working with dogs – loved, scared, pampered, abandoned, injured, working, young, elderly, aloof, clingy, what have you – for decades. At this point I was ready to interpret any less-than-desired thing any dog did as correctable with love. No, I wasn’t starry-eyed enough to think that an inbred show breed with seizures or incontinence or poo-brain can be loved into brilliance and health, but I did believe that if a dog with no genetic disadvantages was exposed to enough qualified, experienced support and love it would be able to find its equilibrium. I actually do still believe this (remember, good story, happy ending), just no longer that I am capable of doing that right myself in every situation. Like poor dog-aggressive Tank, this was an eye-opener. Again, I loved these dogs. I miss these dogs.
     We needed to make the switch from the long train ride to the short one and we had about 25 minutes to kill. Given how understandably restless Trippy Frank was, I started walking him from one end of the long platform to the other, back and forth, until it got close to the time for the train to arrive. He was so pent up, he never calmed down at all. He wasn’t dragging on the lead or leaping about or shaking or being jumpy, but he did everything with a bulling-through-life energy and determination that never once flagged. The problem came when we had to wait a couple of minutes when the train got near. He didn’t hold with that. He got more and more jittery, and eventually it peaked and he leaped on me from behind, throwing his forelegs around my neck and beginning to dry-hump the air behind my ass.

     This is the point at which a group of generalized louts of 19 or 24 years, loitering and littering with beers and fries and cigarettes, began to point and laugh, assembling into a semicircle reminiscent of a scene in a movie about bullying in the 1930’s. The thing is, they weren’t aware of my background, so they were a bit surprised when I executed one smooth turn, took the dog by the throat, put him onto his back, and told him off. I was genuinely startled by his maneuver, so the mammoth thigh I was holding in my left hand appeared menacingly over his face and I told that dog off. When next I glanced up, the group of mini-thugs were backing away silently, a couple of them gone pale, keeping their hands in sight. It was a very satisfying moment, later in retrospect when I could think back on it.

     The dog behaved himself for the rest of the trip.

     Once in our house, he seemed to understand that he was OK to hang there, and lay in the middle of the floor panting from it all. Over the next couple of hours we played with him and his inexhaustible energy, brushed and brushed him because he was still shedding like that, hugged him when he wanted and gave him space when he wanted, and talked to him. Then it came time to take him out for a walk and it turned out, we could tell immediately from his behavior, that he had never gone down a long flight of stairs in his life. He was scared. He absolutely did not dare to do it. Nope, no way, nuh-uh. After a long time of cajoling and wheedling and tossing treats I finally had to give up, and I brought my horse experience (not to mention my experiences with a Great Dane unwilling to cross bridges… in Amsterdam) into play and dragged that poor dog straight down the stairs against his will. As soon as we hit ground level he was fine and waggy, and looked behind him thoughtfully for a moment before we bulled off for the woods. I kept him on-lead that time, and all went well. We encountered nobody, he peed and tore around smelling things, we went back home. That’s where it gets interesting. We were watching TV and we suddenly heard scrambling and thumping, and we realized Trippy Frank had gone back downstairs to the tiny entry hall by himself. We started to stand up but heard him come back up again. Then he went back down, slightly more elegantly. And up. And down. We waited and listened. In total, that dog went down and back up those stairs by himself 22 times, just teaching himself how to do it.

     DAMN that was a wicked smart dog.

     He slept downstairs, we slept upstairs, and there was no trouble. In the morning he greeted all of us happily and we did some cuddles and rubs and went out for a walk. He was an astonishingly resilient beastie, full of aplomb. I didn’t understand yet that he was trying too hard for himself, pushing himself too hard to make nice and be willing. I didn’t understand yet how damaged he was, and why. On that walk there was one disturbing incident when he lunged at the back of a jogger (who luckily didn’t notice). It was a playful lunge, but a powerful one, and I resolved not to let him be surprised by fleet creatures. This was the kind of dog who could skin your palms off if he saw a cat while on-lead. It quickly became apparent that I would need to walk him a LOT in the times before he could be off-lead, and to be honest I finally called it earlier than I would have and let that powerhouse run (but for the record there were no negative repercussions).  

     We discovered very quickly that Trippy Frank was passionate about water. Canals, lakes, puddles, rivers, wherever we took him where there was water he would cannonball wantonly into it. In one tiny canal near our apartment (pictured), he would run the full length of around 20 meters back and forth with enormous sprays of water flanking him. We planned to take him to the beach as quickly as possible.

     Over the course of the first week he both fell quickly into our daily routine and gradually fell apart. He learned his way around our patch of woods. He proved to be friendly with other dogs, if rather too powerful and excited for them. I did all the tests with him, like sticking my hand into his food bowl while he was eating, and he passed with flying colors. We did obedience work (he was a quick, eager learner, took treats without snapping, listened when I corrected his course away from the cow pastures and so on), we played with balls and sticks and toys. He was always courteous with our child. I fell very much in love with that dog.

     The first major sign of a problem with his psyche was when Trippy Frank started playing a game with his leash. I didn’t know yet that there was a reason in his background for this. For all of it. He would grab at the leash and get himself increasingly worked up, jumping around more and more wildly, snapping at it. He’d briefly listen when I told him no, but the behavior worsened and was starting to seriously concern me. I tried carrying a toy and engaging him in tug matches when he started but it didn’t work; he’d gladly grab the toy for a moment, then go straight back for the leash as though it was ever so much more fun. I tried having two leashes on him and immediately dropping whichever one he grabbed but that didn’t work either. I understood that he was acting out of fear and frustration because of how drastically his life had changed, all without him being able to understand a bit of it, but it was an unhealthy and dangerous behavior. And sure enough one day he missed that leash and raked one canine tooth across the back of my hand. The skin didn’t break but a lot of stuff under it did and by the time I got home ten or fifteen minutes later it looked like someone had forced half a purple tennis ball under the skin of my hand. The doctor wrapped it up for me and it was right as rain, if radically discolored, a few days later.

     Meanwhile, I decided it was time to do two things: find out more about this dog if I could, and look into a professional trainer to help with some of his issues. To address the first of these endeavors I took up the passport that had come with him and called the number listed under “vet”. To my horror, I found myself speaking not with a veterinarian but with the widow of the dog’s previous owner! She did talk to me, even when I tried to gracefully bow out, and I learned some things.

     She herself was not, shall we say, a dog person. Wasn’t raised around them, came from a country where they aren’t generally kept in the home, never developed an interest in them. Her husband, about whose issues I know nothing, brought the dog home as a puppy but did not do much in the way of training and pretty much let him run wild around the house, where there was a toddler. The gist of what I got was that Trippy Frank had grown up just barging in wherever he wanted to be, taking what he wanted, and not being disciplined or trained, and at some point apparently the toddler got knocked over. What was clear – and stated several times overtly – was that the widow was very frightened of him. At her insistence, the deceased had moved the dog to that run he’d been living in – nine months before!

     Nine months. So for one month shy of half his entire life, this energetic, mentally brilliant goof of a giant puppy had been confined to a tiny, isolated run. I asked if the man didn’t exercise him, then? And the rest came out. He loved the dog but because of whatever was going on with him did not do right by him. He would go out there every three or four days, and leave an open sack of dog food in with him each time. He almost never let him run free but he would – get this – go in there and play wildly with him… with the leash. This lunging and snapping insanely at the leash was actually the only way this dog knew how to have fun with a human being, the way he had been taught to have fun with a human being, and it must have been torturing him with insecurity that it wasn’t working, was in fact having a detrimental effect on our relationship. I now started to get a picture of just how damaged this dog might be.

     I called my vet to talk about trainers. She referred me to a dog psychologist but when I called, she said it sounded like something a regular trainer could handle and recommended one (she sent me an apology card when she found out what happened, but it wasn’t her fault, it was a fair call). The trainer she recommended listened to it all and we made an appointment and she came out for an intake visit; she had some pretty good ideas, and I started applying them immediately. One was to simply stop and stand still and not react at all when he did the leash thing (dropping the leash if he started to get near my hands), and it started to have an effect by that evening. Another was to engage him in thinking activities, so we started a game in which I would put him in a sit/stay and then hide a treat out of his sight, sometimes buried, sometimes halfway up a tree rammed into the bark, sometimes just hurled into the bushes. It was all going really well. Until he snapped.

     Again, I don’t blame the dog. I blame the man who never gave him a chance and in fact actively worked to screw him up. This was a good dog, a blazingly smart dog, a loving dog. I miss that dog. He didn’t deserve any of that.

     This happened the day after the trainer came out. We’d had a good morning, and now we were returning from the afternoon walk which had consisted of about 45 minutes of find-the-cheesy-treat. He started going for the leash again. I stopped and held still. He escalated. I stayed still. He escalated. I went for “NO, BAD DOG” and he stopped very briefly – and then started to bite me. He stayed behind me, no matter how I turned. I couldn’t let go of the leash because my six-year-old was there and I was afraid. Trippy Frank started leaping up and biting me, sometimes sharp nips and sometimes strong bites which bore down heavily without breaking the skin. He bit me on my back, on my arms, on my legs. He went for my calf once and feeling those teeth right against my bone like that sent a sobering cold wave through my soul. I told my kid to get to the pub down the road and wait there. I tried to get away from that dog but he was all over me, eerily silent (creepy still even nine years later) and the bites were getting stronger, starting to tear in. He pierced my hip at one point. That’s when, thank goodness, a big burly neighbor dude happened along and didn’t hesitate for a second; he helped me get Trippy Frank subdued and tied to a signpost, which he proceeded to start humping as though his life depended on it.

     I tried to call emergency services. My kid came back. The dog had broken my phone at some point and I started crying.

     Eventually the neighbor was able to rope in another one and between them they wrestled that poor dog to my house and out onto the back deck, where we locked him. It was heartbreaking. The whole way back he had alternated between fits of snarling rage and piteous confusion as to why he was being handled so roughly. Both neighbors were deeply disturbed by his behavior. Once out on the deck, though, he stood at the back door wagging and, every time I looked out there, getting excited that I was going to come let him in now. I wasn’t, though. Obviously he was not stable and there was no way he could remain a part of our family so, trying to ignore how much pain I was in, I contacted my country’s version of animal control to see how you give up a dog. It’s not like some places I’ve lived. Calling animal control isn’t a death sentence or a horror story. This would consign him to a comfortable, warm, dry run and excellent food, a veterinary and trainer evaluation, and after that, whatever it took – they don’t kill them here except in the direst of circumstances.

     It cost us a lot of money to give him up. I understand that. It costs them a lot more to keep him. My husband rode in with the animal ambulance crew who turned up to get him while I, feeling that I was going into shock and starting to lose use of my left hand, called emergency services. The woman on the phone was very short with me, explained erroneously that I couldn’t be going into shock because I was speaking to her, and asked me if I was bleeding. When I answered, “Not much I think, but I don’t...” she announced sternly that since I could walk and I wasn’t bleeding she would need to terminate the call and wait for a real emergency, and she hung up. Yes, I probably could have complained later, but that was the last thing on my mind for a long time.

     I called my neighbor, and she told me her husband would be happy to take me in when he got home “any minute”. Then I huddled up in a ball and rocked back and forth and whimpered. Three hours later, the neighbor showed up to take me in, turned on his navigation system, and was directed to a hospital which neither of us had been aware had no emergency department nor saw people who were not long-term patients there. I just huddled and whimpered some more and we set out for another hospital, only to have our way blocked by thronging festival crowds due to a national holiday and its attendant massive concerts. (This plays a role in the story later, albeit a minor and indirect one.)

     Eventually the neighbor dropped me off outside the emergency department and sped off to put his kids to bed. I reported to the front desk and was told to have a seat, they’d be with me when they could – obviously, this being how emergency rooms work. I gradually realized that people were staring at me and that was when I took, for the first time, an inventory of my clothing. My jeans were torn at my hip and all down one leg. My sweatshirt was liberally decorated with torn-out V’s of fabric, flapping around, all over my back and left arm. I was disheveled and covered in mud and no doubt white as a sheet. And there I sat, rocking back and forth and whimpering, watching a parade of over-drugged party-goers come and go, all convinced they were dying, none of them even on anything particularly strong. The guy who had simply eaten too many pot brownies and kept suddenly announcing, “Oh God, it’s coming back!” and his very patient friend were pretty funny, to be honest. These folks were liberally interspersed with sprained ankles. Just when I was thinking things might have been triaged through to the point at which the woman who’d been savaged by a dog about six hours ago might be seen, a whole family came in after a car accident.

     Now, I’ll tell you right away these folks were going to be fine (I saw it for myself later) and they walked in, having driven on from the site of the apparently single-car accident. It was three adults and a teenager, and they were bruised and bloodied and no doubt concussed but all were ambulatory and verbal, just very obviously needing to be seen before me. Just like the little daughter of a man I knew fairly well due to frequenting the grocery he ran, who was having sharp stomach pains and arrived next (and who also made a full recovery). And so it went on, but eventually, a nurse came out and the next few minutes made it clear that my situation had, as on the phone, not been properly assessed by the woman at the front desk (I’m not criticizing her; it’s a tough job and I was walking and taking and not bleeding all over the floor, and also not making a fuss).

     The nurse took me into a small first-aid room off the main lobby and said, “I understand a dog bit you. Is it on your hand?” I started to talk. About three sentences and the removal of my sleeve later I was back in the waiting room because they now understood that I needed a big room at the back with full-on doctors. Everyone was suddenly being a lot more subdued and, well, coddling toward me. I had not yet seen a mirror.