When my parents moved into our neighborhood in 1972 they moved right between two German Shepherds. I was never attacked by either one as a child, and thankfully one of the families moved out by the time I was five or six, reducing my risk by half (one of the Shepherds did bite a woman on the ass years later, though, and one day began charging towards me when I was an adolescent which sent me fleeing inside the house). Outside of those two dogs most people owned little dachshunds, so an attack was never a concern.

Things changed in more recent years, though. One afternoon I was taking a walk when a Great Dane that I've never seen before came galloping towards me with a low growl. Fortunately the owner was in their yard and the dog heeded their call to leave me alone, but I decided then that I wouldn't be taking any more walks around the neighborhood, I would go to a park. I've also seen a Rottweiler in the driveway once (and a kid a street or two over got killed by a Rotty!), as well as a dog that looked like a peculiar pit bull/chow/wild boar mix that was always roaming around with no owner in sight.

The animal peril stepped up a notch a year or two ago when two huskies chased the woman across the street's little old poodle into her back yard and killed it. The owner came down the street in a truck and rounded the dogs up and said he was going to get rid of them, but just days later I was driving up the street and saw five huskies chained to a tree in his front yard! I saw a bumper sticker on a truck parked in the road that said something about a sled dog team, so I guess the guys in this rental house were participants in the sunny Southeast's thriving sled dog racing scene. Fortunately those fartknockers moved out recently.

Which brings us to the focus of this post. When I was working later at night, I would call my dad once a day to make sure everything was all right, and one day I heard just the kind of thing I had always been afraid of: dad went out walking (which I had told him wasn't a good idea) and two big, black dogs ran up out of the woods and surrounded him, walking circles around him like sharks, snarling and snapping and leaping at him. After a minute or two they took off again, and he called the police, who took 20 minutes to show up (as he pointed out to them, he takes blood thinner and if one of those dogs bit him he could've bled to death in less than 20 minutes). Some people who live up the street offered to walk down the street with him and they said the owners of those dogs let them out to run amok every day, unsupervised.

Dad shared his story with the post lady and she gave him a can of something called Back Off Dog Repellent. Dad said he was out in the yard one day and one of those dogs came at him again. He sprayed the repellent and it didn't even have to touch the dog, it made an immediate U-turn and went home!

He had said the dogs were pit bulls but he thinks all dogs are pit bulls. After seeing them myself I think they're Labrador Retrievers. However just a couple of weeks ago I saw the post lady deliver my Boss PH-2 phaser (my second one...gotta have backup!) and I was excited to get to the mailbox to get it when I looked up the street and what was coming this way? A real goddamn pit bull! This one was your classic brown-and-white spotted one with little pointy ears on a big, square head. I turned right around and got back inside until that thing was gone. Dad said he's also seen this pit bull out on his walks but ironically it hasn't even so much as barked at him. I really don't want to meet it the day it's stepped on a thorn, though!

Dad has since heard from the 70-year-old guy down the road that these Labradors have come after him three times in his own yard, and only a few days after dad's last encounter with them we saw an animal control van and a fire truck in front of another house up the street. Animal control has been out here three times but has failed to do anything. Funny when I had a little beagle/dachshund mix they rounded him up for being out of our yard and charged us $60 to get him back, but when it comes to these dogs they're powerless.

I saw these two Labs in our yard just a few mornings ago, and made sure they were gone before I went to my car. I've been trying to think of alternative ways to deal with them because it's ridiculous that people in this neighborhood have to look over their shoulder just to go in their own yards.

However when I brought it up yesterday dad said of the Labs, "Maybe they were just trying to play." Would he make up his fucking mind?!