Close Encounters of the Dog Kind

I'll be taking a brief interlude from my series of posts about my Saturday trip to my old neighborhood. Today I want to talk about an encounter I had with a couple dogs on my daily walk.

Since my MDS diagnosis, my primary form of exercise is walking. I have several routes of varying distances to choose from. I choose my route based on time constraints, weather, and how I feel. Given the right circumstances I will walk 4-5 miles per day.

Yesterday I took my favorite route. I walk from my house to the Trails Recreation Center and back. Along the way I encounter many barking dogs. Normally the dogs are behind fences and no threat to me. However, when I was about 1/2 mile from my house, I came across two dogs that were loose along my path.

The first dog was small, timid, and no apparent threat to me. It peeked its head over a hill, barked at me, but kept its distance. It turns out that dog had a friend -- a far bigger and more aggressive friend. That dog came over the hill and immediately began trotting toward me. You may be thinking, 'the dog probably was just curious or wanting attention.' That may be true but consider my circumstances. I have a blood disease that has drastically lowered my platelet count. That means that if I am bitten and start to bleed, it can be difficult to stop the bleeding. In addition, I have lowered red blood cell counts. That means that my body is inefficient at transporting oxygen. Whenever, I do anything even moderately physical, I immediately go into oxygen deficit. So, if the dog was aggressive, I would only be capable of defending myself for a short time. Finally, my disease lowers my white blood cell counts. If I am bitten, the likelihood of infection is far higher. So, when I saw this dog moving rapidly toward me I felt the adrenaline surge and I immediately had to take some sort of action.

At the time I noticed the larger dog, it was probably 30-40 feet from me. I was walking along Orchard Road and there was a fair amount of traffic. I needed to create a reason for the dog to lose interest in me. I saw that the oncoming traffic was fairly close, but not so close that I couldn't dash to the median half way across the street. I knew that running from a dog wasn't the best way to deter an attack and might even encourage it, but I felt that there was another deterrent that might help -- the oncoming traffic. I dashed across the street to the median and looked back to see what the dog was doing. Thankfully, the dog had stopped right at the edge of the road and was indeed flustered by cars that slowed to a stop a few feet from where the dog was standing. Without delay, I checked the westbound traffic to see if it was safe to continue from the median to the other side of the street. I let a few cars pass and then continued on my way.

The two cars that had stopped were apparently concerned about the dogs. They parked, got out of their cars and tried to handle the situation. I'm not exactly sure what they did, I simply continued on my way, wondering what I might do if this happened again.

I spoke to my sister about the incident and she recommended two things; pepper pray and a 5-iron. So far I am equipped with pepper spray but I am most definitely considering something similar to a 5-iron as well.

If you have dogs, please don't let them run loose. There are kids, people like me, and others that really would rather not have a nasty encounter with a dog. I can tell you right now, if a dog shows anything I can construe as aggression, it's going to get ugly (and I dearly love dogs).