Mid-morning in May. Blue skies. Wisp of a wind. Mockingbird
trills.
Crossing Clinton Ave. on 30th
street, I spot ahead of me a tall lanky man and his matching black lanky dog.
Leashless. The dog is about half a block ahead of the man. The man, of course,
is plugged in with earbuds and phone in hand.
I slow down,
wary.
This dog
was way ahead of his owner, and when the man finally looked up from his phone
and saw me, the dog had trotted closer. “Kali! Come here, girl!” he called.
Pausing, but only for a moment, Kali turned and continued toward me. I wasn’t scared, more just annoyed, thinking how stupid it was for this guy to let his dog walk way ahead of him without a leash.
“Is she
friendly?” I called out, stopping. I mean, I hoped so, right? as the dog
continued to approach me. She was the wary one now, dark nose sniffing the air.
She was a good-sized dog, but I could tell a young dog. Slender but tall with
black and brown accents of a German Shephard fur coat.
“Oh, yeah!”
the owner hollered back to me.
“Okay,” I
continued standing as the dog approached me, sniffing. I held out my hand for a
greeting and she let out a low growl.
Damn! That’s
not a ‘friendly’ dog. Did the stupid owner hear that snarl? He made no mention
of it. Nothing like, “Oh, don’t worry. She’s all growl and no bite” or some
such idiotic assurance. I remember another little dog, Tiny, (of course) whose owner
told me she was friendly and liked people and then when I squatted down to show
her my hand, she snarled at me. “Oh, I guess she doesn’t like all people,” the owner
had laughed.
Really? It’s funny?
Part of me
is hurt that the dog snarled at me, but another part was just pissed off. Yet
this little dog was TINY and it was on a leash.
Today’s dog
was large and there was NO leash in sight.
I backed
away to let them pass. But the owner now took his earbuds out, chatty. He had some sort of accent, Australian? English? All of a sudden, I was in a BBC drama talking to the local shepherd. “She’s
just a puppy. People think she’s scary cuz she’s big, but she’s just a lover.”
“Yeah, I can
see she’s a puppy.” Now that the owner was right there with us, I felt safer,
but still, the dog was no ‘lover’! At least not with me. She circled away from me.
Skittish.
“What kind
of dog is she?” I asked. “Shepard?”
“Yeah, German
Shepard, Greyhound, maybe some Doberman.”
DOBERMAN!!!! Okay, well that explains it. What the hell was this guy thinking letting his Doberman Shepard mix wander around off leash in the neighborhood?
He wasn’t
thinking. People like him never do. Today, I didn’t even bother to ask him why
the dog wasn’t on a leash. That didn’t he realize there were leash laws in
Richmond.
What was
the point?
He would
just either be all confrontational with me: “Hey, chill out lady. The dog is
just a puppy. She won’t hurt you.” Or, sappy faux apologetic. “Oh, yeah. I
know. But she’s a good girl and she deserves to run free.”
Hey, I’m
all for dogs running free. At Point Isabel’s. In their yards. But walking down
30th street where there were other walkers, dogs, babies, squirrels,
birds…. Well, NO. They should be on a leash. It’s the law. And it’s dangerous!
Esp. if
they growl at people.
So, today,
I just walked on, knowing that saying anything wouldn’t have done any good. And
it wasn’t my responsibility either. I didn’t know where this guy lived. I’d
never seen him before. It’s not like I could report him to the police for
breaking leash laws.
Like the
Richmond Police don’t have better things to do.
I’m not going to change people’s bad
behavior with their unleashed dogs.
No one
will. Unless something really bad happens. An attack, a scare, an injury or worse.
I hope this
doesn’t happen to this dog. Even though she growled at me, she was just being a
dog.
It wasn’t her fault she has an idiot
for an owner.
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