There's a viral video that's been doing the rounds in which a cat fends off a dog attacking a little kid. It's an impressive feat of feline fierceness, but while everyone is all "go kitty!" I find myself just sort of queasily disturbed that there's a dog going around biting kids at random.
Jesus, you imperialist, interposing fucks -- think of all those hungry coyotes out there left to starve with your bourgeois stray animal sympathy plan.
Actually, it's not even "animal sympathy," it's sympathy for SWPL-approved charismatic megafauna. You people didn't give a shit abou vultures.
I am the best audience for this kind of thing because even in four paragraphs I never see a surprise ending coming.
Say what you want about cats, but they never tear anyone limb from limb. I think.
I had a post vaguely in mind about how every now and then it gets wearying to live in Texas. Yesterday there was a lengthy discussion in my local mother's group about concealed carry handguns, in which nearly every person led off with some version of "now, we're safe with our guns, but other people..." After that, Jammies and I went to the movies (hooray for visiting grandmas) and the theater was showing two Heaven Is Real style bullshit moves, and the whole thing made me want to give Texas the middle finger and move somewhere sensible.
The point being everyone has guns and how exactly am I going to ask my kids' friend's parents if they keep guns in the house, and if so, under what circumstances?
4: Too small. I bet they could rip someone's throat out, though.
That seems like a pretty reasonable shooting.
I think 5 is a powerful argument for avoiding mother's groups.
And that you'll likely have to revise your inquiry to ask about specific security arrangements for the inevitable guns, unless your kids are social pariahs.
5: "Do y'all keep your guns in the safe? Our kids are into everything, and they aren't trained up to be careful Jr. NRA members like yours."
No joke, I had a childhood friend whose father was an enthusiast (hunting and Civil War memorabilia) who got his kids Jr. NRA memberships when they were born. The parents were extremely lucky.
1: That was a weird looking dog attack. I think of dogs being likely to bite kids because either the kid got in the dog's face and was threatening, or the kid was running and the dog had chasing/hunting behavior triggered. Coming around the car like that and attacking seemed like really unexpected dog behavior: I'd want that dog put down, as genuinely dangerous.
And yeah, I'd call the shooting in the post perfectly justified. A hundred pound animal with big teeth running wild and no indication that they're under the control of a person, if you're carrying a gun that's what I would think guns are for. Not a sufficient justification for broad gun ownership, but not wrongdoing on the shooter's part.
sympathy for SWPL-approved charismatic megafauna
Let me tell you about the time we put out no-kill mousetraps, caught one, and my wife put it on the passenger seat of the car and drove it to a field where she let it go.
That seems like a pretty reasonable shooting.
Absolutely. Not even the dentist blamed her for shooting them, but people were annoyed that she hadn't owned up.
I once used snap trap to catch a mouse. It worked, except the mouse was smart enough not to put his head in the trap. So, I had an seriously injured, living mouse in a trap staring at me. If I had a gun with me, I could have killed it humanely.
12: She's not running for George Washington. I wouldn't worry about it.
people were annoyed that she hadn't owned up.
Understandable. Although "I shot your dog" has to rank reasonably high on the list of Awkward Conversations To Have.
we put out no-kill mousetraps, caught one, and my wife put it on the passenger seat of the car and drove it to a field where she let it go.
Where it no doubt quickly fell prey to vicious wild dogs.
12: Getting embarrassed and covering up shooting someone's beloved pet, even if it was justified, seems totally comprehensible to me. And of course once you don't own up immediately, you're covering up the coverup, because not having told the truth is itself embarrassing.
I really thought 11 was going to end with "...where she smashed it with a big rock."
11: What, is that a silly thing to do? You have to bring the mouse to a place fairly far away -- in mouse terms -- from your house, or else it'll just come back into your house (so I discovered), so you have to drive it some place nice that it will like. Instead.
Mastiffs would run that big or bigger, as would St. Bernards or similar, and of course any kind of mutt with a large part of a big breed.
Although "I shot your dog" has to rank reasonably high on the list of Awkward Conversations To Have.
"On the plus side, I see you have a cowboy hat and a guitar, so this is probably not a first for you."
I was wondering about Presa Canario or something. People think my dog is big at 80lbs, but these were a quarter again the size.
St. Bernards have a sweet image, seems like someone who recognized a St. Bernard might not shoot it (although I think her actions were totally understandable and justifiable).
A Great Dane would be that size. Also a Rottweiler. Those would be less likely to look sweet.
11: when I worked at a cheese store with a mouse problem in the office (not in the store, the office was across a landing), a coworker volunteered for eradication duties. We discovered after a few weeks of continued infestation he was releasing them from the humane trap in the parking lot one story below. In order to breed a race of überrodenten, presumably. Luckily we found him out before the mice discovered the STORE FULL OF CHEESE just across the landing from the couch where they held their mouse orgies. Henceforth dude drove the mice to a regional park for release as raptor food. The end.
I've met Rottweilers that were that big. (And been terrified by them. They belonged to our dog walker, and the first time I met her with them, I was idly petting one of her pony-sized dogs. And then I stopped, and he wasn't done with being petted yet, so he grabbed my arm in his mouth and tugged on it. No damage done, but I did have a flash of thinking "I wonder how hard it will be to learn to write with my left hand?" Lovely dog once I got to know him, though.)
I don't remember the breed, but it wasn't any that have been named so far--they looked like enormous lab mutts, but I'm no expert. The one that lived was something like 110lbs., the other one was apparently a little bit bigger.
Newfoundlands, if they were giant shaggy dogs that looked like labs.
If that's it, I'm surprised they could survive at all outdoors in Arizona? NM? I'd think the heat would kill them in an hour.
"I wonder how hard it will be to learn to write with my left hand?"
I knew a priest how had the same thought after somebody he knew was partially paralyzed by polio. In his case, it turned out to be not very hard for him as a teen.
You should release the mice in the woods, or near a wooded area. It's just mean to release them in a gigantic field.
29: It's nicely cool at elevation. Or was when I was last there.
Someone who owned Newfoundlands someplace hot would probably clip their coats short to avoid the aforementioned death by heat.
Not shaggy.
"Not so shaggy as all that."
20: Like somebody else's house? Crafty.
16 et al: "They were the footprints of a gigantic hound"
Although "I shot your dog" has to rank reasonably high on the list of Awkward Conversations To Have.
Believe I've told the story of my cow orker from the sticks who hit a neighbor's dog while driving home from work one evening. He ascertained that it was not going to live, so being a good ol' boy, he went and got the .22 and put it out of its misery. But! The neighbors were a bunch of city-slickers who took exception to his act of humanitarianism and there was talk of a lawsuit, although I think that never materialized.
my wife put it on the passenger seat of the car and drove it to a field where she let it go.
I did this in Chicago. Except for field read (sometimes) down-the-street.
I've always used no kill mousetraps. Then I kill the mice with a kitchen mallet.
I used to release mice at a church near my old house with the admonishment that they now must be quiet, because they are churchmice.
42, 43: I believe I've seen some documentaries about that. Doesn't usually work out too well for the cat.
I guess I didn't realize releasing trapped mice was a thing. Wow.
Newfoundlands, if they were giant shaggy dogs that looked like labs.
I thought Labs was, uh, smooth.
the theater was showing two Heaven Is Real style bullshit moves
Had to google this to find out what it was about. Heaven is for Real, with Greg Kinnear?
I'd honestly never heard of this, it flew under my radar on a cultural ekranoplan.
47: I released them from this mortal coil.
Speaking of big dogs, my Dad used to drink in a pub where the pub dog was a Tibetan mastiff.* The owner/landlord put her in the kennels while on a holiday. While he was away, two full-sized Rotweilers in a neighbouring pen managed to dig under the fence and a fight ensued. The Tibetan mastiff killed them both.**
* claimed to take on big cats when defending their flock.
** very badly injured and the owner sued the kennel, but the dog healed.
Re: 52
Apparently the dog, which mostly a drooling goof around the pub, had a lot more respect after that.
Is everyone else in your hamlet a health professional? Does your mother give you a hard time about this?
My boyfriend once spent almost an hour trying to catch a mouse in the bathroom. The mouse fought him bravely and ingeniously though his original intention was to break its neck, he was so impressed that we drove a long ways away to find a nice mouse-friendly place to deposit it. But apparently baby mice sing songs of separation for their mothers and are super sad/dead if they don't come back, so now I feel pretty guilty about this, especially b/c it only just occurred to me that we reflexively identified the mouse as male, something which I think is one of my most deeply ingrained sexist habits.
I'm imagining the dog from Dresden Files.
50:
Wonderful allusion, especially given the snap-trap's construction. Shoulda been a copywriter.
53: This is why we need a gender-neutral/ambiguous-and-animate-but-non-human set of pronouns.
4: Too small. I bet they could rip someone's throat out, though.
If you can even get them to take their heads out of Capital for long enough.
Out of dedication to the blog, I shall experimentally try to get the cat to 100 pounds.
I feel like I've developed this fantastic power of thread-killing lately.
I shall experimentally try to get the cat to 100 pounds.
Have you considered space travel? Nothing in this solar system, but a planet with high enough surface gravity would fix that right up. Or, come to think, it'd be more convenient just to accelerate her at 10g or so, depending on what she weighs now.
I killed 8 flies in the bathroom the other night.
You could embroider that fact on a belt, and then go have adventures as a result.
60 It would soften her up a bit.
Shaggy mini-yorkies are actually Tibetan yaks, compressed by the dense sea level air here in San Francisco. In Denver they're the size of a standard poodle.
Found it. Here you go, Halford. Plenty to eat for everyone.
Oh good, glad to see that. When carnivores are happy, I'm happy.
"The point being everyone has guns and how exactly am I going to ask my kids' friend's parents if they keep guns in the house, and if so, under what circumstances?"
This was also an issue when my kid was younger, here in the Fort. She came home from one of her friend's houses when she was about six with a story about how she and the friend and the friend's dad had been playing with the dad's guns (multiple) and I was not precisely pleased.
Almost everyone I know here has guns, but almost everyone I know here is smart enough not to let six year olds shoot their (multiple) weapons without clearing it with their parents first. That this dad wasn't pretty much told me everything I needed to know about gun safety in that home.
And the thing is you can't count on finding that shit out until AFTER.
I could probably make sure that our kids only go to the homes of yuppies or felons, but so far we haven't really had to have that conversation. They know about staying the hell away from guns, though.
A long time ago I had a friend with a rottweiler that reached about 150lb. He was probably a bit over 300lb, and 6'7'' or 8'' himself, so they looked kind of normal together. Then he got a 5'-nothing girlfriend who can't have been more than 110lb soaking wet, watching her walk the dog was amusing. He (the dog) loved her, and would follow happily wherever she went, but if he ever did decide to go somewhere else, what the hell would she do about it?
This dogs favourite chew toys were (non radial, natch) car tyres. They'd last about two days.
It took more than one hit.
...as the snowboarder said to the pizza delivery guy.
I have a colleague with in laws of the "gun safety is a libtard conspiracy" sort, which has caused some tension wih family visits. I think they just stay in a hotel and don't let the kids out of their sight when they're at Duke Nukem's.
"I shot your dog" has to rank reasonably high on the list of Awkward Conversations To Have.
Luckily, the internet has a solution for every problem.
I didn't see the ending to ogged's story coming, because I was so sure the dogs had been shot by some local Navajo. The handgun part was admittedly a problem for this interpretation. Anyway, it's a good story, well told.
Is everyone else in your hamlet a health professional?
Communities like that tend to contain regional hospitals which provide housing for their staff, who in turn tend to socialize mostly with each other. I presume this was the case in ogged's situation.
Exactly. I describe it as dorm life, but everyone has their own house (and there's a wide variance in the ages of the residents).
||
Wow, I happened across a Wikipedia entry that refers to the subject's wife, "by whom he left issue". How many entries are there like this, imported from an ancient Dictionary of Biography and left unchanged ever since?
According to a Google search for "by whom he left issue", there are... ten. I'd expected thousands.
|>
I love the old will language, "heirs of her body." Very simple and rather earthy.
How many entries are there like this, imported from an ancient Dictionary of Biography and left unchanged ever since?
Lots. One of the early-twentieth-century editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica is particularly popular as a public-domain source to copy verbatim.
Not shaggy.
Scooby Doo then? OMG, what kind of monster shoots Scooby Doo!?
You people didn't give a shit abou vultures.
Having lived briefly in a country which boasted both packs of feral dogs and vultures, believe me I am totally on team vulture.
A real gun story would have mentioned what kind of gun was used.
As soon as I make my first million, my shopping list is 1) sailboat, 2) seaplane, and 3) pet vulture, in that order.
And the second million? Pack of feral dogs or Ted Turner's Montana buffalo reserve?
Two pet vultures. I'm not very imaginative.
Our house has a great dane that is around 170lbs. He's a sweetheart, but I wish my house-mates (it's their dog) would stop leaving bags of bagels or whatever around overnight, where he can easily reach them, and then bitch about how their bagel's got eaten.
If you leave a bag of bagels around a great dane, they will be eaten. It's one of those things like e=mc2.
The biggest dogs I've ever seen were a couple of Dane / Wolfhound crosses that a local factory owner had. I don't know if they were really any bigger than a normal (big) Dane, but the addition of shaggy rough fur certainly made them _look_ bigger. They were Hound of the Baskervilles looking things.
it's itfa but the youngs newer readers may be interested to know about my dad's unique pest control strategy. he'd smoke the killer kind, brew up a huge pot of perked coffee (which is the strongest thing in the world) and then perch on the sofa all night long with a good book and a .22 rifle at his side. he would wait for mice to come into view and then shoot them. the man could shoot a lot of mice. he's said recently that the older he gets the less he likes killing anything, which I guess is why he and my step-mom and her brother were freeing 3 snakes from the bird netting around one of our gardenias last weekend when I called. just black snakes, though. copperheads, still, if you see one you have to shoot it, and then you have to go looking for the other fucking copperhead, because there's always two. we have a blind rescue pit-bull, so, extra copperhead-shooting for us. I wonder if she can hear snakes?
90: They don't understand that even if a dog does know that at some level he's not supposed to eat it, you can't leave a pork-chop dinner plate on a coffee table for 2 hours while you go shopping, with out it disspearing.
Well the dog's thinking, "I can't let that go to waste, it'd be a shame."
I don't want to belabor this, but he is also a rescue, and his previous owners starved him, and he is not terrible about stealing food. It's just don't abandoned chunks of meat in the house at his face level and go wander around outside. errrr... (yes this morning I'm having one of these arguments over a birthday cake that got left out (put cakes away when you go to bed.)
Who the fuck leaves food out anyway? I'd never leave food out and I don't have a dog.
Food hygiene, insects, vermin, etc.
We leave bread products on the counter in bags. It's never been a problem.
98. Do you have a giant dog? Or any size of cat?
We sometimes leave bread on the counter, but the only thing that's going to eat that is us or a burglar.
I have dog or cat of any size great enough for them to be seen with the unassisted human eye.
re: 98
Yeah, ditto. But that would be about it. Nothing that would spoil, nothing that might attract insects or mice.*
* we live on the 3rd floor of a new build, so mice are unlikely, but you never know.
I killed all the mice. The previous own kept bird seed around and had tons of mice. For insects, we get ants if we don't keep the floor cleaned. Otherwise, as long as I am willing to accept that the spiders run the basement, it's fine.
You may not be surprised to learn they have very idiosyncratic ideas about why we've gotten bugs sometimes in the summer. My answer of "because you leave food out all the time, has not been convincing." They prefer answers that are not their fault.
Obviously, it's because Obamacare.
Isn't 80 the basic premise of Daniel Davies' dull lives of Wikipedia? Having read that series I will never take seriously a delete-for-non-notability claim ever again.
107 Yeah, my deletion was totally political.
It still remains the case that nobody with my first/last name combo has a Wikipedia page. I'm thinking of putting one up for me and, by way of cover, ever other person with the same name I know of.
(The entry lives on at WikiAlpha, years out of date. It doesn't come up in the first page of google results, though, so I'm not feeling like I need to edit it . . .)
On google, I've always come behind a banker, a chemist, and a law school professor. Now the first hits are almost entirely for a philosopher. Some things can't be tolerated. I'm going to have to accomplish something.
For a long time my first hit on google was an artist. Now it's a guy who murdered his family. This will inevitably lead to wacky hijinks if I ever start dating again.
Just clearly explain that when you murder people, they aren't relatives or romantic partners.
Grrrrr. A quick google search of my unfortunately unique name shows that I will really need to work on getting some other stuff up on the web to bump unwanted results down. Stupid internet remembering everything.
51: Tibetan mastiff.
As I recall, in The Snow Leopard Peter Mathiessen describes his ongoing fear of these dogs as they pass through or stop at villages along their way.
A seaplane that you can buy for under $1 million with room leftover for a sailboat and vulture probably isn't a seaplane you want to fly in.
I believe I've posted here before about my own constant low-level childhood fear of the many free-roaming dogs in the feral Midwestern neighborhoods of my youth. Scarred me for life.
You know, I love pit bulls, and am against breed-specific legislation, but if I see a pit bull loose in my neighborhood, I do everything possible to avoid it. There's just no percentage in not being overcautious.
As a child, I was bitten by some kind of yipping, miniature Schnauzer-looking thing. At least it had its shots.
I've been bitten quite badly by a dog once. It tried to kill me, more or less. Knocked me over and went for my throat, and when I protected my neck and tried to fight it off, it went for my groin instead. I've told this story here before. I was a paper-boy, and one house had a black lab that used to always bark and hammer against the inside of the door when I delivered. One day, the woman left the back door open, and it got me.
To this day, I'm more shocked by her behaviour than the dogs. She fetched the dog in, and then just left me lying bleeding in her driveway. I had to go and knock on her door and ask her to phone my boss to come and collect me. One of the many roots of my basic 'Middle-class people are amoral fucks' belief.
I don't have a fear of dogs now, but I was very wary of them for a long time. I'd been bitten a few times before that time, so the wariness is probably understandable.
Another story I've told here before. We had a family in our street that had a fairly vicious collie. The family were travellers of some kind [Scottish or Irish], andI think the dog was used to being outdoors or on the road. It used to chase and sometimes bite the kids in the street. After it bit me once, and then nipped my sister, my Dad went to their door and warned the guy not to let it happen again. Anyway, I think the guy dismissed it, thinking himself the harder man, perhaps.
A week or two later, my sister was running towards our house, and the dog ran out and bit her quite nastily on the leg [stitches needed]. After she'd been seen to, my Dad quite calmly walked along the street to their house. Rang the door bell. The guy opened the door, and my Dad punched him flush in the face, with nary a word said. Then walked away.
121.1: Did animal control take the dog? They'd put down a dog for that here.
re: 122
No. The owner persuaded my boss, who had gone to see her about it, that she'd have the dog sent away to her sister, who lived on a farm. I was only 12 or 13 at the time, and I didn't pursue it. In retrospect, I should have insisted it be killed.
I should also have extracted some pay-back of my own, later.* For having left me lying bleeding in her drive-way.
* not really, I wasn't that kind of kid.
You should have found a pharmacist.
One of the staff at the animal rescue/vet clinic place I do some volunteering at has a mastiffy massive dog who has figured out that barking thunderously and charging at me is a good way to get treats. He doesn't bite but he's almost knocked me down a few times. I'm thinking taser but then I might have to escalate to some arterial transections.
Anyway, most of the critters there are reasonably well behaved but because many of them have sketchy backgrounds and unknown triggers for aggression, "situational awareness" is the order of the day.
That's why I'm thinking if we get a dog it will be a rescued Chihuahua.
Those can be nasty too, and they're fast, like cats. They can't crush bone or remove your arm but any animal bite gets infected easily. Near as I can tell, lots of observation of animals gives one a sense of their tells. I've seen vets pull their hands away before I perceived the critter starting an attack.
I'm hoping to get a Chihuahua that was abandoned for being too dull.
I have an uncommon name but I benefit in anonymity from it being in the US for a long time (most or all of the people of any note with my name lived hundreds of years ago, and there's a bunch of genealogical clutter) and from it also being the name of a small city.
121: After she'd been seen to, my Dad quite calmly walked along the street to their house. Rang the door bell. The guy opened the door, and my Dad punched him flush in the face, with nary a word said. Then walked away.
Good story, though I don't recall you having told it before. Dads can be great that way: I had a similar thing when I was in 3rd grade (so maybe 9 years old). A neighborhood kid and his friends decided to beat me up on my way home from school, the mates holding my arms behind my back as the ringleader punched me in the stomach. As it happened, my dad was driving home from work at around the same time and passed by during the event. He intervened, and that evening visited the neighborhood kid's house to make clear to the parents in no uncertain terms that this would never happen again. Ever. Are we clear ... ? Yes. We were.
