Abbye got to meet her new neighbor yesterday afternoon, and found that she’d just as soon avoid the next such encounter.<\/p>\n
Gabby is a 60 pound black labrador retriever who is normally kept in the backyard. As MLB<\/acronym>, Abbye and I walked out the front door for our evening stroll, Gabby was running loose in the neighbor’s front drive. Abbye and Gabby spotted each other simultaneously and met under one of our live oak trees, where the lab proceeded to pounce on Abbye with a snarl and gnaw on the back of her neck.<\/p>\n Needless to say, none of us were amused, Abbye least of all. MLB was screaming, Abbye was yelping, the neighbor came running and I grabbed the lab around the neck and pulled her off.<\/p>\n Fortunately, I was close and quick enough to prevent any damage, although we were all pretty shaken. I know people whose dogs have been killed in precisely that fashion. Abbye whimpered for a few seconds, but it may have been more of an empathetic response to the human reactions than any actual pain.<\/p>\n Our neighbor was horrified, and profusely apologetic. He had been testing his sprinkler system and was in and out of the backyard. Apparently he didn’t get the gate completely shut on one trip, and Gabby made a break. She’s slobberingly friendly around humans, but something about Abbye just set her off.<\/p>\n Actually, I think I came away with the most painful experience. Gabby had been barking a lot during the day, probably trying to get used to her new surroundings, and her owners had employed a shock collar to curb that tendency. I can assure you, based on what I felt as I pulled her back by her neck, that little gizmo works! It took me a second or two to realize why I was being jolted as I held the dog back.<\/p>\n All’s well that ends well. We all calmed down (poor Gabby got a few punishing whacks from her master which I’m not sure she understood), and went on our walk. It wasn’t long before Abbye was her usual self.<\/p>\n Of course, what was the first thing we encountered when we got to our neighborhood park? Yep…not one, but two black labs. Abbye wanted to greet them, but her people — for some reason totally inexplicable to her — steered her on a wide berth around them. Her role as a social butterfly will be somewhat curtailed from now on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Abbye got to meet her new neighbor yesterday afternoon, and found that she’d just as soon avoid the next such encounter. Gabby is a 60 pound black labrador retriever who is normally kept in the backyard. As MLB, Abbye and I walked out the front door for our evening stroll, Gabby was running loose in… Continue reading Dog Snack: Close Call<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbye","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4892,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions\/4892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}