Scary Situation, Quick Decision, Poor Shippo!

I'm sorry, I guess I'm just frustrated because it was something I didn't want to do

I fully understand, and I think many of us do too.  When my 2 girls were having these horrible fights, I did so many things in the moments of panic that were either useless or even dangerous.  I actually alpha rolled my large lab, Sassy, after one fight.  I had my face within inches of hers telling her if she ever attacked my other dog again, I'd hurt her bad [:@].  I'm not proud of it and I could've been very injured, but fortunately for me, she was stunned into submission.  When I stood up, I burst into tears - yeesh, what a bad memory. Anyway, I digressed, but I just wanted you to know I do understand and I would've done the same thing.  I just like discussing ways we can all handle those situations in different ways.

I have been on both sides of this kinda.....I have had my dogs get away from me and go see a little dog and the face of its human is almost unbareable. But I always yell not agressive just want to play its ok and then I've had the little dog attack my big dogs...LOL
also my ex hubby thought he was all that saying that if a dog ever attacked him he would put his hand down the dogs throat. Well he did get attacked once by a saint banard/GSD and that didn't work.....DUH!  ONly thing that saved him was the owner came out and the dog actually listened to drop it and came back to the owner like look at what I did.
So my point is you never know what you are going to do in any situation until you are in it.

Astaracheetah you did the best you could at the time. No Faults to you!

take care
Andrea
 
ps...I work for the post office and we are suppose to carry maise with us for protection but I won't! Don't care for it!

Just echoing what cakana said...

I had to get stitches because I figured in the heat of the moment that the best way to pry my dog off another dog would be to grab my dog's mouth, and I don't blame myself for this. It was an experience that was scary and completely beyond me.

The only great thing about scary experiences like this is that once you've had them, they are no longer completely beyond you. I think everyone who was looking at it from the perspective of the other dogs' prey drive was just speaking in that spirit of learning from past experience.

It's definitely tough in the heat of the moment like that. I don't think you can even get deterrant spray over here and if you could, I wouldn't carry it because there's no way in hell I could get it out fast enough to use it before the mean dog got to me. IMO, if you have time to get the deterrant ready, then it's not a situation that is out of control yet and there's a fairly good chance you can chase the dog off without a deterrant. I've had plenty of moments that nearly turned nasty but didn't because the dog was approaching slowly enough for me to make it pretty clear with body language and condifence that it didn't want to pick a fight with us. My feeling is that the one time a deterrant is really needed, it's going to happen too fast to get the stuff out and use it. That's just what I feel from my experiences.

We used to have a dog that was very frightening to strangers. Our gas was delivered to us and our dog hated the gas man passionately. She'd get right up and bark and growl in his face and she really did look scary. One day, one of the guys delivering our gas got really frightened of her and sprayed the gas in her face as a deterrant. It pretty much turned her into a gas man loathing monster instantly and after that day there was no way we could convince that dog that the gas man wasn't someone to be hated, feared and destroyed if the opportunity arose. A similar thing happened when one of the neighbours kicked her from their trailbike when she got out one day and started running alongside the bike. After that, she would go mental whenever the kids got the bike out.

My point is, deterrants can be damaging to dogs psychologically. 98% of the time I'm confronted with a mean dog, it's not completely committed to attacking and it's not in the middle of charging me. If it's not doing those things, then I can sternly tell it to get home and chase it and it will run. I can't think of a time this hasn't worked except in those 2% of times when the dog is committed and charging. So, I'd rather not risk giving a dog serious psychological problems if I can just make it think twice the way another dog would. For those times it's not going to work, I'm not going to be fast enough to do anything but grab my dog and hope for the best anyway.