our imperfect dogs & an unpleasant woman

Our dogs are not perfect. I am reminded of that fact when someone comes to the door. I am reminded of it when they bark at the neighbour's dog. I am reminded of it when they swipe food from Quincy.

And this morning I was reminded of it by a rather unfriendly woman at the dog park. She is a dog walker and had two large boxers with her. She yelled at my dogs for being, well, for being dogs. Then she said to them quite gruffly, as if they understand English, "Come on, let's not make this personal." Well, whenever we see these two dogs when we are out walking, they bound up to our dogs. They even come up to our open car door, which is pretty unpopular with Kai. I must say, they aren't very fond of them and they have tried to tell them off, as dogs do, on more than one occasion. So unbeknownst to her they have history, and maybe for the dogs it is personal.

This morning my dogs had been playing nicely and uncharacteristically quietly for 30 minutes with a large pack of dogs before this woman turned up. You know, not all people get along, in fact, I don't like this woman, so why should we expect all dogs to be best mates?

Maybe I should add that Kai was attacked last year by a large, brown, muscular dog. It was completely unprovoked. Jeremy was walking the dogs on the footpath and this tied up dog just lunged at her. It wasn't a boxer, but ever since she has taken a disliking to many other dogs that fit that description, including a lot of boxers. She was already slightly timid, but that incident unfortunately has made her more suspicious of certain other dogs. When she's off the lead though, she is generally fine because she is able to remove herself from the situation. But some dogs don't pick up on her signals and follow her and continue to sniff her bum. Unrelentlessly. Let's just say, she's not overly keen on that. Can you blame her?