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ANY DOG WILL BITE
This one just shows how easy it is to be wrong when you love your pets too dearly.
The best dog I ever owned was named Gyzer, a Lab/Newfie mix. He was intelligent, loyal and smart as a whip. At one point we counted his vocabulary at over 350 words, and probably didn’t get them all listed. I don’t think there was an emotion or idea he couldn’t understand or even communicate if he decided to. I was recently retired from working due to disabling arthritis and this dog was the love of my life.
Turned out he had hip displaysia and arthritis, too, and it started to bother him badly at about 5 years old. When we got him from the shelter he was less than a year old, and shy and timid, with a history of having been beat. He recovered well with us though, and was one of those “wouldn’t harm a flea” dogs.
He was on a lot of the same medications I was on for his arthritis, interestingly enough, and we watched him closely to be sure he main tainted a quality of life and wasn’t suffering terribly.
One day our grandson surprised him at the kitchen sink by slapping at him. He didn’t bite as much as he did warn, but he did put a canine tooth well into our grandson’s hand, requiring a trip to the ER and a couple of stitches in his palm. I saw it happen: the dog snapped the air near him, and the child’s hand, in swinging, passed into the lower jaw, which was moving at a great speed, and he was thus injured.
We watched him more closely after that, but keeping him away from kids seemed to be all he needed. Kids make unexpected and unpredictable moves for a dog and they don’t like it, no matter how good the dog is at controlling it. In his pain, the dog injured our grandson. He knew it too, because he cowered and asked out doors and wouldn’t come in until after the child was gone.
We were about to make the decision to put him down when another unfortunate thing happened. A kitten we’d just acquired was simply walking past him one morning and he made a quick snap at the kitten to get it away from him. That’s the second time he snapped like that. Only this time he got the kitten’s chest. The poor kitten bled out right there on the floor in just a couple of minutes. There was nothing anyone could do.
So, we lost a kitten and my very good friend, that day. NOW I can see looking back at pictures of Gyzer, that he looked pretty bad, but I loved the dog so much I wasn’t seeing it. We should have let him go a few months earlier than we did.
So, be observant; don’t let a pet suffer needlessly, and try to be sure you’re not being blind to their problems just because you love them so much. I was blinded by his love for me and my love for him.
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