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Our dog was attacked. Liability??
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KylieWyley wrote: »It probably did wreck their heads. However, the fact is that it was a public road they were walking on a pathway that they are entitled to walk and they should be allowed the right to walk along a row of houses without being harassed.
Did I not conceed this point near the beginning of this thread and re-iterate the concession in my last post? The only reason that I did still politely ask in the end for a 'crossing the road timeout' was that a concensus seemed to have developed after I filled in some more detail and history, that the other owner and dog were not entirely blameless either, ie. whatever about walking past the gate as is his right, he was wrong to let the dog lunge at the bottom of the gate everyday. Its actually surprising it took this long for something like this to happen. We were both guilty of letting it go on so and not do anything concrete about it.
OP, your eloquent writing is masking the fact that your attitudes and assumptions are very flawed. Why do people assume that just because their pets are small, their barking is any less stressful/annoying/intimidating to passers-by than if their pets were big.
If you regularly had to walk past a house that had, for example, a German Shepherd or a Doberman, that (although well fenced in) was regularly permitted to bark at you as you passed, I'll bet you'd feel peeved and consider complaining.
I'll grant that some/all of my assumptions were flawed, but most have been corrected by the myriad of helpful posts in this thread. I am not. Obviously some of my attitudes which were based on faulty assumptions were flawed by extension but rest assured that I actually never held the attitude you highlighted. I was well aware that a small barking dog running to the gate and incessently barking while a dog went passed was no more or less annoying to human or dog on the other side than if a big dog was doing it. I didn't have an attitude that the little dogs have a 'right' to bark on my property and annoy everyone but I did have the erroneous assumption that fitting a solid gate and doing as another poster here said he does with his Westies, which was to go out everytime they barked at the gate, get between them and the gate, and scold them and take them in, that this was all I could do (and it wasn't working despite doing it every day for the last year) I'll be starting another thread soon and/or doing some research into training methods to try and stop this in future now that I know while its common that doesn't mean its normal territorial behaviour
I regularly encounter this bias when out walking. People immediately expect the larger dogs to be on leashes while the smaller dogs are allowed to run riot and run up to other dogs yapping away. The irony is that often times, the larger dogs are the more docile, calm creatures. Small dog owners have this "arragh, sure he won't do any harm attitude".
Ironically, I've encountered this bias from the same side of the fence (pardon the pun
) as your goodself. We used to have a Labrador walked on the leash and we hated the attitudes of small dog owners and double irony, an owner in particular who we would meet with her two.....Westies What we learned when we got Westies/small dogs ourselves was that they weren't nescessarily viscious little buggers that hated and barked at all other dogs but that the barking at larger dogs was often fear of much larger dogs and the barking was a pre-emptive warning (Don't think I'm a little white fluffy pushover!! (or am I anthropomorphising?? )) That said the owners attitudes to the behaviour of 'arragh, sure it won't do any harm' was obviously still wrong.
That was an observation of behaviour that meant we were able to nip it in the bud when it started to happen with ours. At best they happily greet other dogs off the leash on walks on the beach and at worst they ignore other dogs who want to play with the rare vocal reprimand at a particular boisterous persistent juvenile Lab getting in their face for example. The irony is that they'd probably get on great with this Airedale off their territory and off the leash down the beach, its just our walks never coincide. The Airedale is walked before and after work early morning and late evening while we have one long walk in the afternoons everday. Sundance and Cassidy will play fetch from one end of the seafront to the other with the occasional dip while Butch will swim the full length of the beach as long as the waves aren't too big. Its quite unusual for a Westie to like swimming and thankfully it was the lad who stood to lose a few pounds that developed a liking for this low impact form of excercise. In terms of fetch, he was the guy that made a judgement call from the trajectory of the ball about whether it was going too far for him to bother chasing, so he would never expend as much energy on the 90-120 minute walks as the other two.
Sorry, I digress again. The rare times on the leash that we'd round a corner and suddenly come face to face with other dogs as opposed to seeing them coming in the distance, are the times when they'll get defensive and start barking at the other dog out in public. From my previous experience, I knew why my dogs were doing it but also knew it was they that were in the wrong and it would be me that would smile and apologise to the other owner.
While its unfortunate that your little guy was hurt, I don't think it's right for you to expect, or accept any form of compensation. Your dog was the aggressor and the other dog was only defending itself.
Again, you are talking in the present tense. I knew I wasn't necessarily correct about compensation from the very first post in the thread. Hence, me asking, was I naive. Sure I was probably fairly sure I was but not 100% sure. Is this a case of you reading my first post and clicking reply without reading the following 3 pages of discussion and the rest of my posts. ie. I did expect compensation, was informed legally I might be entitled to compensation but that morally I was not. I accepted the consensus and now don't expect any compensation nor did I demand or accept any compensation from the owner.
- Aggressive, charging behaviour. Can you really blame the other dog for defending itself? It doesn't understand the physical constraints of walls and fences. As far as it's concerned, it's under attack and must defend itself. It is only an animal after all!
The question of the Airedale defending itself gets a bit muddled here due to the fact that long before this incident the Airedale became pre-emptive in its lunging/attacking the gate. While one of my Westies is pre-emptive in recognising certain houses where a dog has barked behind the gate as we walked by in the past and stops in his tracks and demands to cross to the other side of the road every time we pass that house in future, the Airedale pre-empts by starting to pull its owner when he gets to our corner and gets more worked up as he gets closer to the gate. Its this excitable state that usually alerts our guys to his presence in advance if they happen to be out in the yard at the time whereupon they run to the gate and start the barking.
I hope no one, although I think someone alluded to it, thinks that my story developed throughout the course of the thread to show my guys in a more favourable light or the Airedale in a less favourable one. Its just that in the past I have found that if I start a thread/question and fill in every concievable detail or fact that might be relevant right from the getgo one can end up with a wall of text that either illicits the TLDR response from other posters or that the (too much) information gets jumbled up, missed, confused by the respondant while composing his/her reply. I find its often easier to follow if I fill in pertinent/relevent details for clarification as the need arises throughtout the course of the thread.
I am guilty of jumping to conclusions about the other owners motivations before talking to him. He's actually a compassionate conciencious dog owner who had just started taking for walks and now adopted a neglected Labrador from a chinese family that live behind him. Usual story, dog got too big for them and they didn't realise the work involved or have the time to walk him so he languished in their bag yard all day everyday.
I learned that a lot of my assumptions were wrong and that in terms of responsibilty for this incident the pendulum`swung all the way from his side in my mind way over to my side...though not 100% of the way.
I've learned a lot in this thread and I have a lot more to learn. Many thanks to all who replied.0 -
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