Labour Day bike ride with my College friend. In Buffalo, people commonly ride over this set of bridges to a place called Grand Island. It's all super quiet residential and a loop of the island is about 25 miles. Sometimes the wind is brutal becasue it's so flat and yesterday it was. It doesn't bother me too much but it did slow us down a lot on the second half of the loop. Aside from the wind, the weather was very nice. I really like riding my bike for more than a simple commute, I need to get out and do it more. Later that day we went got a nice 5 mile walk around the park. Sadie and Ralphie are pretty well-behaved and socialized dogs so we feel pretty confident that they will behave themselves on walks but they are vocal about wanting to play with other dogs which makes them look a little nutter. There was a little rat terrier thing and the guy asked if our dogs were nice. I was like sure and he brings it over and it goes ballistic and snappy and crazy. It was like WOW, moving on. So this put Ralphie into overdrive. He is always super quiet but once he feels that he or us are threatened he goes into super guard puppy mode and will try to chase away the offender. He does it at the dog park sometimes when his space is being invaded and once the dog move away he settles down. It's defensive and never aggressive. But that little terrier was not socialized and looked like it would bite so we moved on. The rest of the walk was nice and it was a nice fall day to stroll around. The park was packed with people celebrating the last day of summer. On the way home we stopped for ice cream and got them puppy cones. A dog eating ice cream is probably the cutest this ever. Video Evidence. They were pooped and slept the rest of the day.
It drives me crazy that people routinely accept that little dogs can be aggressive toward people and other dogs becasue they are small and "can't" do damage. If a large dog acts the same way, it's dangerous and it shouldn't be any different. My dogs are 40 and 70 lbs and if they acted even partly like this terrier I'd have to destroy them. I see it all the time, little terriers and other small breeds are downright dangerous due to improper socialization and training.
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