JANUARY 11, 2024 – Each day brought memorable encounters with the people of Buffalo. Going door-to-door, you meet all kinds of people—happy, sad, smart, dumb, kind, mean, guileful, guileless, short-tempered, tall-tale-tellers, people mad at the world and folks at whom the world is mad—and once you’re invited to cross the threshold, you see all kinds of things—neatness, filthiness, chaos, orderliness, things ugly, things beautiful, and plenty of cats, dogs, and parakeets.
We’d been trained to deal with dogs. One presenter during the “week of free training” in Nashville filled an entire hour demonstrating how to stare down a hound and otherwise defend ourselves from aggressive canines.
“Suppose as you walk up to a house, a German shepherd suddenly appears from around the corner and runs full tilt toward you?” the Southwestern guy asked, expecting audience input. I could easily imagine the scene he described, but unless a climbable tree happened to be five feet away, I figured I’d be red meat.
Someone raised a hand and was promptly acknowledged. “Drop to the ground,” said the volunteer, “and curl up like a ball.”
“Anyone else?” asked the presenter, offering no reaction to the idea.
“Throw the book at ’em,” blurted out someone anonymously amidst a modest wave of laughter.
“Any serious ideas?” the trainer asked, ignoring what we were to understand had been a non-serious idea.
After waiting a few beats the trainer revealed his superior knowledge. “What you do is stand your ground, establish eye contact with the dog, and point straight at the dog’s snout.” As he spoke, he extended his arm straight ahead and down a bit with his index directed menacingly at an imaginary German shepherd running toward him. “Nine times out of 10,” he said, “no matter how vicious the dog, the shepherd or Rottweiler or what have you is going to stop in its tracks, turn away and leave you untouched.”
I’d never heard of this technique for fending against attack dogs, and I didn’t place much confidence in it. Fortunately, I was never pressed to test its efficacy. Another dog control method we’d learned, however, I deployed effectively. Application of the method required exactly the right circumstances, which arose early one afternoon.
The place was a small, rundown house surrounded by a dirt yard with no more than 15 blades of grass. A sidewalk ran straight back from the street to the front door of the home. Off to the right of the sidewalk was a mature oak to which a large bolt was anchored. Attached to the bolt was a long heavy chain, and at the end of the chain was a surly industrial gauge German shepherd. The length of the chain allowed the dog to patrol the sidewalk all the way to the front steps.
The solution to this exact problem was simple enough: I walked toward the dog but stopped just short of where his jaws could reach me. The dog then went into hysterics, barking and baring its fangs, made madder than ever by its restraints. I then walked sideways in a circle around the tree, at all times just beyond reach of the angry dog. A few revolutions in that fashion around the tree, and the dog had shortened his chain enough to allow me to reach the front steps and still preserve a margin of safety.
I didn’t have to knock. All the commotion had already brought the dog-owner to the doorway. He was rough in appearance–stocky with a large, grizzled head, dirty jeans and a soiled T-shirt not long enough to hide the hair on his belly, which was cantilevered over the top of the jeans.
“Howja get to the door?” the man asked.
“Friendly dog ya got there,” I said.
“Huh,” said the guy, perplexed by the dog’s tight proximity to the tree.
“What’s going on?” a woman called from farther inside the house.
“What do you want?” the man asked me.
“You have kids?” I asked, despite being pretty sure it didn’t matter.
“Not here.”
“I’m selling a medical encyclopedia,” I said, ditching altogether the pitch or the one-volume encyclopedia.
“No interest,” said the guy.
“That’s great,” I said, “so . . . the folks next door . . . Do they have kids?”
If I hadn’t come close to making a sale, I considered the encounter a victory. Thanks to my training I’d outsmarted one big bad security dog—and its owners.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
