A dog that did not deserve her fate.

When I first moved to town and began seeking out my weekly running routes, four dogs at a rundown house in the country were among the first animals I began to notice regularly. They were beautiful large dogs, bully mixed with lab. One had a graying muzzle and walked slowly, one was a gorgeous brown brindle, then there were two yellow dogs, one with a docked tail and the other with a fluffy one. They saw me coming long before I saw them, and they’d bark as I went by, running side to side inside their large fenced enclosure. Oh hot days, they’d barely even raise their heads from inside the holes they would dig beneath the trees to cool off in the dirt yard. But they always noticed me, and I always acknowledged them, happy to count all four of them and see the aging black dog running with the others.

After about a year, however, something changed. The yellow dog with the fluffy tail was no longer behind the fence when I’d run by. She was loose on the property, sometimes behind the ramshackle sheds that dotted the side yard, sometimes behind the vehicles parked out back, and occasionally in the fields surrounding the home. No matter where she was, she would always see me first, either alerted by the barking of the other dogs or using her own finely tuned canine senses. She would run purposefully around the house and down the short driveway, then turn at the mailbox to head toward me. At first she just barked and matched my pace on the other side of the road. But soon she became increasingly bold, crossing the yellow line in the middle of the road and charging at me, baring her teeth and giving a menacing look.

Her behavior became so unnerving that I would look for sticks and other junk en route to that section of my run so that I’d have something other than my foot to put between me and her. I definitely became afraid of her, but I tried to mask my fear, screaming and yelling, and telling her “No!” and “Go home!” I worried that she’d be injured or killed if she came charging out at the same moment a car was passing pass. As tiresome as her behavior was, she didn’t deserve that.

Her behavior became increasingly aggressive.

One day a car was coming. Inside was a resident of the road whom I’d chatted with on occasion about her own cats, dogs, and horses. She put her PT Cruiser between me and the dog that day to ease my passage. She told me that the dog was always in the road and frequently chased her husband’s work truck. A city worker that tended three steer on another nearby property reported the same thing. One day the dogs’ guardian was at the far end of the road and no doubt watched as his fluffy-tailed dog snapped and growled at me as I tried to run by. I watched him pull into the driveway from a safe distance, and he did nothing. And nothing I did really worked to curb her aggressive behavior, either, and it became progressively more deranged. I considered calling animal control, hoping they could go there and talk to the owner of the property—the dog’s guardian–about keeping her inside the fence once again where she’d be both safe from traffic and protected from interactions with pedestrians. Just before I made the call, however, I was called out of town and didn’t run that way for several weeks.

Last week I returned to that route, which is one of my favorites. There was no sign of the yellow dog with the fluffy tail, and the aging black dog was also gone. Soon afterward I saw the neighbors out, the ones with the PT Cruiser and the yellow dog’s favorite work truck. I asked them about the dog. Turned out she had bitten a young female pedestrian brutally in the leg a few weeks before and animal control had been called out. The owner of the property either could not or refused to keep the dog inside the fence. At the next report that she was loose, animal control came and took her away.

I have no doubt about what happened to her, and I’ll likely never know what happened to her aging canine pal. What I do know is that the owners of that property have blood on their hands, and it’s their fault – not the dog’s – that a girl was bitten and a dog was euthanized. This yellow dog was probably born a sweet puppy, filled with curiosity and a desire to belong to a family or a herd of doggie friends. What she got was training as a property defender, a miserable and hardscrabble life outdoors in a dirt yard, and a premature death that came as the result of careless disregard and willful neglect by the people she depended on for her care. Few “bad dogs” are born. They are all made through ignorance and ill training by derelict humans who have no business having companion animals in their care.

These four dogs made me feel vulnerable, yes. But inside their fence, where they at least had the freedom to run, dig, roam about, and play with each other, I could appreciate them for their individual barks, antics, and interactions with one another. I always hoped to see them looking okay and being together in the only home they knew. Now I run by and see just the remaining two dogs. They bark, and I hail them, wondering what they must be feeling since the disappearance of their two friends. I feel sad for them and upset about the situation.

Rest in peace, yellow dog with the fluffy tail. I wish I knew your name. I wish I knew your brother’s name, too. And I wish I could avenge your senseless death.

~nancy