if it's required by law, i ask the owner to leash their dog. usually, they comply.

if i'm out on public lands where there are lots of dogs off lead, i choose out of the way trails and low-use times of day. i pay attention to what is up ahead, and even if my dog is off leash, he is always BEHIND me so that i can see what's ahead before he does and be prepared.

if i see a dog with a dominant posture up ahead, i'll leash my dog and take a detour to avoid the encounter.

if i see a friendly looking dog, i'll put my dog in a sit-stay and approach the owner and the dog to assess its friendliness. if its a friendly dog, i.e. a female or a small male (my dog gets into dominance problems with other large males), i will let them play together as a reward for his sit-stay. (this is a great way to get a solid sit-stay, btw, if your dog loves to play with other dogs.)

if a dog approaches without an owner, i don't care if it looks friendly or not. i put my dog in a sit-stay, put myself in front of him, and ROAR at the at-large dog to GO HOME!

i can be very intimidating and overpowering to a dog when i want to be. they always turn tail and leave! (well, except once in the case of a wolf-dog that scared the carp out of me).

usually the owner is somewhere back there, and the dog runs to its owner. when the owner sees the size of my dog, they usually leash right up! <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

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i can be very intimidating and overpowering to a dog when i want to be. they always turn tail and leave! (well, except once in the case of a wolf-dog that scared the carp out of me).

Alice, now you have to tell us what happened w/the wolf-dog experience??

Yes, do dish on the wolf-dog incident. I admit, that would've scared the carp out of me too <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

i was xc skiing with my dog on the national forest in an area that is getting increasingly heavily used by dog walkers (it is getting more and more difficlt to avoid them every year).

this woman jogger goes running past with a small herd of dogs, one of them a wolf-dog. all her dogs keep on after her except for the wolf-dog, who very clearly has it in for my dog. (reading body language).

i stop, put my dog in a sit stay behind me, raise both my ski poles in the air at the aggressor, and order him to GO HOME!

he wouldn't budge! he just stood there, looking at ben, getting himself good and ready to charge. i stepped in front of him and again ordered him to GO HOME! he looked unsure, would not make eye contact with me, but held his ground.

his stupid, irresponsible owner had just kept on running. i could see her through the trees, heading down the mountain trail. i screamed after her, come get your dog!!!

she actually had the nerve to curse me out and yell at me to neuter my dog, as if the fact that my dog is intact was the entirety of the problem (it probably is the reason the wolf-dog saw ben as an irresistable challenge, but so what? she left her dog behind to attack mine!)

ben, thankfully, was staying calm and ignoring the other dog, keeping his sit-stay, as he's been taught. i was careful to keep my stance threatening and my voice calm, and not strike out at the wolf-dog. i wanted to convince him i was not to be trifled with, but i didn't want to induce an attack i might be able to avert.

finally, his owner started calling him. she was out of sight, but within voice range. the wolf-dog very reluctantly, very slowly started to move off to follow his owner. i kept repeating GO HOME! the damn wolf-dog kept stopping and coming back, only to move off again when his owner called.

i waited a good long time after he was out of sight, hoping he and his owner would have left the parking lot by the time we reached it. despite that, she was still there! and the wolf-dog was running around loose in the parking lot while she brushed out one of her other dogs! luckily my car was far enough away i was able to get ben inside before he noticed we were there. she knows a giant intact male is coming down the trail behind her, yet she leaves this dog out running around until we get there?

people are so effing STUPID! <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

Yep, that was a very dangerous situation Alice, and you probably handled it well. The nerve of that woman to curse you out for having an intact dog! I've had that excuse too from the owners of the AmBulldog who attacked Zeus, as if that justified it, which it doesn't. The craziness is that if the reverse were to happen, my dog going after another w/out provocation, my using that excuse would no doubt be ignored. As well it should.

Yeesh, the audacity of many of our citizens today astonishes me I guess. Judging by the experiences of others in various threads with a similar theme, even the classic "boondocks" locale is subject to off lead, roaming and often aggressive dogs. Yet the dogs who get the BSL attention are mostly the breeds who're kept chained up and react badly to some little kid, not the dogs you don't "expect' to be troublesome, like roaming Labs, or like my experience the other day, a mix of Aussie Shepherd & Border Collie. It was one of those "what the...." moments when that dog went bonkers as soon as he got a whiff of my dog's clackers. Which did not give him the "right" to go into attack mode.

My mom noted to me that certain people like to own very anti-social dogs who appear to be 'tough' and who get into fights because it gives them a 'rise' so to speak. The dog is like an extension of the ego of the owner. And I don't mean young urban thugs either. I mean guys who look like Grandpa Jones, driving a new decked out Jeep. And some woman jogging thru a national forest, mainly deserted I'm sure, with her pack of dogs...who'd a thunk that this woman would be such a nasty pill and have such a nasty aggressive dog. It's positively a case of cognitive dissonance.

If "clueless, stupid, jogger" was observant enough to notice your dog was intact, how did she miss the fact that she had "lost" one of her pack. Honestly, maybe we should just mace/pepper-spray/stun-gun these moronic owners.

Don't be scared of my dog, be scared of me...

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My mom noted to me that certain people like to own very anti-social dogs who appear to be 'tough' and who get into fights because it gives them a 'rise' so to speak. The dog is like an extension of the ego of the owner.

my dog sitter and i were talking about this after my incident, and she has the same theory as your mom. she says she thinks the psychology of why people let their dogs roam off leash is because they themselves feel so chained up and limited in their own lives, they make the dog a surrogate who gets to experience the freedom they themselves don't have. also explains why so many of these people are hostile and angry when you make a reasonable request that they leash their animals.

i was very scared that that wolf-dog was going to attack. and ski poles would not have helped me out much. unbelievably, the owner glared at me as i drove out of the parking lot. it's hard to imagine what someone like that is thinking.

of course, owning a part-wolf is already indicative of someone who is missing a significant portion of common sense, at the very least.

i think what everyone should take away from this is the reassurance that when you do step up to the plate and take a leadership role, even a dog with dominance aggression will be calm and let you handle it. i can tell you my boy would not have stayed calm if i hadn't taken control. it would have been one very, very ugly scene.

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of course, owning a part-wolf is already indicative of someone who is missing a significant portion of common sense, at the very least.

.. an *off-leash* part-wolf, at that. <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />

I think I would have ran up with the ski poles and beat the crap out of the dog, then quickly got on the cell and call out the cops. And if lady got pissed, same thing for her! <img src="http://www.leerburg.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Ah well, she probably got her dog destroyed or fallen into a lawsuit as I'm sure the dog attacked somebody or some dog by now. If not, then definitely soon.

Clueless dog owners in public = "Danger, danger, danger!" RIP Steve Irwin, but generally I look at any dog owner as dangerous. I've read enough horror stories on here and had enough charges from loose dogs with owners who couldn't care less to learn that the next time I see a dog and owner, I'm readying for a fight. If the person says the dog is friendly while the dog is straining on the leash (or rushing away because it's not leashed), that's my cue to get ready to rock! Not that I enjoy it, but the way I see it, I either get ready to kill or deal with a dog attack on myself or the dog I am with and in turn the dog lives the rest of its life in fear of every other dog and loses faith in me as a leader that can protect it from threats.

Amen sister!