Another In House Dog Altercation......

Been an interesting few days......

Right before I was going to get cleaned up for a retirement party for a buddy of mine that I worked with at both Hughes Aircraft and DirecTV, or dogs had another tiff, and this time there was blood drawn.

The circumstances leading up to The Latest Confrontation have happened before. Our dogs just go berserk when the mailman walks up puts the mail in the slot. We've learned to get the inside door closed when the mail is due, +/- 30 minutes, or have them both outside. We have one of the dog beds in a corner of the living room, near the front window. It's a somewhat small area, and when the mailman cometh, they both try to get up to the window to bark at him. Well, the area is small enough that with both dogs in there at the same time, there's not much maneuvering room, they both want to use the little step stool to look out the window, and doggie tempers flare. The big dog has snapped at the smaller one several times, and while she yelps and backs off, as far as we know, he's never really chomped on her.

This time was different, and the small dog went after the big dog. She took a chunk out of one of his ears, clamped down on his left foreleg hard enough to break the skin and cause quite a bit of swelling, and bit him in several other places hard enough to draw blood. He had her by the scruff of the neck, and he really showed restraint because as big and string as he is, he really could have hurt her.

She has some fur missing by her collar, and a couple of small bite marks, but no major damage compared to what she inflicted on him.

The whole battle lasted about 5 minutes, with my poor wife holding on the the big dog, while screaming for me to come help. I grabbed a large glass of water, and that broke them apart and stopped the fight for about 500 milliseconds. I lunged for her collar and missed, and she went right back at the big one, and off I was to the kitchen for more water.

This time I hit them both in the face with it, and was able to grab the little one's collar, and drag her outside.

We spent the next fifteen minutes cleaning up the mess, both on the floor, and on the big dog, and treating his wounds as best we could. We wiped him off with peroxide, applied some triple antibiotic ointment, and got him cleaned up and calmed down, and gave him three 81mG "baby" aspirin. The animal rescue guy we got both of them from says he thinks she's getting old enough to want to challenge his Alpha status, and the dog trainer we took them to a few months back had warned us of the same thing, and that young females were more likely to challenge the other dog.

SO.........we kept them apart most of yesterday, alternating them between the one wire frame kennel I brought back in the house, and the little one was confined to the kennel for sleep last night. I had a private shooting party to tutor at the range today, so I was gone in the afternoon, but kept in touch with my wife, who said they had "made up" and were being civil to each other.

As of this evening, Swisher's (the big dog) wounds appeared to be healing OK, the swelling on his left foreleg has gone way down, and he's pretty much stopped limping and favoring that leg.

At least my poor wife isn't suffering (shakes, nausea, cold sweat) like she was the time the neighbor's dog and Swisher got into a confrontation, and I joked with her about this being her second time in "combat", and that she was handling it better.

I bought two of the "soft" muzzles to put on them while we're out of the house tomorrow, so hopefully if they get aggressive at each other while we're gone, they won't be able to do any damage to each other......