Sooooo...your dog makes friends with my dog...and before you know it, my house gets robbed...and my dog never barked.
I'm sooooo Columbo....
Blow your nose, have some chicken noodle soup and get over it.
Sigh. I think I am just stuck in an old world sometimes.
I guess you can’t take your dog to some field. Someone, somewhere will get pissed off for some reason. When I was a kid, I would take my dog to some football or baseball field and do all those chase and fetch games you do with them. Sometimes a dog would run out of the woods, sometimes with no owner, and most of the time, the dogs would just go at it with each other, having great time. I guess they knew each other, being free-range dogs and all.
I remember when it was normal to just open the door and let your dog out. We did it with all of our dogs and cats growing up, and we did have the instances of tearfully finding your pet on the side of the road.
Or, sometimes, it just never came home.
What was it about those times? How was it so different then? You knew that your dog crapping on someone’s lawn or digging up the flower bed was on you, that it was inconsiderate, but...everyone did it. It was rare to have a dog that didn’t have the run of the neighborhood.
I used to love to play rough with dogs, and dogs loved it too.
When I was eight or nine, my best friend’s family had a collie named “McDuff”, and OMG, we would tear ass across the yard, and the the dog would leap at you from behind and take you down, growling fiercely as it held your sleeve, jacket, or dungaree leg in its teeth, shaking its head vigorously from side to side as it did so.
Another friend had a great big gray Weimaraner with huge, menacing green eyes and a big bump on top of its head, and we would tease the dog until it was almost mad with desire to catch us. We would balance and walk on the top of the fence at the back of the kid’s house, and the enraged dog would jump as high as it could, snapping its jaws shut with an loud, audible “snap”, but we were just out of reach.
The game was, one of us would tempt the dog away, and when it was far enough, there were one of two goals for the other kid in this “game”.
As soon as the dog was past a point chasing the kid on the fence, the other kid would jump over the fence and run hell for leather through the yard to climb over the fence on the other side, or, alternatively, jump into an open bathroom window.
When you dropped into the yard, the dog would immediately tear after you, and laughing hysterically, you would scramble over the other side. I only got caught once when I tried to jump in the bathroom window, and the dog got my trouser leg and worried it like the end of the world was in the balance, growling fiercely as it did so, and taking a bite at your leg in the process!
I could tell, in both cases, the dogs completely enjoyed this rough game and thought it was as close as they were going to get to being real hunting animals that could catch prey, but boy, did they ruin my clothing.
I would go home with my dungarees all in tatters with big holes ripped in the legs, and my mother would go ballistic! When she would demand to know what I had been doing to cause that damage, I would lamely lie about falling out of a tree or something like that.
I think if I ever told her we were intentionally allowing dogs to chew our clothes to pieces, she would have had a real cow!