Most of the crazy people at the dog park are at least relatively harmless. Some of them dress eccentrically, or are dangerously obese, and may even be somewhat negligent dog owners, but they are still essentially benign personalities. There is one guy, however, who is anything but.
I do not know his name, but he was one of the first awful people I ever encountered at the dog park. Rosie was just a year old, and I had her for no more than a month, when I brought her to the dog park one day. She was running around and generally having a ball, until this guy's un-neutered Miniature Pinscher, Reese, developed a fixation on her and started humping her. I am not extremely stuck-up about dogs humping when they are neutered, as it is just another way for them to express dominance—something that dogs absolutely need to do, but Reese was completely obsessed with Rosie. No matter how many times she tried to knock him off, or I pulled him off (and he tried to bite me while I did this, by the way) he kept coming back to hump her.
I asked someone if they knew whose dog this was, and they pointed to a short, balding, overly-tan, bulked-up juicehead who was talking on his cellphone. I tried to get his attention, but he continued to ignore me, so I finally took Rosie out of the park. This MinPin was so obsessed with her that he jumped the fence over to the big side to follow her, and then finally jumped out of the park altogether to keep humping her. Then, and only then, did he finally take notice and come out of the run to grab his dog.
I'd like to say that this was the end of my encounters with Reese and his awful owner, but alas. At least Reese stopped being fixated on Rosie, for whatever reason, but he was still clearly a problem, humping lots of other dogs, becoming obsessed, and his owner was paying no attention whatsoever. It seemed clear to me from the over-muscleization and yellowing eyes that his guy was a steroid abuser, but I also started to hear from fellow dog park patrons that they'd seen him lolling about on benches, as if stoned on heroin.
One day last winter, I went to the dog park with my friend Peter. Reese was there, and he started to fixate on a sweet dog I know named Peanut. Peanut's owner started to get more and more frustrated, and the Juicehead continued to make only minimal shows of interest in dealing with the situation, until it finally turned into an argument with Peanut's owner beginning to cry. When she finally asked him to leave, the Juicehead told her that he had arrived here first, so he didn't have to leave. Peanut's owner began to pull Reese off her dog yet again, while crying, to which the Juicehead yelled, "He's going to bite you. I hope he bites you."
This got Peter's goat up, and he yelled at the Juicehead that he can't threaten someone like that. The Juicehead looked visibly upset that someone else had gotten involved and not taken his side. Peanut's owner left, in tears, with Peanut, and quiet seemed to return to the dog park. After no more than five minutes of silence, the Juicehead suddenly got up off his perch and marched determinedly across the park to directly where we were standing.
"My dog wasn't messing with your dog, right?" he asked pointedly.
"Right, but that's not really the point," I argued.
"My dog wasn't messing with your dog, so we don't have a problem, right?"
This went on for a little while. I didn't think at the time that he was going to actually physically fight with us, but I also felt like there wasn't much point in having any kind of argument with this guy, so I eventually just acknowledged that we didn't have a problem, and he marched back across the park to his seat. We stood there for a second and Peter astutely observed, "that guy just did to us what his dog does to other dogs."
A month later, I heard that the Juicehead initiated a physical altercation with someone in the dog park, whose dog Reese had been obsessively humping again, and had shoved the guy against the fence, causing his back to bleed, and fled when the cops were called. I still see him in the run sometimes, and I feel conflicted. On the one hand, I look at him and think to myself, "I should avoid any kind of confrontation with him because I know what he might do," and on the other I want it to happen so I can call the cops on him again. He seems to have an equally unappealing girlfriend these days, and he also looks slightly deflated, muscles-wise, so maybe things have calmed down for him, although I heard some extreme hearsay (I heard from someone who heard from someone, &c.) that he was seen shooting up inside the park, so you never know.
No comments:
Post a Comment