Asshole Dog Owners

My wife and I once stayed overnight at a house with another couple--family members. We arrived a tad early to their house and no one was home. I could hear a dog raging in their back yard. Absolutely pure foaming-at-the-mouth raging. I encounter this from time to time in my job as a letter carrier. I'm kind of antsy and don't like to sit still, so I told Carole that I was going to walk up the driveway and have a look at the dog (it was behind a fence, so figured it would be fairly safe to just look).

The dog was there. A medium sized short-hair cur-dog of forty or fifty pounds, I'd say. Of no particular breed or type. It was the color of a maggot and had kind of a shrunken skull and a rat-like countenance. It was not a pretty beast.

The dog was in a froth of anger. At what? At me? At another dog that was nearby? I can't say. I assume that it's just a shit-crazy dog.

But sometimes I have learned that you can get some dogs like that to calm the Hell down by talking to them. So I did that, in a level voice that I hoped was soothing. It did no good. Instead, the dog seemed even more upset than before, almost going into a shaking bout of pure bloody fury. My wife came halfway up the drive and saw this monster and asked me to get away from it. She was not so foolhardy as I was.

So I left the creepy animal and retreated to our vehicle.

After a while our hosts appeared and we unloaded our luggage and were shown our bedroom. All seemed okay. We went out, had dinner, and returned to the house. We were shown around again...and then it was decided that they would see what would happen if they let this withering creep of a dog into the house. That is, they wanted to see how it would react to us. Their little drooling, chomping baby.

We were in a kind of activity room on the lower floor of the house. A sliding door was opened and the horrible animal came in. It did not come barreling at us, jaws ablaze, but it definitely did not like us. It growled and snapped. Instead of disciplining the vile thing, the owners comforted it and petted it and made it feel that its display of aggression was the right choice.

I realized that we were at the mercy of this mucking hound and its two clueless owners.

My first thought was to be honest and just leave the house. But this was family who I hadn't seen in some time, so I bit my tongue and took my chances. We weren't attacked, but I consider that just blind luck and my own caution.

It takes a special kind of asshole to put two human guests through something like that over an obviously vicious, inbred, mentally retarded canine. I've never forgotten it.

"Welcome!"