My dog is an asshole

…but we love him anyways. 

Obi’s not always an asshole. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, he really is THE BEST DOG. The issue is, he can very protective (which is a euphemism for aggressive, I suppose) about certain things. Those things are me, and food. 

When I’m walking him, if certain dogs get near, he goes ballistic. Like, Kujo-level. I have to do regular strength training to be able to hold him back. We’re working on this, and he’s much better after training and the “Leave it” command, thankfully. 

At bedtime, he’ll cuddle next to me and is so sweet and, well, cuddly. But when anyone else even gets near the bed– kids, cats, husband– he growls. Yes, I yell at him and make him get off the bed and onto the floor. But it’s been the same for years. Cesar Milan would NOT be proud. 

Then there’s the food thing. Very unfortunately this has resulted in injuries to others… We have friends whose lovely black labrador has a permanent scar on his nose because of a fight over a bone, in their backyard. When that happened, Hubby dragged Obi-Kujo to the car and home, and we haven’t risked getting them together since. 

More recently, and I couldn’t bring myself to write about this at the time, there was an incident involving a child. It was a family barbecue with no other dogs, but there were kids from the neighborhood. Said kids were sitting in a close-knit group on the ground, eating pizza and chicken tenders. Obi was begging, and everyone was moving around and laughing and eating, and someone waved a tender in the air for him – and then all of a sudden there was a bark and a scream. 

We still don’t know exactly what happened, but whatever it was, it resulted in a little girl with a bleeding face. I heard the bark and knew it was Obi’s “THAT’S MINE” bark, so I ran over and grabbed him by the harness and pulled him away, scolding. Then I noticed that it was suddenly really quiet, because there was a little girl holding her face and rocking back and forth. 

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Are you okay? Let me see–” 

She held her hands away so I could see– she was bleeding, either from her nose or from her top lip. My breath stopped, and it took just a few seconds fore my brain to work through next steps: 

If he’s bit her nose or her lip, that could cause permanent, disfiguring damage. What if it’s her nares, or if the vermillion border is involved? That’s a plastic surgery consult and we’ll need someone really good. We’ll have to rush her to a hospital– it’ll have to be downtown, probably Children’s is the best choice. We’ll have to call the parents to check insurance. The police and animal control will be called. We’ll need Obi’s rabies status. There’s a risk they’ll call for euthanasia. I’ll have to prepare the kids.

All of this ran through my head as several of us helped the girl up and into the house, to the sink. There were two doctors – me and my brother. We wiped her face and shone our iPhone flashlights to her face, searching for the source of the bleeding. I felt sick sick sick. 

But we couldn’t find anything, no lacerations anyways. It seemed like her nose was bleeding, almost like she’d been punched. I kept asking her what happened and promising that we would help take care of what ever injury there was and she kept saying “I don’t know, I don’t know” until my brother, the calm one, shooed me away. “I got this,” he promised. 

It was decided that she’d been head-butted in the nose by my lunging dog. She must have leaned forward at the same instant as Obi was going in for that tender. My brother called the girls’ mom to very rationally explain that she had a bloody nose apparently from an unfortunate incident involving a Husky forehead and bad timing, and I kept saying, “Tell her I’m sorry, Tell her I am SO SORRY” and he kept waving me away like a buzzy fly. 

Meantime we got the poor girl some ice and she hid out in the bathroom until her mom walked over. I fully expected to be scolded for my asshole dog, but the mom, obviously Irish in every way, brushed off the whole thing. “She’ll be fine, these things happen, kids are resilient.” And they left. 

Meanwhile my kids had dragged the dog to the car and locked him in until we got the injury situation sorted. Then we packed up and went home, and we’re watching Obi dog much more carefully from here on out. Maybe it was just an unfortunate head-butt, but it may also be that we got very, very lucky. 

This bums me out to write, because LOOK AT THIS FACE! This is the sweetest doggo. Most of the time. I think the lesson here is– dogs are dogs, and we can’t ever forget that…

Except that this dog thinks he’s a cat, alot of the time…