Tom, you're a good man!
Right-now, I am off from riding for a few days. My wife is s sucker for lost dogs. She has an iPhone app which alerts her when a dog is missing. This Sunday, before Labor Day, I was coming from her father's home in Miami, he's in his 90's & is becoming more-frail. I was in another vehicle ahead of them, when I saw a little white dog in the middle of 5 lanes of traffic, cars whizzing by. I stopped because I knew when my wife came-along, she would, and I didn't want her going into the road after the dog and maybe getting hit. So, I chased the dog to the side of the road. Sure-enough, here comes my wife, she stops, and opens her door to get out, and the dog runs over and jumps onto her lap!
Now, if this dog was rabid or vicious, he could literally kill my father-in-law, so I ran over to my wife (w/my truck) & told her I was gonna remove the dog. I tried to grab his substantial leather collar, being careful to come-up his back from behind him, and I got-ahold of his collar.
Damned if that little mutt didn't have a neck like a swan, he whipped-around and sank his teeth into my right hand and wouldn't let go! I yanked him out of my wife's car, still embedded onto my hand like a family of ticks at a nudist colony! I was streaming blood down my hand and forearm, and slammed him onto my bedcover, and twisted the collar to choke him-off. He finally let-go, and was wailing like a bum who lost a winning lottery ticket and broke his quart of cheap whisky.
I secured him in my truck & took him home, but I had to wait to leave until I clotted. When I got home, damned if he didn't do the same thing to my other hand! And this time I thought I was ready for him, just like Butch and The Kid in Bolivia. Nope! I stuck him in the garage bathroom.
We found an ad on CL where someone two blocks from where we were when we found the dog, lost their furry, lovable, gentle (doesn't bite) dog, w/pictures of the Puncture Monster Who Preys on Unsuspecting Good Samaritans. Stupid people didn't even include a phone # so we had to email back & forth to finally be-able to speak to them, we used call-blocking. My wife asked, "we think we found your dog, does he have his rabies shot?" They accurately i.d.'ed the mutt, and of-course, no-000, the mutt doesn't have any rabies shot!
By now my hand is swollen pretty-good, throbbing, aching, and when I look into the mirror my canines look to be more prominent, I'm starting to salivate quite a bit nore, and suddenly I am interested in sniffing butts-mine, my wife's, anyone's...
Yeah, I went to an urgent care center, got my wounds Betadined, wrapped and examined by the cute female Jamaican MD, a University of Miami undergraduate (the urgent care center is across US-1 from the U-Miami campus), and am back home when we are doing the search for the owners. We took the Puncture Monster to a vet and found no microchip, and the vet said he couldn't vaccinate the dog after it bit someone, that the dog is required to go into quarintine for 10 days to see if it dies, if it does, they crack the skull and look for rabies signs, which means euthanasia. The vet said it's a $150 civil fine for no rabies vaccine; neutering/spaying, other shots, would cost a total of about $600 to get the dog back. The owners sure don't appear to have the $$, so my wife and I are sitting on this "lovable, does-not bite, friendly" dog for the next week to see if I have rabies treatment in my future.
As my fire-rescue shift captain says, no good deed goes unpunished.
P.S.: the dog is affectionate and not agressive and even is OK around the Bathroom of Incarceration, and shows no signs of becoming insane with rabies, but the next 5 days will thell the truth of that. Then we are going to give that mutt back to the people. If I was a sum-bitch, Animal Control would have come to get the Puncture Monster at my request, and since the people couldn't afford to pay the treatments and civil penalty, the dog would be gassed. After that they would cut off the head and examine for rabies.
And, when I went back to work at the college, during the a.m. commute, a student who didn't want to wait behind me for the traffic light, shot across the intersection, lost-control, and creamed my GMC's rear bumper!:bang head::bang head:
