Animal Encounters-Pit Bull

I've spent a lot of time in rural southern Wisconsin lately because because as of early last summer my 83 year old aunt has the responsibility for maintaining two farms.  Think of your lawn and multiply it by over 500 acres.  Believe me, nature wants to take back those 500 plus acres, and it's been waging a relentless and effective war to do so. 

It's a different world in that section of Wisconsin.  One of the sheriff's deputies called the township my aunt lives in "the wild west".  My aunt's farm is near several areas of public land where hunting is allowed.  Hunting coyotes is apparently allowed year-round.  People come out from nearby cities to hunt, or in a lot of cases to get drunk and fire off their guns a lot. 

Too many city people also think they can dump their unwanted pets up there.  Sorry.  My aunt already has more than enough cats.  She got behind on the neutering while her husband was dying and there are now 10 adult cats, 6 almost grown kittens, and 10 nearly newborn kittens on the farm where she is living.  I'm not sure what we're going to do about that.  Neutering all of them would cost thousands but I don't know of any other humane choice.  Of course that only solves the problem until someone else dumps a pregnant mother cat at the end of my aunt's driveway.

Speaking of animals, I had something very strange happen to me up there last fall.  On Labor Day weekend I was heading from one of my aunt's farms to the other when I saw a dog--a pit-bull terrier to be specific--standing by the road.  It had a collar on and didn't seem afraid of cars.  It actually chased my car.  I stopped and rolled down the window to see if I could read the tag on the collar.  The dog came up and was obviously friendly, licking my hand and wagging the back third of its body as I tried to read the tag through the open window.  Then I made a mistake.  I said something like "You look lke you want to come right in to my car."  As soon as I said the word 'in', the dog jumped into my car through the driver's side window.  So I ended up sitting in my car with a strange pit bull in my lap. 

Fortunately, it really was a friendly pit bull--probably full-grown but with a lot of puppy still in him.  Unfortunately, the dog wanted to play with his new-found friend, and his idea of play was a tad bit rough.  I decided to drive over to a nearby country store to find out if anyone knew who the dog belonged to.  I ended up driving with one hand and trying to keep the dog from nibbling on my ears with the other.  I would have probably made America's Funniest Pets if anyone had been taping all of this. 

This wasn't that big of a dog.  At one point it got in the back seat and started licking the back of my neck.  I was afraid it might start play-biting, so I grabbed it by the collar and lifted it back into the front seat with one hand.  That probably means that it didn't weigh more than 40 pounds.  It was strong though, all jaws and shoulders.  It also loved to play rough.  When I lifted it over the seat it came down a little harder than I intended for it to.  It paused for just a second as if the wind was knocked out of it, then got up and made it obvious that it thought that was cool and it wanted to do it again.

At any rate, this being Labor Day the vet's phone number on the tag didn't help much because the vet was closed and the backup number didn't answer the phone.  Fortunately I did get the dog back to its owner after about two hours of misadventures.  I didn't notice it until the next day, but the dog's play-fighting left two bruises on my arm.  The owner said that his stepson and some friends went up to the state land near my aunt's house, apparently got roaring drunk and forgot the dog.  I'm not sure getting the dog back to that situation was the best outcome, but hopefully the stepson learned a lesson from the experience.

Shameless Self-Promotion section: If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy looking at my chapter in the First Chapters competition here on gather.com.  It's a very different style than this, but if you enjoyed this you'll probably enjoy the chapter.  It's at:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976924766