I Saved Someone's Life Yesterday

Yesterday June 20th was a very traumatic day for me.

I saved someone’s life.

That someone is named Toby.

Toby is my neighbor’s cow dog that is forced to live in the backyard on a cable all the time.

I feel sorry for Toby and give him a dog biscuit when I walk by him on my way down the alley when I take out the trash. Toby likes me.

Yesterday at 3:20 PM while I was in my living room just across the alley from Toby, I heard a hellacious dog fight, at least I figured that must be what was going on outside.

I grabbed the closest thing by me that looked like a weapon, my trusty remote pincer claw, manual ‘robot arm’, and ran out the front door.

What I saw was a Gang of Four dogs, at least two of them large male pit bulls, fighting Toby THROUGH a hole in the fence. 

I immediately started running and yelling at the dogs but they didn’t seem to notice me until I was right on top of them swinging the robot arm. In the less than two seconds it took for me to get to them they had yanked Toby by the neck  completely through the hole in the fence but the cable prevented them from pulling him any farther. 

I inherited my father’s ability to get really loud, really ferocious, really fast when the situation dictates. The Gang of Four didn’t hang around any time at all but headed west running down the alley.

I called the police and they contacted animal control. Toby sat up shaking and quivering while barking at me lightly in a confused manner. I started yelling for the owner to come outside, not wanting to leave Toby alone. No one seemed to hear me. The owner’s wife finally appeared inside the backyard in a couple minutes and Toby shot back through the hole in the fence momentarily tangling himself up with the cable. She took him inside and then on to the vet.

I put my dogs into our backyard and decided to try to stay up with the Gang of Four in order to guide animal control to them. I caught up with them in my car about a block away and when they left that front lawn and headed back to the alley I headed on west to see if they were going on that way. 

Sure enough, they all came towards the west end of the alley and suddenly a couple Husky dogs inside their fence started barking at them. One of the mean ass pit bull males was surveying the situation quietly and one of the Huskies appeared to be fixing to come over the fence! I yelled at the dogs and the gang decided to head back east. 

About 15 seconds later the owner of the huskies appeared in just a pair of black shorts. I told him briefly what had happened and he asked me, “Do you want me to shoot ‘em?” I told him no, that animal control and the police were coming. He repeated, “I’d be glad to shoot ‘em for ya’.”

About a minute later animal control pulled right up behind me and stopped, as I had let the police know where the dogs had moved to.

I told the animal control officer where they had headed and he took off after them.

I never saw any police.

I checked on Toby about an hour later and the vet found and cleaned up wounds on his face and neck. She thanked me for helping her dog.

I had called my wife to let her know about the situation. When she came home about three hours later she thought she saw two of the dogs about 3 blocks west of our house near the hair salon on Union Street. 

So I spent about another hour driving around asking several people, who were out and about, if they had seen these dogs, but no one had seen them.

Today I called animal control and discovered that they had captured NONE of the dogs. They told me the dogs had headed down into the canyons, which are outside the city limits.

I thought to myself, if they had attacked a child, they would have been shot, ... right?