Sunday, January 16, 2011

Adventures at the Dog Park. Or Rather, Ragnar Getting his Ass Kicked

Today we went to the park.

We took all of the children, both human and canine.

It was a first for us.   We have never been to the dog park before.  I didn't know what to expect.

It was a beautiful day and the park was packed.  Because Chris still felt like a chewed up and crapped out piece of offal from his nose surgery earlier this week (a topic of which I will surely discuss at a future time),  he watched Maggie as she surfed the playground equipment available to her.

I took Ragnar to the pen.

Ragnar was very much the most puppy-ish of all the dogs there.  I took off his leash and he gazed at me with a look of delight before he dashed off to join the others.

Being a newbie, I made a couple mistakes today when I  visited the dog park.

Mistake number one:  I wore a white sweater.

I had no way of knowing that the entire enclosed area was dirt and sand.  And there were spickets placed strategically around the play area with buckets underneath to catch the water so the dogs could swap spit to quench their thirst.   The immediate areas surrounding the buckets were, predictably, mud.

Which leads me to...

Mistake number two:  I brought treats.

Ragnar doesn't listen to me very often unless I have a bacon flavored item in my hand.  Sort of like my husband.  So I thought it would be wise of me to bring the value size bag of bacon treats along to the dog park.   When I thought that  Ragnar wasn't listening to me, I called to him with a treat in my hand.

No less than seven large dogs came bounding towards me and jumped on me, smearing mud all over my sweater.

I smiled and chuckled, petting the least offensive dog.   I  tried to appear good natured and not bitchy.

Since I didn't know anyone, I didn't want them to let them in on the fact that I am actually a royal bitch.   Only my husband and kids are privy to that little factoid about me.

We had been there for about five minutes and Ragnar had been having a fine time, when suddenly he was t-boned from the side and tackled by a bullish female named Kaia.   She was an alpha female and identified Ragnar as a gerbil-ish, weak little wiener who needed to be taken out and eaten alive.

Ragnar was passively trying to right himself, but she had him down in the dirt and he looked pretty helpless.  In the meantime, several other dogs had noticed the scuffle and had jumped in.  Of course, there was a scrappy little Jack Russell,  a Doberman, a mutt and a Daschund joining in on the whupping.

Kaia was obviously in charge and the others were her minions.  It wasn't wholly unlike millions of junior high lunchrooms across America...there were mean girls even in the dog world.  And the dog park was their lunchroom.

The owners were scrambling to pull their dogs off of Ragnar, and Ragnar was doing a belly crawl under the nearest picnic table to hide from the mean kids.

This scenario occurred again at least twice, so Ragnar and I left soon thereafter.

I took Ragnar and we sat on a bench.  We watched Maggie slide down the playground equipment with the large penis drawn on it by some joker with a Sharpie.  Luckily, she is too young to recognize vulgarity when she sees it.

We left when we felt we had sufficiently tired them all out.

What we did, however,  was brought on the melt-downs on an entire hour early.  A whole HOUR before we could even consider putting them to bed.  

So we screwed ourselves  big time.  

At least one of them is quiet.  









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