A joyful pup and its mistress once passed me on their walk in the park. The joy in the puppy’s half step half hop was quite evident. To it, every moving blade of grass was an investigative Sherlock Holmes mystery to be unraveled.

The high pitched yip yip yip repeated stops you in your tracks and like everyone else in the park, you turn to see what has happened to the joyful puppy. But your turn isn’t quite finished before you hear the deeper growl of another dog. Instinctively, you wish the puppy well and hope that the situation can be brought under control. You might even move towards the fracas in an effort to help calm the situation down.

There are lots of reasons for bad dog behavior. Some of them logical and some well, not quite as obvious. The dog misbehaving may be a dog that has been ill treated, or it might have a long standing chronic problem like a very bad tooth ache or head ache that it keeps under control until something unleashes it. Or the problem could be partially hereditary as in certain types of dogs being more prone to behavioral problems.

My neighbor tells the story of his dog which is actually half dog and half Northern wolf.

A little less than a year prior, he had chained his big wolf puppy to the tail gate of his chevy pickup. He had then gone inside for lunch while the puppy played outside. He says he wasn’t inside more than about 15 minutes before a deep snarl and a shout caused him to run to the front door.

A Pit Bull Terrier had torn itself loose from its owner and was running full speed at his tied dog. His dog went suddenly silent and ears perked alert as it appeared to test the length on its leash. It backed up quickly towards the car and half sat and waited the second and a half for the pit bull to cross the 40 feet between them.

In less than a blink the Pit Bull was high in the air and reaching for his puppy’s jugular. However, his puppy was no longer there at all. Launching itself a split second earlier it was also in the air and much higher than the pit Bull. The pit Bull attempted to twist before it even hit the ground, but the wolf puppy was faster yet and by then had a grip on the throat of the pit Bull.

The half puppy did a very adult thing. With astonishing strength it growled and thew the pit bull about 6 feet away.

What happened next is the stuff of legends. The furious pitbull twisted before it hit the ground. Some say that it never touched the ground before it was instantly airborne again. But the story was different this time. The wolf puppy didn’t wait this time. It timed the rush perfectly and met the pit Bull almost at the end of its own leash. In a moment it was over. The big puppy snapped the neck of the pitBull and it was over.

No one knew how long this had all taken. It seemed to simultaneously happen so fast and then suddenly slow down as if time had been holding its breath. My neighbors big puppy, backed to the beginning of its leash and sat itself down gently, almost as if, all in a days work.

I don’t wish any animal ill, but we were later told that that pit bull was already under probation for having attacked a child the year before. In Ontario, a dog can be put down for that behavior but apparently this happened weeks before some law was passed and the witnesses had differing stories so the pit bull was in its owners care while the case was being decided.

I guess, the wheels of justice move slowly and that sometimes the animal kingdom simply takes things into its own. Afterward, everyone was very certain that the puppy would have stood no chance under the fierce onslaught of the pit Bull, but nature thought differently.

The story of the overly aggressive Dog and the half wolf puppy. Discover also how to go about training aggressive an dog. Also published at Training Aggressive Pitbulls.

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