well-heeled
Took the dog to the dog park this morning for the first time in a while. Went early because the first rule of taking the dog to the dog park successfully is taking her there when it is unlikely that other dogs will be present. (The purpose of the dog park, for this dog, is to sniff and run, not necessarily in that order.) When we arrived, though, there was a loose blue heeler slinking along the chainlink boundaries of the park, looking a little feral and joyless. There was no other human present, although a security guard had just gone into the nearby building. The lost dog was wearing a fairly nice looking harness and did not look undernourished, but it was not a security dog; it observed us from the safety of the fence, occasionally slinking along the perimeter to get a better look.
The plan for the morning – take the dog to the park, let her off leash to run around, perhaps play fetch for three minutes until we were both bored – was now a non-starter. I do not, generally, recalibrate the trajectory of my activities with any great nimbleness, and I could practically hear the seconds clunk away as the dog watched the heeler and the heeler watched the dog and I tried to watch them both at the same time, along with the fifty or so yards between them. I urged the dog away to sniff, and she did, and we moved slowly to the edge of the park. The lost heeler kept an eye on us, but followed the fence to the other end of the park, well away from the entrance. I urged to the dog out of the park and decided to take her to the other dog park a few streets away.
At the second dog park, another human–dog dyad were already wandering the field. So we stayed near the entrance to see if they would leave, which they showed no disposition to do. I turned around to check the entrance – and there was the lost heeler, which had followed us across a fairly busy street (at, admittedly, a not particularly busy time of day) to the second park. I told the dog to sit, and the dog sat – and so did the heeler. When I checked the heeler for tags or some sort of identification (regrettably absent), the dog of course took the opportunity to suggest that playing would be a suitable way of getting acquainted. We managed to disentangle ourselves, though, and head back to the first dog park, heeler following at a fairly respectful distance. 1
I let the dog head home, and the heeler went back to the park. Later that morning, it was playing with a larger group of dogs. It was gone by the time I passed by again on my way to the library.
- It was too early to call animal control, and as the lost dog posed no danger to anyone but itself, it seemed unkind to call the non-emergency police line.[↩]