Dog Tales

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Meet Spike

We have a one-year-old golden labrador. Last week he excelled himself in his eating habits. Our kids had a water fight with friends, and forgot to put the toys away. So when we next came outside, we found Spike had:

punctured the watering can
demolished a giant water pistol (squirt gun), chewing the handle to pieces
eaten a surfboard. Great big hunks of orange foam were strewn across the lawn, with a third of the board missing, and the rest in bite-sized chunks.

So we thought we'd learnt not to leave stuff outside. But the next day was very windy, and I came home to find my placemats had blown off the top deck, onto the lawn, and were lying shredded on the lawn.

Of course there are the usual holes in the garden, as Spike tries to dig his way under the fence on his way to the labrador next door, worthy of the Great Escape. Paul Newman would be proud.

from Chris

Revenge is Sweet

The mate and I were sitting in my ute at the biggest set of traffic lights in Townsville one Saturday morning. We were five vehicles back in one of six lanes; two left, three straight through and one left. At our level there were about 25 vehicles waiting for the lights to change. I saw the mate looking hard ahead of us when he said, "Aint that Frank first up in this lane?" I put my head out the window for a better look. Sure enough, it was Frank, in his battered old Land Rover with six of his Stag x Arab x Boxer x Wolfhound x Cattle x anything else he thought might improve the "line", and as usual, all unrestrained in the back of the old Rover.

"Wanna have a bit a fun?" said the mate? Now the mate has a terrible sense of humour and it invariably gets him (and me through association) into all sorts of trouble. With that he stuck his head out the window of the ute and gave out a squeal like an old sow with a dog hangin’ off each ear. Now the mate can take off a pig squeal to perfection and those dogs went from a slobbering mixture of ill bred mongrels into a frenzied hunting pack.

They took off in every direction. The owner of the B.M.W. that had one each trying to scratch their way through the windows wasn’t at all impressed. Neither was the Fairlane driver who had one come through the passenger window and into the back seat, scattering groceries everywhere. One was up on the bonnet of a near new Camry barking at the driver through the heavily tinted screen. It could see movement but didn’t know what it was. He was soon joined by another two.

The mate and I were almost peeing ourselves with laughter. We had slid down as far as we could in the seat so that Frank might not see us and wound the windows up to muffle the laughter. Frank was just about to the point of tearing his hair out. His dogs weren’t what you would call biddable at any time and he had to almost flatten them with a piece of four by two every time he tried to get them off a pig. This time he was totally out of control. There were dogs under cars, on top of cars, inside cars, on the trays of trucks and the backs of utes. They had one thing on their minds – find that pig!

One driver got up enough courage to get out of his vehicle. He threatened to do something to Frank which I thought at the time would be extremely painful. Frank had by then grabbed two of his dogs and just thrust them at this bloke and said, "Hold these."

The bloke just stood there with his mouth open. But not for long. The two dogs were not going to miss out on all the fun. One bit the bloke on the leg, the other bit his hand and they bolted off to join the others.

The lights changed and Frank stood in front of the traffic and held his hands up for them to stop. Cars started to slowly move off. Obscenities flew thick and fast. Frank just sat down in the middle of the road , put his hands over his ears and buried his head between his knees. The traffic moved slowly around him. I put the indicator on and moved off to the left to put as much distance between us and Frank just in case he looked up at the wrong time. I got a lot of abuse for doing this but I felt it was nothing to what Frank would do to us. We knew if he spotted us he’d twig straight away.

Frank never mentioned a thing when we saw him next and of course we never let on about it at all. We had had our fun. We thought it a bit funny but put it down to the fact that he was so embarrassed about it he didn’t want to remember it ever again. There was no mention of the incident in the local rag and the mate and I soon forgot about it all.

About six months later the mate and I were sitting at the same set of lights waiting for a change. Instead of sitting with my foot on the clutch with the ute in gear, I had knocked it into neutral as the lights had just changed as we approached them. Suddenly the ute started to move out into the line of traffic on the green. I thought there must have been a slight gradient and put my foot on the brake. We kept moving. I pressed harder on the brake pedal. We just kept moving slowly out into the middle of the intersection!

The tyres were squealing. I froze. I started to panic. I didn’t know what was going on. The traffic had come to a standstill and drivers and passengers were questioning our ancestry and our parents marital status. One semi driver threatened to go straight over the top of us. A bus turning right pulled up, it’s grill against the ute’s front bumper. Someone got out a mobile and phoned the police. They were very polite when they asked me to blow in the bag. I was so confused I couldn’t say a thing. The constable took three pages of notes. The mate just sat there with a stupid grin on his face. He was a great help.

Above the noise of angry abuse came a long drawn out squeal ‘like an old sow that had two dogs hanging off each ear’. Frank had snuck up ever so gently behind us and placed the bull-bar of the old Rover (no dogs this time) up against the tow-bar of the ute, slipped the Rover into 4 wheel and low range. When we looked around Frank was standing beside the bonnet of the Rover, bent over with laughter. He tried another pig squeal but just couldn’t make it. He just kept pointing at us and laughing. Revenge is sweet. =

Submitted by John Chandler