A while back I wrote about being attacked by a customer's dog while on the job as a utility worker, and how my company then proceeded to blame me for the whole incident.
The following is a story about a situation that occurred a few years earlier, involving another dog attack.
This time though I saw it coming. I defended myself and probably killed the dog in the process.
A few years before I got my leg mauled, I defended myself from a dog that was about to attack me. It was a big, mean pit bull that had climbed over a fence and was charging straight at me.
I was working at a house several doors down and needed to access the utility pole behind the yard with the dog. The pole was on a public easement alongside a wide ditch that was choked with brush and garbage. There was a strip of grass about ten feet wide between the backyard fences and the brush line and I had walked over to check out the situation.
The pit bull was going absolutely apeshit, barking and growling and I noticed the chain link fence was only about four feet tall and that when the dog was standing on its hind legs its head and shoulders were higher than the fence. I remember thinking “Holy shit! That dog could come right over the fence, but I’ve got to work back here. I’d better arm myself.”
I also imagined trying to explain to my boss that I didn't do the job because a dog was barking at me from the other side of a fence and how well that would have gone over.
This was years before the promised pepper spray that never materialized and the only thing I really had were some cans of wasp spray.
The wasp spray we carry is called Rainbow, it is truly nasty stuff and I try to use it sparingly. You can’t buy it in stores; it’s specifically for utility workers. We encounter lots of wasps and hornets and yellowjackets on the job. They love to make nests in phone terminals and interface boxes and, especially in the late summer and early fall when they get really agitated; encounters are almost a daily occurrence. I probably get stung about a dozen times each year. The spray we carry will kill an entire nest in seconds. You can literally knock a wasp out of the air and it will be dead before it hits the ground. No shit, you hit a nest and they drop like, well, like flies.
I’ve gotten this stuff in my eyes a few times when a sudden puff of wind pushed some mist back into my face and, I can tell you, it’s not pleasant. It burns like hell. And “spray” is not really the right word. It comes out of the can in a concentrated jet. If it’s not windy, you can accurately nail a nest from twelve or fifteen feet away.
So I got my extension ladder down from the truck rack and before I hoisted it onto my shoulder, I grabbed a full can of Rainbow and made sure it was well shaken. I left the cap off. As I was walking back to the pole, carrying the seventy pound ladder on my right shoulder, I kept the spray can in my left hand. The dog was acting absolutely insane by then and, as I had feared, came over the fence and charged directly at me.
We were about twenty feet apart. I dropped the ladder and then we were ten feet apart. I unloaded right into the dog's face; jetting poison into its open mouth and eyes and up its nose.
I don’t know what I expected to happen exactly but I was still amazed at the effect it had. The dog, carried by its forward momentum, crumpled in a heap right at my feet and started howling and whining and writhing around in pain. Only then did the dog’s owner, who must have been home the whole time, come running out her door screaming at me “What the hell did you do to my dog?!”
She was pure white trash and had that vaguely southern accent I always find so odd to hear in Michigan. It came out as “Whut the hay-all did yew dew tuh mah dawg?” Then she said “Ahm cawling the cops.”
I was pretty shaken because I really don’t like to hurt any living thing (except wasps. sorry, but fuck them) and I responded “Good, because if you don’t call them, I’m going to. This is public property. What if I was some neighborhood kid playing back here?”
Realization dawned on her then that her dog had tried to attack a utility worker on public property and she quickly changed her tune. “Well hold on now,” her eyes shifting side to side “let me take him inside.” The dog was still lying at my feet blubbering, eyes red and puffed shut, long strings of mucous coming out it's snout. The lady came over, grabbed it by the collar, dragged it back through the gate into her yard and dropped it there.
The dog was making so much noise that neighbors were starting to come outside to see what all the commotion was. The lady came back over to me and actually said “Well, no harm done. Yer ok ain’t ya?” Like now she’s concerned about my well being? I told her I was ok but she might want to get her dog to the vet and she said “Aw hell, he’ll be alright.” She walked back and dragged the dog into the house where I could still hear it howling.
So, I gathered up my ladder and did what I had to do at the pole. After I was done the man whose house I was working at told me everyone in the neighborhood was terrified of that dog and he hoped I had killed it. His neighbor leaned over the fence and and said she hoped so too.
I called my manager to explain what had happened. I told him I think I killed a dog and detailed what had happened including the lady’s last words to me. He said that I should just keep quiet and we’d wait to see if anything came of it. Nothing ever did.
I never heard another thing about that dog or that lady
I’ve worked in the same area dozens of times since then and I always look for the dog. I’ve never seen it again. I think I did kill it.
When I contemplate that I feel terrible, but then I think about what I had said to the hillbilly lady; what if it had been a kid back there? Or what if it had been me but I hadn’t armed myself? This dog was not chained to a post. If it had gotten to me, it may well have killed me. I’ll never know.