Being a father has taught me a new gold standard for fear. Also, a legal question.

[Tazz]

That scared me just reading about it. Check out this bear deterrent from Cabelas. Super bad OC spray!
http://www.cabelas.com/product/UDAP...t=bear+spray&WTz_l=Header;Search-All+Products

 

[jcountry]

Get some pepper spray. That will communicate all the dogs need to know. Personally, I would be hesitant to shoot and firearm in a neighborhood unless it was a last resort-those bullets go about 4x further than most people would ever imagine. One hits a rock and flies into someone across the way, and now you really have legal problems. Defending yourself from a guy with a gun is pretty cut-and-dried. Defending someone from a growling dog or two is not. I sure wouln't want to go through $30k in court to find out the correct answer to that one.

Dogs are very easy to read. If they show threatening behavior, just hit them in the eyes with some spray. I used to ride bikes long distance. Every once in a while, a dog would run out of a yard and go straight for the pedals or one of our bikes. A nice half-second burst and that little pooch will never chase you again.

I am a dog owner, and I love our little guy-but I also recognize that a dog is not a person. Most people don't know that a "teenage" dog will see small children as other dogs... That is not good-sometimes they want to play, sometimes they want to fight to determine pack order. Either way, big dogs and children they aren't used to don't mix.

All dogs all have a little (or a lot) of wolf in them. You can never breed that out. They are all pack animals, and they think in terms of a pack. To a group of pack animals, what those dogs were up to makes sense, to humans-it does not. Either way, pepper spray will solve your problems. Practice with it- and be aware of the wind, you dont want even a little blowback.

 

[Bear44]

Deterrent sprays will work in many situations. This is not one of them. Prey Drive, the drive to catch, kill and eat a prey animal, is one of the most powerful drives a dog has. It is very difficult to turn off once it is triggered. This situation is far more dangerous than almost any other you can find yourself in with a dog. It is NOT a typical aggressive encounter. The damage intended by the dog is devastating. You have to kill it before you can eat it. It is also rapped up in the most basic survival instincts for them. Deflecting this instinct away from humans as prey was one of the key factors in domesticating dogs in the first place. Some can and do revert.

Think about a pack of wolves going after an Elk. They can get kicked, hit by antlers and even get some level of goring. They just keep coming.

 

[jcountry]

All I know is I hit a Chow (which are not known for being pushovers) in the eyes with some of that stuff once long ago. That dog went from chasing me and barking viciously to rolling around and pawing at its eyes in about 1/4 second..... It worked for me, and eliminated a serious threat from a potentially dangerous dog. I would think that it would work.

Bullets work also, but I sure would give pepper spray "the ol' college try" before I would go flinging lead around a neighborhood. All it takes is one ricochet to fling off and smack an innocent bystander, and you could lose everything you have worked all your life for-and you may have the weight f killing an innocent person on your conscience as well..... Be careful.

-Pepper spray-
-Worked good for me!

 

[jsquared]

Scary situation most definitely, thanks for sharing. I agree, call animal control and get the dogs taken away if you have not already. Whoever "owns" those dogs needs a ticket and an ass whooping also.

 

[Ken Ford]

Dogs sense of smell is conected to their nervous system. Modern pepper spray will act almost Like a tazer does in a human.
OP did well, gun fire in a neighborhood is not good. Has the OP spoke to the owners?
If the Dog becomes actively aggressive then killing them MAY be the only option. Before that OC would more than likely to be effective.

 

[Jester7]

I don't know what the law states, but great job at keeping a level head and protecting your family. I am a dog lover ( have 2 "bully breeds" a dobie and american bulldog) but would not hesitate to do what I had to do if put in a situation like yours. Again just wanted to say way to go. Oh yea did you call animal patrol or anything like that? If anything if the owners of the dogs are that irresponsible than the dogs need a new home.

I agree completely... great job by both you and your wife. I glad there was two of you and not one... that would have been tough. It sounds like we have a very similar neighborhood and I rarely see dogs loose but it does happen and it can be scary. My daughter was walking our greyhound and two big dogs did the whole circling / growling thing at her. She kept between them and our greyhound (they are big chickens) and it escalated until one of the dogs lunged and my daughter actually got her arm up so that one of the dogs put his mouth on her arm! He let go and backed off with his pal luckily!! It turns out that the dogs belonged to a neighbor who didn't really worry when they got out of his garage... I felt like seriously hurting that owner...

 

[Crackerz]

Hmmmmm. Interesting thread. Are you sure you want to trust pepper spray as your sole source of protection for you or your family? In moderate/high wind conditions? Predators usually go for the young first. Dalmations are listed as 1 of the "most dangerous dog breeds" on all of the media-biased lists, also.

Excerpt from O.C.O.G. 16-12-4; Cruelty to Animals:

"(f)(1) Nothing in this Code section shall be construed as prohibiting a person from:

(A) Defending his or her person or property, or the person or property of another, from injury or damage being caused by an animal"

Where I live, a charge of discharging a firearm within the city limits is possible, but is doubtful in this type of situation, I would think.

 

[chiefsquirrel83]

Maybe Ken Ford agrees....we carry MK4 OC by Defense Technologies....I have been sprayed by Sabre, Cap Stun, etc...MK4 is the equivallent to Satan's Piss...and it is like taking a blow torch to the face....I have sprayed it on several unchained dogs that have ran at me at offender's houses....the only thing it doesn't affect that I have seen are Roosters (lol)

 

[Tailor]

In my haste to get things written down, I seem to have missed a few details. Any bolding in quotes is my own emphasis to make it clear what I am addressing. I also shortened a post or two to get under the post size limit.

Glad everything worked out ok for you and your family. You showed alot of restraint, proly alot more than I could have.

My sights were always on the lead dog and several times my finger went to about 90% of the trigger pull needed to fire. The doubts in my head, and how close they already were is about what held me back.

In Ga. one of the justifications of the use of deadly force is in the event that you or someone close to you is in fear of grave bodily injury or death ... After you shoot a neighbors dog, quite often it can escalate into a violent encounter.

The risk of neighbor retaliation was not really in my head at the time, but may have played a part in my hesitation because I've played through this scenario in my head before, and come to realize that some dog owners see their dogs in an irrational light and might feud over a dead dog even though it was attacking a person.

Use this situation as an excuse to go and get you & your wife some professional training. ... You did pretty well... but you also were lucky. Learn the law & defensive handgun fundamentals from someone who teaches it for a living professionally.

I do get 2 days of training 5 times a year. What I probably didn't do a good job of explaining in the original post is that if it was just me, I would have been much more decisive either to kill them, or to not kill them. Adding my pregnant wife and 2.8 kids to the mix and having the dogs clearly fixated on my kids really changed things in a fundamental way for me. I could probably put two into the lead dog in under a second (however, I've never shot at dogs before and they are a different size and movement speed and profile than humans). I didn't know whether that would stop, or start the fight. It might sound stupid of me, but as long as my family was moving steadily toward safety I didn't want to escalate the situation.

All that aside, this encounter mostly showed me a gap in the legal side of my training, and since I have a (small) influence on the focus of the classes, I will definitely be pushing this kind of issue to be covered in greater depth.

I know I'll always have gaps in the tactical side of training. I'm never going to be a HSLD operator. Since the only person paying for my training is me, and I can't dedicate the time, or money to attend classes more often than I do. If I can shoot better and faster than most, and I keep working on it, that's got to be enough for me. However, legal gaps must be fixed once identified. Upside: Getting my wife to a training class just just went from impossible to probable.

That way, if there is a next time, you might be able to either avoid it (not that you could have in this event)or at least have the mental & physical tools to do so more confidently.

The main thing I was not prepared for was the speed that this went from a normal walk to "get any closer and this gets ugly". There may be things I could have done differently, but yeah, aside from just never taking my kids outside, there isn't much I could have done to avoid the situation.

You handled it pretty well but I think you would have been justified if you had killed one or both of them. I can't quote the law and it could have led to more problems with the owners but I most likely would have shot them early on in the encounter. I would suggest you find out who they belong to and get the proper authority notified of this incident. It might save you or someone else trouble down the road. I am glad your family was unharmed.

I took today off work and have been looking and asking around for those dogs. I called AC and county pd last night, but while an officer came around and wrote some stuff down, he didn't get out of the car, and I never even saw an animal control vehicle. I thought I knew all the local dogs, these were not among them.

I do not have any dogs now "My wife is allergic to them"
But,I have own a few APBTs in my life.

One thing I will say is that they do not like small fast moving items and will pass
other "prey/toys" to get get what they have afixed their attention on.

Call you local pound and have them set out cages to trap the dogs.
Hopefully they can be removed from the area before they do harm.

I did call animal control, they took some information, and I never saw them come around.

This can easily be solved with some bleach and water in a spray bottle( worked great from my paper route on a bike as a kid),now you can get a pepper spray to carry that will work fine and is more compact.

Don't take this the wrong way, but with my family on the line (and probably not if it was just me either), there is no way I'd go to a bleach solution in a spray bottle. An attorney whose advice I trust advised me against chemical sprays. So I don't carry it. If my gun had a selector switch to go from lead to OC, I might have used that, but I used what I did have.

Don't kill a dog unless it's wild or the owner might do something crazy. A shot in the ground would scare those dogs, but might cause issues with the police and neighbors. I have a 5 and 7 year old and feel your concerns. I carry a pistol most of the time,but I allways have my sizable pocket knife that I keep razor sharp. Give an arm,proceed to fillet aggressive dog with one pass. Yes,my pocket knife is probably to big. No one can argue if you defended your self in hand to hand combat with an aggressive dog.

You're so right about crazy owners.

I do carry a blade, but that's another thing I wouldn't have gone to in this situation. In the time it takes me to switch from knife to gun or vice versa, either of those dogs could have killed one of my kids.

You handled it EXACTLY right. You could not have done better. Legally I think you could have killed them both at any time after they became a threat, however, there is a good chance that trying to or firing a warning shot would have triggered an immediate escalation and a full on attack that would have been very hard to stop even if you had had a shotgun. The same thing applies for any type of chemical deterrent. Forget the OC and bleach.

This is exactly what I was thinking. I know this might not be true of dogs truly raised in the wild, but I felt that these two (and especially the lead dog) were kind of balanced on a knife edge between hunting(not acceptable in a neighborhood), and attacking (REALLY not acceptable). I was listening and watching their movements and body language closely I planned to get the first attack in if they went from hunting to attacking, but I didn't want to tip them that way as long as we were making our escape.

This is also why I wouldn't have tried to scare them off with the gun. The thought did cross my mind, but I dismissed it because, A: most importantly, I don't do warning shots, and have no way of knowing how they would have reacted to it. B: I would be shooting at asphalt and have little control of where that bullet went afterwards. C: as far as I know, if you're not justified in shooting them, you aren't justified in a shot to scare them off.

D: occurred to me later, but if my kids had been 15 feet from a gunshot they probably would have started crying. This might have been the final inciter for one or both of those dogs.

There were a few other reasons I wouldn't have tried to scare them off with a gunshot, but those are the biggies.

What you experienced was a totally primal situation. A pack of large powerful carnivores were in hunting mode and your children were the target. Your protective instincts were dead on. These two dogs are dangerous and will remain so. Call animal control and get these dogs off the street. They need to be picked up by AC or the owner needs to be found and they must be properly confined. The owner has probably never even seen this behavior. It probably only manifests when they are out on their own and in pack hunting mode.
If you need me to get directly involved in this PM and we'll go from there. In case you don't know, I'm a trainer and an expert witness in the courts. Do not underestimate the ongoing threat these dogs represent.

Thanks, I haven't found who owns them yet, but you can bet I will. I'm not going "dog hunting" or anything, but they live somewhere and I am going to find out where. They both had collars. I don't think I mentioned that in the original post, but it was one of the minor things that kept me from killing them, knowing that someone considers them a pet and may react in an appropriate (in their mind) way.

I agree completely... great job by both you and your wife. I glad there was two of you and not one...

A thought that really kept me awake last night is that it could have been just me out there pulling the wagon with the kids. Even worse, it could have been just my wife out there with them. That's why once I find them, the owners will get a notification about this behavior, and if something like this happened again wither either or both of those dogs, they will probably get the notification that their dogs are dead.

Bottom line, I don't want to kill someones pet, but as a friend of mine in APD said last night, "They stopped being pets the minute they ran off together and started stalking your kids."