Giant George by Dave Nasser and Lynne Barrett-Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

seniority, and among them, George was very much bottom dog. He looked to me about as threatening as a wet paper bag.
    “You see!” said Christie again, indignant as any slighted mother.
    “Ignore her,” I told her. “George is doing nothing wrong. Besides, if she has something to say about him being here, then she should quitwith all the whispering and pointing, and come over and say it to our faces.” I added a glare in her direction to display my solidarity, and decided that the best thing to do was to dismiss her as a silly, neurotic, overanxious woman.
    But what did
I
know? She clearly wasn’t alone in her disapproval.
    “That dog shouldn’t be in here.”
    It was only a couple of days later, and George and I were backin the dog park. This time the person was saying it to my face, and it wasn’t the silly, neurotic, overanxious woman. Well, he might have been some of those things, but he was definitely not a woman.
    Since I was sitting and he was standing, I blinked up at him, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. “Excuse me?”
    “You shouldn’t have your dog in here,” he went on. “He’s too big. This part’sfor small dogs. It says on the sign.”
    I stood up. “
And
puppies,” I pointed out, because I’d read the sign too. “It’s also the area for
puppies.
And he’s a puppy. He’s only just seven months old. He’s too young to be in the adult dog area.”
    “But he’s too big to be in here,” the man said, clearly implacable. “He could hurt other dogs by running into them—”
    “Which he doesn’t.”
    “Or treading onthem accidentally—”
    “Which he doesn’t do either.”
    “But he might. C’mon, here! He’s way,
way
too big. He should be”—the guy pointed—“in
there
.”
    But the truth was that far from George hurting or intimidating any other dog, the exact opposite was what mostly happened. The smaller dogs would run both around him
and
under him, and he’d be constantly sidestepping them, anxious and jittery, not tomention traumatized, as any sensitive guy would be, when some of the adult ones tried to hump his legs.
    But it seemed our George, without doing anything to deserve it, had been cast in the role of social misfit. And, bowing to the pressure from other owners, which was becoming oppressive and difficult to deal with, after a few visits during which we took George to the puppy section, we decidedthat perhaps we’d better take heed of the comments and give him a try in the large dog enclosure instead.
    At least there, we thought, he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and as a big guy perhaps he would feel right at home.And maybe we wouldn’t feel quite so stressed. It was no fun to sit there and feel everyone’s eyes on us—even less when they started up with all the pointing.
    How wrongwe were. This was far worse. The fact is that whatever size a creature is, it’s the maturity that is important, and with pack animals like dogs, this is key. George, however intimidating-looking people seemed to find him, was very much a puppy in the world of the adult dog enclosure, and right off the other dogs let him know that.
    Whereas in the puppy part he’d struggled with his size and lackof confidence, here, even though his size didn’t matter, he was bullied remorselessly from the start. He was constantly buffeted by other, older dogs, who made their authority clear by running fast and bumping into him, sniffing him aggressively and generally acting kind of mean. Any time we threw his ball or his beloved piece of rope for him, there was always sure to be some other dog who’d goharing after it, invariably, even if he didn’t beat George to it, making it clear that he’d better keep back.
    It was hard to police this—they were animals, just
being
animals—but a line had to be drawn, and one day, sure enough, it got crossed. We were at the dog park one lunchtime a few weeks later, when George was attacked by not one but two dogs at once. They