Dangerous dogs advice stands the test of time
‘‘US NAVY Seal tells you what to do if attacked by a dog,’’ said the clickable link on the website. And when I read those words I remembered a 30yearson reunion.
What happened 30 years ago is that 90 boys and one teacher had their first day at Christ’s College, Christchurch. The boys were 13, the teacher was 30. And he was me.
Now those boys are 43 years old, and about twothirds of them gathered a few weekends ago to reminisce and to compare the things that men compare and they asked me to join them and I hesitated a moment because sometimes the wrong people go to reunions but then I thought why not and when I stepped out of the taxi and into the forecourt of the pub a bald middleaged man came towards me and I had no idea who he was. But then he smiled and said Joe and I immediately had an image of the blond and freckled mother’s darling he’d once been and he shook my hand and generously left a bone or two in it unbroken and then he asked me if I remembered what to do if attacked by a dog. I burst out laughing.
In that first year I lived in the school, doing duties in one of the boarding houses in exchange for room and board. My duties included making sure the kids went to bed on time and the only way I knew to achieve this was to bribe them with a story. Like all of us, they loved a story.
The stories I told were drawn inevitably from my own teens and 20s, the decades when stuff happens, when you are establishing your own identity and you have few ties. Once you get to 30 you are who you are and the anchors start to drop. At 60 you’re becalmed.
One of my stories was of hitchhiking through France aged maybe 20. I went in search of romance, adventure and sex. I found tedium, loneliness and dogs. I was fond of dogs but these dogs scared me. They prowled in open front yards. ‘‘Chien mechant’’ it sometimes said on the fence, which translates as ‘‘naughty dog’’, but naughty didn’t do these dogs justice. They didn’t bark but they would sometimes growl and it was clear that I had only to cross the boundary of the property they were guarding and they’d go for me. It was equally clear that they knew exactly where that boundary lay and I could only guess. It made for nervous travelling.
It took a cafe proprietor to solve my problem. I’d stopped for water. He wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing. Under his gentle inquisition I confessed my fear of the chiens mechants.
‘‘Pah,’’ he said, and I am quoting.
I said it was all very well for him to say pah, but he wasn’t the one facing the dogs.
‘‘Pah,’’ he said again. ‘‘If a dog attacks you, you must stand your ground.’’
It was my turn to say pah, but he was serious.
‘‘The dog will leap to attack. You will cross your hands in front of your throat thus,’’ and he moved my hands up in front of me like a boxer’s guard.
The idea, it turned out, was that the dog’s front paws went either side of your arms, at which point you pushed those arms out and away from you, as if doing the breast stroke. This would cause the dog’s legs to splay unnaturally, the shoulders and sternum would snap, the broken ribs would pierce the dog’s vital organs, and, though the impact of the dog might still knock you flat, the beast would be dead on arrival.
‘‘Vraiment?’’ I said.
‘‘Vraiment,’’ he said. And he clapped me on the shoulder and gave me a beer and told me to have courage and oddly enough I did. It wasn’t so much that I believed the man, it was that I now had a strategy, a plan to cleave to. And from that came an odd sort of confidence.
All of which, with suitable embellishments, I retailed to a dormitory of wideeyed 13yearolds some 30 years ago and clearly my words had lodged as firmly in the head of one of them as the Frenchman’s words had lodged in mine.
So when I saw the link to the Navy Seal, I wondered whether here at last I might find confirmation of the Frenchman’s advice. I clicked the link.
‘‘If a dog attacks you,’’ said the Navy Seal, ‘‘punch it on the nose’’.
‘‘Pah,’’ I said.