Geese - again

As we all know, I have a long-standing feud with geese.  For some reason, I also always constantly find myself living in ideal goose habitat.  Growing up in Texas, there was the inevitable problem of dead geese mounted on walls as trophies (creepy).  Grandparents were in Florida and New Jersey, both living next to lakes.  College was in PA right next to a river, and of course law school was next to both a river and a lake.  Suffice to say, these little monsters had me surrounded from the get-go.

We want to kill you.

I adopted my first pup Lucy my second year of law school.  She was a mix of curious and scared of everything at first - for example, she attempted to play with a copperhead, which didn't end well.  The point is, I knew we were a perfect pair when I discovered that the only things she had violent aggression toward were geese.

Lucy, after an afternoon of goose chasing.

Who the F buys these?

It all started when we went on a run in the subdivision near the lake.  Obviously, the first offensive thing was the subdivision itself (I find sub-d's creepy, and nothing will change my mind so save your hate mail).  We are chugging along (well I chugged, Lucy pranced effortlessly), and all of a sudden Lucy stopped dead in her tracks and let out a full on hound howl.  I kept chugging (I had a lot of retractable leash to work with), and all of a sudden, Lucy took off like a shot.  Of  course, she did this by cutting directly across my path, causing me to drop the leash and take a nasty fall on to pavement, but that really is beside the point of this story.  When I lifted my head up, there's my dog, sitting in someones front yard, holding a plastic goose yard ornament by the neck.  In fact, she pounced on that thing so hard that the neck split.

I was bleeding and delighted all at once, and yet knew that I had to do the right thing and approach the proud owner of the plastic victim to offer to replace it.  Fortunately, the homeowner wasn't home, nor were any of the neighbors (probably at some subdivision Satan worship meeting).  Soooo, since I didn't have a pad of paper, I propped the thing up as best I could and got back to my chugging.

That event only empowered Lucy, who saw it as evidence that she would definitely win in a goose-Lucy showdown.  From that day on, she would swim, run, hop rocks, whatever it takes, to get to a goose with murder on her mind.  Gosh darnit I miss that dog so much.