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.

And in the beginning...

Small, seemingly cute woodland creatures have never liked me.  This fact has always perplexed me, because I very much like them (unless they fall into the category of "squirrels who  eat my garden and manipulate my useless dogs").  It all started back when I was a wee toddler, only 3 years old, living in England.

Me, as a toddler.

I am an oldest child (a fact that neither of my sisters will let me forget), and as such, I was basically a metaphorical guinea pig* for my parents.  Anyway, one of my favorite activities while we lived in London was to go to St. James Park, because there were ducks and British teenagers with purple hair.  Anyway, one of the major differences between London and my homeland of Texas is that London is bloody cold by comparison.  My parents cared about me to an extent, and therefore bundled me up in winter jackets before my outdoor adventures.  I was small and the jacket was large, therefore causing me to lurch along in a sort of starfish-shaped slow and clumsy gallop. Then they inadvertantly found a great way to entertain themselves...

Like most children, I really got a kick out of feeding the ducks.  In an effort to cut down on the obnoxious screams of "Mommy, Daddy, more bread!" my parents decided to stuff all the pockets of my winter jacket full of it so I could be my own woman for duck-feeding endeavors.  The plan seemed great until you come face-to-face with the obvious.  Where you find ducks, you also find geese.  Unlike ducks, geese are mean, and geese are large.  Geese will also chase you, tackle you, and bite you (and possibly eat you, or so I have been told).  So there I was, barely able to propel myself forward due to my jacket, and basically holding the motherload of bread on my person.  Did you know that geese growl?  Oh yes, they sound a lot like a bear with an inconvenient itch right before they start flapping their wings while running 25 mph towards a person half their size.

The stuff of nightmares.

Needless to say, my parents found the whole scene hilarious (til the geese actually caught me, at which time they were kind enough to intervene).  Bloody good timing.

*more stories about guinea pigs to come later...