Every Rose Has A Lot of Friggin' Thorns

While on our evening dog walk, on a pleasantly warm spring evening, our wonderful Shaak Ti displayed her newest manifestation of what I can only assume is some kind deathwish. I don't understand her mental processes, nor do I think I want to, but often times the result is her hitting her head, falling down, or otherwise hurting herself, which though it does not faze her, leads me to believe that eventually her high risk behavior is going to catch up with her. She will inevitably decide that indeed an ostrich is not too big of a bird to chase, or one day eat another pound of fudge. Despite this seeming urge to end her own life prematurely she lives every day to its puppy fullness.

Now normally when we're walking, she loves to jump up, onto retaining walls or ledges, or any structure that runs along the sidewalk where she can explore and be higher up than if she walked like other normal dogs, i.e. at ground level. Having witnessed this behavior over several months, I've gotten used to it. Every once in a while she'll try to run ahead and jump up on a wall, misjudge how much leash she has available, and get yanked back to earth mid-jump. This doesn't seem to faze her a bit and she continues along her merry way.

On this particular we approached a house with a 2.5 to 3 foot wall out front. This house typically has a few cats running around and since Shaak Ti tends to get a bit ramped up as we approach, I was prepared for her to pull a bit on the leash, maybe even whine a tad. I wasn't prepared for her to suddenly stop, turn left and jump completely over the wall.

Now the other side of this wall was a good foot below the sidewalk level and there wasn't a soft cushy lawn for her to land on, but a series of rose bushes. And not just rose bushes, but the stumps of the rose bushes that had been trimmed back for the winter. As soon as she jumped I ran to the wall to find that she had impaled her back left leg and butt onto a big thorny rose bush stump. She was impaled so deeply that she was stuck in the bush and couldn't move. I had to gently lift her out and then spend the next several minutes pulling a dozen huge thorns out of her leg and paw. She wound up bleeding in a couple places where the thorns had penetrated deeply enough, but aside from shaking for a minute, was pretty much good to go.

The dog owner concept is pretty new to me, so this was my first time seeing my dog bleeding. I was somewhere between frightened and angry. Frightened because I care about my dog and didn't like to see my dog bleeding, and angry because who the hell jumps over a wall when they have no idea what's on the other side? Seriously, who does that?

After treating Shaak Ti with some doggie first aid spray, I continued to be mad at her for the ordeal and her lack of judgment. She was soon forgiven and I realized that the decision making and rational thought processing areas of her brain may be underdeveloped, but that makes her even more endearing and lovable.