On a less anti-reporter-rant, I saw an interesting dichotomy at the animal shelter yesterday. A police officer from one city brought in a dog, a a brown hound. Opening the cage in the back of his pickup truck, the officer snapped his fingers and the dog jumped down. Without a leash, the dog calmly followed the officer into our intake room and stepped into a cage that the officer held open for him. Job done.

An hour later, another officer from a different city brought in a dog. This dog, a labrador retreiver, had been pepper-sprayed, tasered, and was dragged howling and fighting into the intake room with a choke pole around its neck and one of the taser barbs still embedded in its skni. Its mouth was bleeding from trying to chew the metal cable, and I wouldn't doubt that it had lost a couple teeth. Because of the pepper spray, I had to hose it off (through the bars of its cage), spraying it in the face for almost ten minutes with a mix of shampoo and water. When the pepper spray got wet, it became so strong that the other dogs in our intake room started sneezing, and we had to move them out.

So it was quite a contrast, and the question is this: what kind of dog are we? Are we dragged kicking and screaming and tasered through life, or do we accept the situation and make the best of it? Both dogs ended up reunited with their owner in the end, but I can guarentee that one dog was happier than the other, and had a much more pleasant experience.