He flagged me down in front of the mail carrier and said, still scared of a puppy, Walt. So I said I was not scared, I was organized, and I told him animal control had all six weeks of footage and was scheduled to come out Thursday about the repeat violations.
Because I had not pushed it. I bought one of those little porch cameras and let it run. It caught the dog loose eleven separate times in six weeks, no leash, no owner in sight, all stamped with the date. And I learned the county has a leash law with real teeth, especially after a prior incident, and this dog had charged me twice, once knocking me down.
For all those weeks the only thing I had lacked was proof it kept happening, and the moment I had eleven dated clips of the dog running loose, the mean old man who wants to lock up a friendly dog became a documented repeat-violation case with animal control on the way.
He had told it around until a couple of folks crossed the street away from me, while his wife loudly called the dog the sweetest baby whenever I passed. But a camera does not read tone, and a leash law counts loose dogs, not friendly ones.
I did not push it and I did not raise my voice. I said, animal control has six weeks of footage, the dog loose eleven times, all dated. They are coming Thursday about the repeat violations. It charged me twice and I have a heart condition and it knocked me down once. You can call me scared of a puppy, but the county is going to count how many times that dog is loose now.
The footage was the footage. There is no scared-of-a-puppy-ing your way out of eleven dated clips of a loose dog and a prior incident on record.
The county did what my one calm request never could. Animal control cited the repeat leash violations, and the family was ordered to contain the dog, with escalating penalties for the next time it ran loose.
The dog stays in its own yard now, behind a fence they finally put up. I take my evening walk without watching over my shoulder, which at seventy-three with a bad heart is not a small thing.
It is a fine dog; it just belongs on their side of a fence. Six weeks of watching my own street ended not with a fight by the mailbox, but with six weeks of quiet footage and a Thursday visit, and it turned out the mean old man was just a fellow with a heart condition who wanted to walk his block without getting knocked down.