Stealth dogs!

If you walk, cycle or ride in residential neighborhoods you know what I'm talking about. Many people have dogs, and a lot of people in the western US have dogs. I live in the western US. I have dogs. When I take them for a walk in the nieghborhood, we usually encounter other dogs in their yards, barking to alert me that I am not invited to their yard. As these dogs well know, if they didn't bark and carry on, I might just sneak in there and well, do something. So these guard dogs are really the first and best defense (in their minds) for protection against marauders. When I trail ride, Pip and I encounter a lot of these types of dogs, the barky warning dogs. That's fine; the horses may spook a bit, but it's all good.

Then there are stealth dogs. These are much less common, and much scarier for horses and people. These are the dogs that don't bark, they just quietly get themselves where they can rush you and scare the snot outta you. We found two today. We were riding along, the horses were already on higher alert because we'd caught an old, napping horse by surprise and had a mutual scare. Amanda C was riding Fiona off the trail, and by a fence, because Fi had been worried about it earlier. I had taken Pip down there, but was moving back to the main trail, as there wasn't really a lot of room for two horses.

Suddenly Pip and I were moving very very fast away from that property and toward the ditch. Then that time slo-mo thing happened, where you say "holy crap! I'm not falling off, and I'm not going into that ditch!" and you get yourself organized and do an emergency stop. Pip stopped, turned to look, and I saw two red dogs slinking back to the property next to the one we'd been riding by. they didn't look espeically proud, more like shocked that their plain of eating horses hadn't gone so well.

Happily, neither myself nor Amanda C. fell off, and the horses were fine, if very jumpy for a bit after that. And the great thing is, by the end of that ride, both Pip and Fiona were fine, relaxed, moving forward, listening and happy. Yay for a really, really solid horse!