Dog Attacks

1stclassalan said:
Yes, I never went anywhere without a 4ft dressage stick - used many times for bashing cars roofs and threatening their owners!

The first thing I'd say here to the O.P. - you take your horse out from relative safety - it's your first duty to bring it back in one piece. Falling off after an "attack" from a Jack Russell does not come into my zone of good excuses!
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On the occassions where owners were present - I used to say -"call it off or I will ride the dog and you down" - that used to concentrate their minds quite well. Two Alsations came flying at us on one ride with the owners nowhere in sight - mare put one into a low earth orbit which rather dampened the other one's enthusiasm.
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You are obviously a charming guy :rolleyes: - hell-bent on making horse owners hated by motorists and dog owners alike!! Bashing car roofs and threatening their owners falls into the camp of putting ALL future horses and riders THAT driver meets at serious risk - it will undoubtedly make that driver even more dangerous!

All our youngsters start life knowing dogs - and knowing vehicles - so we don't usually have problems when introducing them to the roads. And we have a wonderful narrow unadopted road which is perfect for their first outing, as it has donkeys, farm machinery - and a pack of lunatic bearded collies which hurtle out of their home, barking their heads off, and often going in to nip fetlock joints. As youngsters are always initially accompaned by a sensible older horse who has met them many times before, it's never caused a major problem - and I HAVE given a couple of the dogs a good whack with a schooling whip - which has made them listen a bit more to my fierce voice yelling 'Get inside' at them (although they ignore their owner!)
 
Alyth, the retractable leads can be a danger in themselves if being used by someone not paying attention. A tripping hazard, getting wrapped round animal legs, as happened to my friend walking a JRT near some pigs. She fell over a tree root and let go of the lead. Absolute chaos as dog made off to chase pigs, wrapping lead round pigs legs, and my friend getting over electric fencing to catch the dog again, having freed the pig!! No animal was hurt but it could have been such a different story...
 
Retractable leads give no control whatsoever, all you have is a lump of plastic that can be held in one hand only, I have one but I only ever use them on dogs that already have distance control and never in a situation which requires close control.
 
Retractable leads should be used with a wrist loop and with total concentration on the dog. Too often they are not.

Op report to the police & the dog warden. No excuse for the dog's owner not checking you were ok.
 
IMO

Dogs & Cyclists should not be on Bridleways anyway full stop.
There are millions of footpaths, that Horses are not allowed on & yet very few Bridleways, yet it seems most people ride their bikes or walk their dogs on bridleways rather than all of those footpaths.
Where I live we have 2 bridleways & 9 different footpaths, in 2 years never seen a footpath used by cyclists, dogs, ramblers etc, yet the 2 bridleways are always full of them !!!!
 
Taffieboy1 said:
IMO

Dogs & Cyclists should not be on Bridleways anyway full stop.
There are millions of footpaths, that Horses are not allowed on & yet very few Bridleways, yet it seems most people ride their bikes or walk their dogs on bridleways rather than all of those footpaths.
Where I live we have 2 bridleways & 9 different footpaths, in 2 years never seen a footpath used by cyclists, dogs, ramblers etc, yet the 2 bridleways are always full of them !!!!
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Don't get me started!!! In Scotland, SUSTRANS succeeded in closing routes used by generations of horse-riders, one of the most disgraceful was an old railway line on the edge of Balquidder Glen. It was closed to riders forcing the children and their ponies back onto the road.

A delegation went to see Ann McQuire, Lab, Stirling, who said "Neigh Bother" made good copy in the local press. She did NOTHING.(She did vote to ban hunting in England)

The saviour for Scottish Riders was the Land Reform Act which banned the 'cycle only routes'. However, by this time millions of tax payers money had been poured into the national cycle route. Its construction involved tearing up every scrap of grass and laying down hard-core.

One of the reasons for moving to France was there was nowhere I could canter my horse!! The same EU legislation and funding which should have enabled the UK to manage and waymark multi use routes has been used in France. I have miles of off road routes which are marked by our local ramblers. AND they don't need to be hard-cored so that weekenders can enjoy the countryside in their high heeled shoes.
 
I often wonder if a rider pitched up at a dog park or a training field and started cantering around, how that would work out for them. But it seems to be no problem doing it the other way around....
 
Horrfied to hear about this. These dog attacks seem to go on all the time but usually end up in near misses. I hope you've put it on the BHS dog attack page. The law on dangerous dogs has just been fully reviewed but sadly the chance to deal properly with this issue was missed. When the dog attack is "only" on another animal - not a human - the legal protection is much less. Assistance dogs are treated as "humans" for this purpose and I strongly believe that ridden horses should be treated in the same way as assistance dogs rather than lumped in with sheep and other farm animals. The risk to a rider if their horse panics is huge and foreseeable. Read my blogs on this at http://goo.gl/ZZuzr. What do the police intend to do in your case?
 
Rollin said:
Don't get me started!!! ........
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You may not be aware, but there was a cartridge designed, by the French, and it was loaded into pistols and carried by French cyclists, to shoot attacking dogs. The round (here anyway), is known as the 5.5 SFM Velo-Dog. ;)

Good old Wicki to the rescue; "The Velo-Dog was a pocket revolver originally created in France by Charles-François Galand in the late 19th century as a defense for cyclists against dog attacks.[1] The name is a portmanteau of "velocipede" and "dog"."

I've a couple of spare rounds, somewhere!

Alec.
 
JanetGeorge said:
You are obviously a charming guy
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You are not the first to take note of that.

hell-bent on making horse owners hated by motorists and dog owners alike!! Bashing car roofs and threatening their owners falls into the camp of putting ALL future horses and riders THAT driver meets at serious risk - it will undoubtedly make that driver even more dangerous!
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Ah, the drivers that I've bashed are the extreme of a bad bunch - these guys don't understand anything else - the kind that have punch-ups in Tesco's over a car park space and believe that they alone have a godgiven right to an open road.

Normally, I am extremely courteous and when out in the good old days would follow all the wonderful hunting etiquette of hierarchically thankings etc., etc., but some folk have some very strange ideas when in their car.

Nor does this seem to be a "class" thing either as I've had a great greasey Hell's Angel motorbiker pull up and turn off his engine while giving admiring looks at mare - and the bumbling old colonel type that lived down the lane who insisted on driving at lunatic speed so long as he kept tooting his horn!!! "I've never been so insulted!" he gasped one day "I've the highest repect for horses, never had anyone complain before!" He continued to drive exactly the same until he met a skip lorry some time later - that slowed him down somewhat.


All our youngsters start life knowing dogs - and knowing vehicles - so we don't usually have problems when introducing them to the roads. And we have a wonderful narrow unadopted road which is perfect for their first outing, ......
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Sounds idyllic!
 
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