Today's Sunshine

Today Monster and I came across a man thinning the forest (or rather, "forest" as we both scoffingly rolled our eyes at the tiny stand of trees) along our usual walking path. He was wearing bright orange protective clothes, a giant hat with a visor and built in ear mufflers, and wielding a chainsaw. Naturally, Monster was... troubled. I BATted a few tries against this frightening apparition, until we got close enough I could see the man was looking at us. I stopped and called out to ask if he minded if I worked with Monster to not react against him, and he called back and asked if the dog was aggressive around people. I answered that yes, he tends to overreact, he's never actually attacked anyone but he certainly puts on the show that he'd like to, and he's loud and rude. The man called again that it was OK, and got back to work.

So Monster and I spent some time (I again have no idea how long, as I didn't check a watch and know from experience that I completely loose track when I'm training Monster) working against this man, us along the road and him among the trees. He moved around a lot, sometimes toward us, sometimes farther away, and made lots of horrible noise. Occasionally a tree would fall.

Monster was interesting. Initially he'd stare intently at the man, and look back often even as we were moving away, but after we'd been at it a while he seemed to lose interest... I don't know if it was extreme displacement behavior, or if he was genuinely that unconcerned. He'd start digging by the side of the road, pick up sticks and try to play tug or fetch, and generally ignore the man except for short periods when he did something extra interesting. He did get freaked out when trees fell, though, and would shy away keeping his body low. However that only lasted for a second or so before he was again moving forward trying to get a better look, so I simply ignored him and gave him the full leash length to move around in.

Yeah, I know there's some weird guy behind me, but I found a stick!

After some time, we were perhaps 15 feet away from the man, and he turned the chainsaw off to talk to me. Monster started barking when the man turned toward us and addressed me, so I asked him to sit and petted him whenever he was quiet. He calmed down in about twenty seconds. The man and I talked about what he was doing, where we were from (both of us from places with real forests), the pathetic collections of sad trees they call forests down here, and about animals. While we were talking, he slowly sat down and started removing scary things like the weird helmet, and I equally slowly let Monster get closer and closer. When Monster got within touching distance, the man looked away and held out his hand, fingers lightly closed and knuckles first, a little bit toward Monster. Monster sniffed him, and decided he'd found a new friend.

Things like this make me so happy. If only we could meet more people this understanding and helpful! It really was great!

Of course, when the man got up and picked up his helmet (which Monster had sniffed very carefully when it was on the ground), Monster had a bit of a "The scary thing must die!"-episode. But it only lasted for a couple of seconds, and I still think it was a great meeting even though it could have ended even better.

What? It was a scary helmet, I tell you!