Monster Goes For Takeout

... Fortunately he comes back empty handed! This morning was another of my absolute nightmare scenarios: the line snapped. It didn't even have the decency to do it with a dramatic sound effect, at most I think there may have been a slight "fwip" as the tension in the line gave.

Yeah... My ears are better than yours, but I think my mind may have been on other things...

Just to demonstrate how Monster actually feels about hares, what happened was first one hare then another jumping up quite far ahead of us and running off. Monster fixated, started tugging on the line and trying to go after them. In typical hare brilliance the pair of idiots decided to double back and run across the path we were on - still pretty far away though - and Monster did another small lunge and the line just... gave up. Naturally, I took the most productive option of how to act: I panicked. At first he didn't race off, he just pulled further ahead of me in little starts and stops, and I couldn't decide what to do so I tried recalling him, telling him to sit, stop, and lie down. I may have thrown something else in there too... Naturally he lost whatever interest he may have had in me and raced off after the distant hares. I will say he got a lot closer than I thought he would.

That's cause I'm fast. A lean, mean, running machine...

Uh-huh, sure. That's why your tongue was by your knees when you finally came back, right?

Because he did come back, fortunately. He ran around for maybe a minute or so, within sight at all times (very open country), then he looked around for me who was "calmly" sitting down on the edge of an old well and came trotting back. As I saw him being interested in me again I got on my hands and knees (with a small scream - the panic had made me forget about my foot, which no longer bends the ways required to kneel down) and pretended to find something super interesting in the dirt, hoping he'd come investigate it with me. Which he did, but now I'm thinking he'd probably have returned anyway. But I really didn't want him to continue past me and onto the path behind us we'd just left. Ordinarily, I'd like to think I'd have the presence of mind to try the reaction I believe would be most likely to succeed, which is to turn around and say "let's go back!" while jogging (OK, hobbling) away from him. This is something which works - or should work - on two levels; for one it's a command we use in BAT, so he has a learned response to this cue in tense/exciting situations; for another he's fairly dependent on me and hates when I "abandon" him. But today this was not an option - going back was a direction I really wanted to avoid: behind us were a man with an infant and a dog. While Monster probably wouldn't have presented any danger for the man or the dog, based on past experience as well as knowing Monster isn't really driven by aggression, I can never feel safe with him around a small child. It takes so very little to severely injure a child that young, and Monster is so big and so clumsy and excitable... A lot of worst case scenarios went through my head in the short time Monster was running free, and while I know those were highly unlikely it was a risk I had no wish to take. But, happily, Monster just raced across the field after the hares and came running back to me again quite soon. He was happy - he'd had fun - and I was terrified. Sounds like a regular day now that I think about it...

Fun times! Let's do it again after I've had a nap...