Sometimes people just absofuckinglutely blow my mind. God, how I wish professional ethics allowed us to bitchslap stupid pet owners. Hell, sometimes, with some owners, I almost think it would be worth getting fired over. Tonight, we had one of those situations.
We had a min pin (miniature pinscher, looks like a scale-model doberman) come in tonight. I personally have never met up with a min pin over the age of 3 months or so that wasn’t a total shit, and tonight was no exception. The dog came back to the triage/treatment area jumping around and snapping at the leash and the tech leading him. We all looked at one another, 2 vets and 4 experienced techs, and we were all thinking the same thing: “Yee-fucking-ha, we’ve probably got a fucking rodeo on our hands.”
After a few fruitless attempts to apply a canvas muzzle, we decided, in the interests of minimizing patient stress (and the chance of us getting bitten, I’m not ashamed to admit) to ask the owners to muzzle their own damn snaphound. This was when things got interesting. The owners refused to even make an attempt, because they’re afraid of their own fucking dog. (The issue of keeping an animal you’re afraid of is a whole other pissy thread.)
Rather than go straight for a full-on rodeo (which generally involves huge quanitites of shit, urine, and anal gland expression), we tried the blanket trick first. He was, unfortunately, wise to that one and kept evading the blanket while making repeated lunges towards all of us. Fortunately, though, in his attempts to nail the nearer hand I had on his leash, he got his front feet tangled in it.
While he was busy choking himself, another tech took advantage of his distraction, dropped the blanket over him, and got a firm grip around his blanketed throat. I slapped a gauze muzzle on, then a canvas one, and from there on, we pretty much had his bitey little ass, despite his continued attempts to break free and/or bite us through the muzzle.
Yeah, it was the dog being a pain in our collective ass, but I put all the blame squarely on the owners. They were the ones who socialized him so badly that he was trying to bite before we ever even tried to pick him up. They were the ones who didn’t even try to curb his aggressive tendencies as a pup, and they’re the ones who let him continue to rule that house with an iron paw. If they weren’t such irresponsible fuck-knuckles, they could have saved a) us a lot of time and energy and risk, b) themselves the technician fees that got added onto their bill, since it wouldn’t have taken three of us 10 minutes to even muzzle him so we could begin work, and c) themselves a lot of stress in day-to-day dealings with the fucker.
I’m sure their regular vet agrees.