It must have happened to you while walking on the beach or the local park. There jumping on and off the walking path is a puppy in the throes of life. You know that such a dog is full of wonder at every little butterfly that flutters. Its non-stop tail movement is evidence that it is truly happy to meet each and every non-threatening stranger.

Seconds later, however as you are twenty or thirty meters away you and every one else hears a high pitch yapping and you turn already knowing with horror as you hear the deep throated roar that that little puppy that you just passed is in some serious trouble. Perhaps even its owner is not able to extricate it from the problem.

There are lots of reasons for bad dog behavior. Some of them logical and some well, not quite as obvious. The dog misbehaving may be a dog that has been ill treated, or it might have a long standing chronic problem like a very bad tooth ache or head ache that it keeps under control until something unleashes it. Or the problem could be partially hereditary as in certain types of dogs being more prone to behavioral problems.

I heard an interesting tale as I was stroking the hair of my neighbor’s half wolf puppy.

About 12 months ago, he had gone inside the house after tying his puppy to the tail of his pickup truck. He estimated it had about 15 feet of slack on its leash. He claims he was only inside about 10 minutes before he heard a shout and the snarl of a pit bull. He ran to his front door and saw this scene.

There, running free of its leash and cutting a line straight towards his big puppy was a vicious pit Bull. He remembers his dog backing up to the vehicle as if to get enough slack in its leash. In no time the pit bull had crossed 30 feet and without so much as a hello, launched itself in the air towards the puppy.

This all happened at high speed, but when the Pit Bull leapt high for his dog’s throat with uncanny speed, his dog was eerily not there anymore. It was airborne and above the pitbull. As the pitbull landed and simultaneously twisted, my neighbor’s half wolf clamped its jaws on the PitBulls neck and held it motionless while the pitBull shook itself viciously backwards and forwards.

The half puppy did a very adult thing. With astonishing strength it growled and thew the pitbull about 6 feet away.

What happened next is the stuff of legends. The furious pitbull twisted before it hit the ground. Some say that it never touched the ground before it was instantly airborne again. But the story was different this time. The wolf puppy didn’t wait this time. It timed the rush perfectly and met the pitBull almost at the end of its own leash. In a moment it was over. The big puppy snapped the neck of the pitBull and it was over.

Time that had rushed faster than anyone could probably recount, suddenly stood still. The only slow movement came from the puppy as it backed to the vehicle, slunk down and looked around.

Its truly sad when something like this happens. The savagery of the episode is lost in the speed and suddeness of an attack like this. We heard that an older child had been threatened by the same dog a year earlier and that there was pending investigations about that due to those on the scene telling different versions of what they thought they saw.

I guess, the wheels of justice move slowly and that sometimes the animal kingdom simply takes things into its own. Afterwards, everyone was very certain that the puppy would have stood no chance under the fierce onslaught of the pitBull, but nature thought differently.