Seeing this post today is kind of a coincidence; we have a "senior citizen" Rat Terrier named Peabody that spends about 98% of his time in his bed under a table anytime the temperature is 50 degrees or below; this morning when I first got up I let Peabody out the front door to take his first pee of the day; just as I opened the door again about 10 minutes later, I caught sight of a half-grown coon that had just got into a tote full of eared field corn that I had under a tarp in front of my garage to put out for the woodpeckers; the coon had an ear of corn in his mouth and was rapidly headed along the end of the garage towards the woods out back;
Little did the coon realize that old 20 lb Peabody was just finishing up "business" in the back yard! I think the coon must have spotted the dog about 1/2 second before the dog spotted him; The coon dropped his ear of corn, made a mad dash towards a big sycamore tree, and hit the tree running warp speed, about .0005 seconds before Peabody, (also running flat-out ) misses the coon by 3 cat whiskers as the coon is setting a new record going up the tree!
I guess I'll start keeping my little video-cam beside the front door and have it ready any time I start to let the dog back in the house.
Peabody may only be 20 or so lbs. but in his mind, he thinks he's a 100 lb. Rottweiler; if a grizzly bear came out of the woods across the road heading for our yard, Peabody would dash out to "intercept" the bear before he got across the road! He minds me out to about 100 feet; beyond that, he's "stone deaf"! I have literally run myself ragged across the road chasing that dog through the woods trying to catch him before he runs into a couple of coyotes that would make "lunch" out of him.
The Vet that rescued Peabody about 13 yrs ago from a red-neck that had beat and kicked him almost to death, gave him to my wife rather than to euthanize him; the dog had all four legs broken, plus a few other bones; in spite of all of that, he can run faster than any small dog I've ever seen; apparently the bones in his left hind leg never healed up right, because when he gets "up to speed", he raises that LH leg up and proceeds at flank speed on the other three legs! (which is a rare sight to see! )
