Hypothetical: What would you carry, concealed?

Which one?

  • Charter Bulldog .44 Special, custom made 140 grain no. 4 shot

    Votes: 7 11.1%

  • Charter Pitbull, .45 Colt, 150 grain no. 4 shot

    Votes: 1 1.6%

  • Taurus Judge revolver, .410 bore 2-3/4", etc

    Votes: 3 4.8%

  • Other

    Votes: 52 82.5%
  • Total voters
    63
As OldDog noted,
Old Dog said:
but that dog will be on you before you know it,
Click to expand...
That's for sure!

We kept Pyrenees for years. The second one was a sort of rescue dog, not from a pound, but some friend's friend. ?? Turns out it had some sort of 'rage syndrome' or some such. It was always 'growly, and extremely guarding/antagonistic about its food, and resistant to training.

One night, I'd taken some garbage out to the garden compost. Walking back to the house, the pyrenees came out, sort of quietly, not bouncing/playing as most of the time, and from about 3 ft, attacked me, inflicting bites on stomach and arm. I was carrying my 6906, but it all happened in literally, an instant. Between proximity and time, there was no drawing/shooting. I struck it with the large plastic pitcher I had emptied, and it ceased the attack. The dog went back to being docile, and sheepish as though it realized what it had done. I was bleeding all over the place. Went to the hospital for stitches on stomach and arm irrigation and cleanup. Police showed up, as is protocol for dog bites, I guess. He could only say since it was my/our dog, he couldn't really ticket me for keeping a dangerous dog. Needless to say, the dog stayed at vet's kennel for 72-hour observation and was killed.

Point of the story is, though, dogs are fast and have only one gear!! When they go, it's full out!

More life in the 'burbs......

-West out
 
I would use the gun I carry every day in reality, a shield 9- not a revolver, and not with shot loads. I am also confident that I would be able to get a good hit at some point on said dog, hopefully prior to being bit. I also know from expoerience that firing a gun at a dog and missing it will often scare it away, unless of course it is a dog that has been trained/conditioned to gunfire.
 
Bad idea. Definitely carry a less-lethal option like OC spray. I recommend POM or Sabre in the pocket clip or keychain cans because they're practical for EDC. I carry it all the time. The 3oz cans are good for the car. I clip them to a magnetic sunglasses clip on the passenger visor or overhead so they don't get lost in the center console or glovebox.

As for lawful use of deadly force, I recommend getting some training. The first post makes it painfully obvious that use-of-force training is lacking. Get a MAG-40 class or Andrew Branca Law of Self Defense class underbelt.

As for being able to hit a moving attacker, that also requires training that involves more than just a static stance on a square range. I can suggest Thunder Ranch, Gunsite, ITTS, and some itinerant trainers, but if you post where you are, at least the state, you could get advice on local options.

As for skills for breaking-up dog fights, that's something to get from dog trainers.

Bear in mind, advice on dogfights is going to be as varied as the fights themselves. For example, sometimes you have to break up a fight between your own dogs. You actions then are going to be different than a random attack my a stranger dog. Don't balk at advice that doesn't seem applicable to the hypothetical scenario in the OP because sometimes the dogfight situation that it more likely isn't the one that you fear the most.
 
I'm a dog person and they almost always like me. The ones that are sane will leave me alone if I use a command voice. The stubborn ones will go away if I spray pepper spray near them (no need to spray it at them).

A couple of crazy ones have attacked with no warning at faster speeds than a human sprinter. If they start off close to you, you're not going to be able to draw anything before they get to you. Walking boots and walking sticks are already deployed.

Inconveniently, the best answer is to have a very large and capable dog that can protect both you and itself. Conveniently, a large dog like that is also a great deterrent against humans. :)
 
Kleanbore said:
Consider a couple or three things:
  • A German Shepherd can run at a speed that is three times the speed of a charging human attacker. That means that if the defender detects the threat and decides to draw them the dog is twenty feet away, he will have one-half second to draw, get on target, and shoot.
  • Those shot revolvers have a ridiculously small pattern within their short effective ranges, and would not be require much less in the way of aiming than a handgun load with bullets.
  • Shooting a pistol in such circumstances would be extremely risky. The defender would have no time in which to exercise due care and circumspection, and hitting anyone down range would most likely bring serious charges of negligence.
No, my pistol would remain in its holster, concealed.

I recommend a cane and of repellent or a shock baton and dog repellent kept in hand.
Click to expand...
Been in the sticks for many years. Had two aggressive dogs come to visit. But thanks for your opinion.
 
Other. S&W Model 64, loaded with .38 Special ammo. Ruger SP101 or GP100, loaded with .38. Special or .357 Magnum ammo, tailored to the barrel length and overall weight of the weapon. Glock 17, loaded with 9mm Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P. I am responsible for each and every projectile that I shoot. Individual pellets, fired from rifled barrels, spread FAR too wildly.

Loose/feral dogs tend to kill several people a year in the Houston, Texas metro area, so, this is not idle speculation, on my part. One of my LE colleagues has had to shoot multiple dogs, but no human adversaries.
 
Tallball said:
A couple of crazy ones have attacked with no warning at faster speeds than a human sprinter. If they start off close to you, you're not going to be able to draw anything before they get to you. Walking boots and walking sticks are already deployed.
Click to expand...
I don't know why that is so difficult for people to understand. A lot of dogs have been shot and killed, some with justification and some without. But drawing and shooting a dog that is attacking is not the same thing.

When trained K-9s demonstrate how they take down an armed attacker, they do it every time. They do differ from the untrained dog in a vicious attack : they know to go for the arm with the weapon instead of the throat, and they release their vicim immediately upon the command of their handler.

For those who insist on playing movies in their minds about how theywill draw and defend themselves with a handgun, I suggest the following:
  • Try some Tueller Drill exercises with Simunitions; try several times, with different attackers; one failure means failure.
  • To simulate an attack by a dog, shorten the difference from seven yards to seven feet and require hits in amarke. area the size of a small pie plate.
I'm not going to try it. I know the outcome.
 
Ironic that literally 10,000 years later, the best SD weapons are sometimes still a big stick and a big dog. ;)
 
I have some experience with protection dogs and protection dog training. I'm not claiming to be an expert dog trainer, but I personally know good ones that have national championships in Schutzhund/IPO, French Ring, and Belgian Ring and also those that have titled many KNPV dogs. I also spent many years in the training clubs. These are the places that the police K9's come from and they're also the places that served as the foundation for the MWD program at Lackland. Guys like Stewart Hillard came out of the Schutzhund clubs to start that. The police K9's mostly come out of the breeding programs when they've been determined not to be good enough for competition or they start getting old (like 4 or 5 years) and aren't showing promise. I'm not saying they suck, but a competitive trainer can only invest in training so many dogs for the highest level of competition and then what do they do with the rest? They sell them to the charitable organizations that donate the dogs to the police for K9's. Most K9's in the US are donated, but the donors pay for them.

I've worn the bite suit, but I'm not a trial-level decoy. Those guys are incredibly athletic. I knew one that was also a MLB player. The guy was ripped and fast even in the suit. What I can tell you is that the best dogs are awesome. They're incredibly fast and their bites are unbelievably crushing. They're smaller than you might think though. German Shepherds have mostly given way to smaller, lighter more athletic dogs like the malinois, and there's none of those muscle dogs you see in gangland. They're extremely smart. The trials are contrived with rules so the intelligence on display is narrow in focus but when I've seen the dogs problem-solving in training, it's obvious how smart they are. They are still animals though and living creatures. One of the things I'd see was these ego-driven guys, the tactical types that had passion for black guns, 5.11 pants, and dogs that fit the image, mostly Dutch Shepherd or Belgian Malinois. Those guys had a hard time understanding their dogs. The people who do the best are the ones for whom all of it is an all-consuming lifestyle. It's nothing like having an accessory to go with your plate carrier, ballistic helmet, NODS, and DDM4 V7 with the LPVO and PEC15. It also not like having a pet dog or even a gun/sport dog. The closest thing might be training and winning championships with field trial retrievers. You live it 24/7. You cannot just buy one of those dogs and have a bad-ass accessory. You'll ruin the dog if the dog doesn't ruin you first.

I could not tell you what these dogs cost because most of the expense is in the lifestyle. It really costs every material thing you have and all your time. Many tens of thousands of dollars are just the start, because it also costs many hours many days a week at the clubs and the first dogs you get you'll make mistakes with and have to figure things out, so after you've had a few and put everything into them, think about this:

Are you going to walk it down the street and see if some junkyard stray wants to try to chew it up? It's like if you had a $750,000 GT car that was part of your race program with an annual budget of $3.3 million. You're not going to go looking for some street racers with hopped-up Subarus to teach them a lesson.

Protection dogs are a cool thing -- even if you're not competing in trials. A lot of the people in the clubs are working on titles and not necessarily competitive. But their investments are similar in proportion to what they can afford. They put a lot into their dogs in terms of time, money, and emotion. The time and emotional commitments are so great that all the money they have inevitably follows, and for all that you put into it, the dog can still get sick, injured, which costs even more, and then it won't be long before they get old.

Having a dog with you makes you much more likely to be the target of a dog attack -- more specifically, your dog will be the target. It might be ironic, but if you've understood what I've explained so far, you'll see that you need to protect your protection dog. That doesn't mean having a gun or OC or a stick. If that's your plan, you're strategy sucks. You wouldn't take the risks of exposing yourself and your dog to threats where your gun is the first line of defense unless you were incredibly stupid.
 
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Kleanbore said:
I don't know why that is so difficult for people to understand. A lot of dogs have been shot and killed, some with justification and some without. But drawing and shooting a dog that is attacking is not the same thing.

When trained K-9s demonstrate how they take down an armed attacker, they do it every time. They do differ from the untrained dog in a vicious attack : they know to go for the arm with the weapon instead of the throat, and they release their vicim immediately upon the command of their handler.

For those who insist on playing movies in their minds about how theywill draw and defend themselves with a handgun, I suggest the following:
  • Try some Tueller Drill exercises with Simunitions; try several times, with different attackers; one failure means failure.
  • To simulate an attack by a dog, shorten the difference from seven yards to seven feet and require hits in amarke. area the size of a small pie plate.
I'm not going to try it. I know the outcome.
Click to expand...
That must be why no one has ever successfully shot an attacking dog, and why I was able to draw and aim at two before they committed.

Absolutism is generally unwise in SD planning, as is pedantry.

Larry
 
When I was attacked by the pit cross I did not have time to draw. It was only after I shoved my left hand in his mouth could I draw and shoot downward between his shoulders. Pepper spray, yelling, a big stick and I would have been in deep shiz.
 
FB_IMG_1709010965082.jpg

I don't think there's a good solution to this, I just think OC spray is the least bad outcome.

A couple people have said that the odds of you actually hitting a moving dog are pretty low.

So I'm imagining those misses hitting a concrete driveway or a concrete street and ricocheting somewhere.

I'm also Imagining the dog's owner shooting back at you.

Maybe I'm Wrong but I just can't come up with a good solution to this problem that involves a gun
 
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Kleanbore said:
One other thing--the pepper in bear spray is much lower in concentration than that in OC spray desinged for defense against humans. the animal is more sensitive to it.
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Ummmm No.

Pepper spray is designed to temporarily incapacitate a human attacker. Bear spray contains a higher concentration of the active ingredient – making it the stronger spray - and is designed to be shot at a further distance from the attacker.

 
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I’ve had two encounters with aggressive dogs in my life as well. I fought one off with a walking stick when I was a kid until the moron owners called it off. The other was a husky that came out of nowhere about ten years ago. I was carrying my lunch in a bag, and I reacted by just swinging it like a flail. I had a partly frozen apple (walking to work in the winter) and made contact with the dog’s head - that was enough to stun it and chase it off. The impact completely liquified the apple.

I think I’d almost have to have pepper spray in my hand to react fast enough to most dog attacks. It’s surprising that we spend a lot of time thinking about bear defense, but it seems like half the people in this discussion have been attacked by a dog. One thing about pepper spray is that there’s likely no permanent damage to anything, and any bystanders are pretty safe. You don’t have to worry about a backstop or hoping soft ground will catch a bullet you miss with.
 
The Night Rider said:
I'm afraid I don't understand. Why do I take the word of some random poster on the high road over the people who actually make the bear spray?
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We discussed numerous public sources, all of which say that bear spray is more potent. I said I had misread one report.
 
Just poking around the Sabre site they show of levels of
bear spray at 1.0 - 2.0%
dog attack spray .35 - 1.0%
self defense level 1, up to. 5%
self defense level 2, 0.5 to 1.0%
self defense level 3, 1.0 to 1.33%
for whatever it's worth.
 
I have no familiarity with the OP's selections so I voted Other.

I go out everyday in my suburban neighborhood and walk 3 miles, with my EDC Glock 26, 9mm, and a very stout hickory cane.

Between the two I feel fairly confident in warding off dogs and predators. The cane is definitely a threat to an attacking dog!

The Glock can hopefully handle everything else.
 
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