Le parc à chiens

~ iamthesunking

I have just had the last of my set of cycling lessons with Cat Daddy’s friend Gerard. (It was supposed to happen ages ago, but then I had appendicitis and somehow I haven’t got around to rearranging it until now.)

We usually choose Monday morning as our cycling day, because there are fewer people in the parks than on a weekend. However: DOGS. Mon Dieu. Cycling in a park with dogs is like cycling in and out of moving land mines.

The horrors we were forced to endure during our last session included the following:

1. A russet-coloured sausage dog who sat stone-still in the middle of the path whilst his human was on the phone*, then sprang out in front of me just as we attempted to overtake him. The human did apologise but it was a dismissive kind of “Sorry” … and she remained on the phone.

2. A large, honey-coloured Labrador-type beast who chased us, barking, whilst his human was on the phone*. Gerard decided to bark back at him, which scared him witless and sent him packing.

3. A brown and white spaniel-type thing who offered us his stick, whilst his human was on the phone*. Gerard picked it up and threw it just a fraction of a second before his brain informed him that doing so was a legally-binding contract and that, from that moment onwards, he was obliged to keep throwing the stick forever more. We then had to cycle extra fast to get away from him.

*Do you see a pattern emerging here?

Cats, surely, are less trouble than this? Well, ok, Louis Catorze isn’t. But most normal cats are, right?

Catorze can be seen here, pondering that question and also wondering exactly who these “normal cats” might be:

Sa Maj says “normal” is overrated.

22 thoughts on “Le parc à chiens”

  1. We hiked over the weekend and the mountain bikers were pretty obnoxious. We had our dogs on leash and were considerate about sharing the trail, but I wasn’t happy about having to make way when both sides of the trail had a lot of cactus…. My husband was a trail biker back in the day, so he was more tolerant. I was worried my dogs would get cactus thorns as we left the very narrow trail to give them room.

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    1. Cat Daddy and I don’t have a dog but we are also considerate path users. During the pandemic we would always go into single file if someone needed to get past, and very few people did the same for us. 😐

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      1. We pull our dogs all the way off the trail when the bicyclists come through – provided we hear them coming. The polite ones say “on your left!”The rude ones just plow through. Garnet was afraid of bicycles and skateboarders (in the city) that would come up on us unexpectedly, but she handled it better if she saw them coming. It is a common problem here in the city – pedestrians v bicyclists and cars v bicyclists.

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  2. I used to ride my bike to work which was about 16 kilometers away. Part of that ride was on an old railroad track that was converted to a trail. Often I would come up on walkers who would spread out across the trail as if deliberately trying to interfere with cyclists. Once I came upon a man walking his dog. He was on the left side of the trail and his dog was on the right. I think they wanted to clothesline cyclists.

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  4. I’m accustomed to meeting badly trained dogs in Brussels . When you walk out a young child in the Bois de la Cambre, you can meet dogs which come to lick their face or to steal their cookie.

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  8. ROFL at “Gerard decided to bark back at him, which scared him witless” I do love dogs as well as cats, although the yappy purse pooches get on my nerves…

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