By: Ben Johnson
I have a friend who was very
recently besieged by ravenous wild hell pigs. I’ll call the friend “Lexie,”
because that is her name, and the hell pigs were a couple of improperly
socialized and therefore quite rude American Bulldogs which had somehow gotten
off-leash in our Baltimore neighborhood. Apparently they ran up to her while
she was in the middle of a very unassuming regular walk down the block, barking
and snarling and generally being very uncool indeed.
If you’re not familiar with the
breed, the American Bulldog is one of those that qualifies as a potentially
fatal attacker if its owner does not take special care to avoid raising a horrifying
weaponized giant muscle with teeth. It is a fight-or-flight response dog in any
case where it’s unrestrained and not making clear dopey “hey I like you and I
want to be your friend” moves.
Lexie reverted to Discover Channel wild
bear survival techniques such as screaming and acting like a crazy person and
basically shitting herself, which confused the hell pigs sufficiently for her
to escape unscathed. I’m not sure I can or should recommend Lexie’s wholly
unplanned actions in the case of other potential maulings. Lexie’s initial “please
be aware” post on Facebook is currently devolving into a very long,
point-missing, and, to be honest, boring discussion about industry standard
hell pig defense techniques. My plan is to get on the roof of the nearest car,
but I don’t know, and I’d prefer continuing not to know, if that would be
practical or effective. I think the simple truth of life is that sometimes
people just get torn to shreds by deranged space beasts, and I’m glad that
hasn’t happened to me and didn’t happen to Lexie.
Since this incident, Lexie has been
obsessed with baseball bats. I’m not going to tell her not to be obsessed with
baseball bats. That’s not my job. She got run up on by terrifying ghost hounds,
she experienced that, and the emotional fallout is her burden to deal with as
she sees fit. My job is to be the friend she knows who might perhaps best be
equipped to assist in the purchase of baseball bats and in refining their theoretical
optimum fear-deadening utilization. She runs with a very arty crowd, not many
of whom will drive her to Play It Again Sports and then review various methods
of hypothetical retributive dogsmashing justice in the parking lot.
For my money, you’d probably want to
choke up about a third of the way from the base of the handle. Grip that sucker
one-handed, so as to still have one good hand available if the primary one gets
eaten. You’ll want, I’m guessing, to use several short back and forth
downstrokes, while backing away in a fencing-like motion. Think of the bat as a
downward-facing windshield wiper for keeping dogs off your legs. You’re not
looking to square up a kill shot to the skull with a wide, majestically looping
follow-through that’s going to leave you vulnerable if and when you miss.
That’s the deadly sin of pride, friend, and it’s what causes people, and again
I’m just spitballing here, to die of beast attacks while holding a baseball bat
like they’re Gary Sheffield instead of somebody who knows and accepts their
limitations. No, seriously, go ahead and look like a goon, and by all means
sacrifice power in favor of making contact. The goal is to discourage by making
the attacking beast think “ouch, wait, maybe this sucks” as the result of
lunging after any random pedestrian who happens to currently be holding a
Louisville Slugger.
I am of course not qualified to
invent an anti-dog baseball bat maneuver, not by any direct application of experience
nor by any theoretical mastery of the involved concepts. I’m just a guy who
thought about this particular problem good and hard, and earnestly pretended,
while holding a baseball bat, to be attacked by nonexistent dogs in a mini-mall
parking lot for a solid twelve minutes. I did this not to come up with a
perfect, repeatable solution to a life-threatening problem. I did this because
Lexie, who is a cherished friend of mine, had a run-in with a pair of less than
welcoming local demon pigs, and this caused her to want a bat, and because I
like to think of myself as a good friend I am ready to participate in her
healing process to the extent that it involves laughing until she can’t breathe
at my taking idiotic dog-fighting test swings behind the Dunkin’ Donuts on
Belair Road in Nottingham.
If you are some kind of an expert in
fending off ghastly attack monsters with sports equipment, do me a favor: shut
up. This isn’t about you. You can’t expect every little random person who
happens to have stumbled on an interest in your chosen field to be seriously
interested in your opinion. We’re dealing with very particular abstract theory,
and very particular emotional responses, and very particular holy shit I
thought those dogs were gonna kill mes. They do not apply to you. They do not
apply to anybody, really, except to me and to Lexie and to the nonexistent dogs
in the parking lot who totally just got their asses kicked. You know who you
are.
