Early morning grumble

This afternoon I have to attend a three-hour dog attack seminar.

On the upside, it means I'll be doing less actual work today, and we are allegedly going to be paid overtime for the three hours.

On the downside, it will be a complete waste of time. Learning how to wear dog armor and get attacked by trained attack dogs who are trained to attack an armored extremity is not going to help with being unarmored and defending one's self against untrained, wildly vicious street dogs.

These seminars are all for appearances. Nothing else.

UPDATE: Well, at least it wasn't boring. I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know, as far as handling dog attacks out in the field. I did learn a couple of bits of dog trivia that were interesting, though not really what I could call useful. For example, the Rottweiler was originally a cattle dog. Also the chocolate Lab has a much higher pain tolerance than yellow Labs. While the yellows were bred for retrieving waterfowl (which I knew), the chocolate was bred for jumping into icy water and retrieving fish nets (which I didn't know). I also learned about a breed of dog I had never heard of before: the Presa Canario. They were almost unheard of in the U.S. until they became infamous in this incident. (Apparently this trial was big on CourtTV but I never watch that channel). The lady who taught the class was extremely critical of the media in this case, because she believed that it was wrong for them to publicize all the results of the dogs' autopsies. It seems that the male dog involved had consumed 4 1/2 pounds of the victim. When this got out, it immediately created a high demand for this breed. (It just goes to show what I've always said: people are slime).

I also got to see an Argentine Dogo in action. That is one scarily impressive dog. The one they had originally came in on a drug boat. She said such a boat was seized off Florida which contained two tons of cocaine and 40 Dogo puppies.

So it wasn't boring, but three hours for a couple of trivia items is still a waste of time. And it was a real drag having to hang around until 5:00 when on a normal day I would have been out of there at 1:45.

One other thing. The German Shepherd she had would have been dwarfed by the Shepherd that mauled me a couple of years ago. I think the one that got me must have been crossed with something else much bigger. That sucker was huge.