For 15 years, I grew with a dog that I loved dearly, and throughout most of my childhood I was surrounded by other dogs from the neighborhood that I enjoyed almost as much. If it wasn’t for an incident, way back in grade one, where a neighbor’s half-wolf, half-husky decided to go all airport Bjork on me, I would probably have nothing bad to say about the species.

Unfortunately, a small percentage of dog owners do a poor job of raising their pets, and some of these dogs eventually exercise their aggressiveness towards humans. Many of these owners will pledge that their beast is friendly and doesn’t mean any harm, but that is some comfort to the paperboy or unassuming passerby that happens to trigger the dog’s terminator mode.

So today I was cutting across a park when I noticed the man walking in front of me stop dead in his tracks. Another man from the opposite direction was approaching with what looked to be a rather large Rottweiler. The owner yelled, “he’s friendly, he’s friendly,” then raced to place a leash around its neck. Then, surprisingly, the man with the dog allowed his Rottweiler to run free with the retractable leash and jump up on the man in front of me. I watched with caution.

The man in front didn’t look comfortable at all, and was nervously standing there with the dog jumping all around him. I thought it was rather rude of the dog owner, and it seemed as if he had decided that his dog should do whatever it pleased, despite the clearly uneasy body language exhibited by the other man.

Then I wondered, what would I have done?

1. Assertively demand that the owner get control over his dog, and tell him to fuck back off.

Here, you might seem like a total asshole, even though you have every right to act this way. You’re placing your rights and safety first. And right now you feel violated!

2. Nervously play along and act like it’s no big deal.

In this scenario, you have bent to the will of the dog and its owner. You’d rather roll the dice and hope that it’s another harmless encounter with someone’s pet. In addition, you’ve avoided making a scene or escalating the situation.

It’s hard to say what choice I would of made. This was no tail-wagging lab, or ankle biting pug. It was an aggressive, heavy looking dog, jumping up on a stranger with its owner seemingly reluctant to control its behavior. Scenarios like this play out often at public parks, and almost always without incident, but should a person who feels uncomfortable by another person’s pet just quietly deal with the situation and allow themselves to be at the mercy of a potentially dangerous animal and its irresponsible handler?