When a rabid dog is on your heels, your first thought is probably to run away as fast as possible. However, on the Adventure Journal website, Brendan Leonard explains that if you know you won’t be able to run away, the best way to get a dog to back off is to first stop running and then, if the dog is still aggressive, to give it the finger and bark.
Brendan notes that a dog instinctively knows what to do when someone is running away from them, and their current owner has probably already tried shouting or speaking quietly to discourage their behaviour, so this probably won’t work for you. Some dogs that chase you are more interested in chasing than catching, and will lose interest once they catch you. According to him, what the dog hasn’t seen is a human taking it up a notch in the madness and giving him a good, incredibly loud yell:
What the dog has not seen is a human being going FREAKING CRAZY on it. Which is what you’re going to do. For one second. When the dog realizes you have completely lost your shit, it will be shocked. You are unstable, possibly dangerous. And, ideally, the dog will stop chasing you.
Admittedly, this trick could stun the dog into stopping (in which case you now have an aggressive dog just standing there,) or even into running away, but it could also just as easily escalate the situation and make the dog even more aggressive. Brendan does point out that he discovered this method while carrying a water bottle he would use on aggressive dogs that would chase him while biking, and that other people he knew carried pepper spray. If you’d rather not hurt the dog, this is definitely worth a try, but it might also be a good idea to have a backup method on-hand in case it doesn’t work. Photo by Sini Merikallio.
Dealing with Aggressive Dogs: Make Your Bark Worse than Your Bike | Adventure Journal
