Tank, I’m afraid, has turned into a canine racist, eh!

Frank Touby —

Tank spent his first night back in St. Lawrence Neighbourhood on very familiar ground. Not nearly as free-wheeling as he could be at our Lake Erie cottage, but in a known and treasured environment. He visited his old stomping ground at St. Lawrence Market Saturday morning, met a few friends among the newspaper sellers there and plenty of shoppers who know him.

Everywhere we take him Downtown people stop and ask, “Is that Tank?” He’s really well known and memorable.

The Tank Report

We have had to add a slip-chain collar to his red-leather ensemble because as much as he loves people, he is triggered by some mysterious forms of (dare I call it “racism?”). He is prejudiced against boxers as a class. Not the fisticuffs variety of boxer, but the canine boxer race.

He is also triggered by some other breeds or styles of mutts that we’re still learning. He was able to back out of his leather collar and I had to make a leaping tackle to hold him off the object of his dispute. So a choke-chain is necessary to save my knees and Paulette would definitely have to use that to hold him off.

We expect that in a few weeks as he fails to engage in combat with any dogs he will abandon that mission in life and just get along so he can run free in the park.

Daisy also has a proclivity for beating up on certain dogs, the small white kinds. Not all of them, but somehow she knows which small white dogs to pounce upon. I guess that makes her a dog-racist. Or maybe it’s a size-ist, since the only big dog she tries to engage in St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, a guy named Webster, could tear her apart limb-by-limb.

Anyhow, in time Tank will pull back from his instant aggression streak and adopt that live-and-let-live philosophy that is so much a trait of the black Labrador retriever breed.

Meanwhile, for my fellow Canadians this weekend, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

And for my fellow Americans, “G’day, eh!”