The police in Austin, Texas go through many hours of sensitivity training to avoid shooting dogs, for after all, it’s a matter of 100 to 1 that people complain to the police about shooting dogs over shooting people. I wonder per usual, if we should be narrowing all this down to white people?
Speaking of which reminds me of a story from just a few months ago. Dave, a Texas A&M graduate and refinery engineer who lives kitty-corner from us came up the lawn with my old overweight Golden Retriever in tow. He handed Easy over saying that if he finds Easy on his property again he will shoot him dead. In this case it was not the dreaded fear of a possible lawn crap, but that Easy chased his cat up a tree.
A few years before that we had some likely Republican take a Buck knife to two tires each on three of our cars. An especially nasty event. With the police and most of the neighborhood out gawking and talking about it the following Saturday morning I thought it a good time to warn one and all about my next door neighbor Pappy Yokum. A gentle kind man and friend of mine who was suffering from Alzheimer’s.
I explained that just the week before I had found Pappy sitting at my kitchen table at about 6am and gently walked him home. So “Don’t shoot Pappy!” I humorously said.
Like a good neighbor, Texas A&M engineering graduate Dave said – in front of everyone including the police – that if he found Pappy in his house, Pappy would find himself the recipient of six .44 magnum hollow point rounds in his head. It wasn’t that so much as it was that no one, including the police, blinked an eye. Welcome to Texas and Southern hospitality.