Just when you thought that a full-on dog fight is the worst thing that could happen, something else comes along. This isn't for the faint of heart so if you're disturbed easily, you might want to go back.
Two days after the pre-Halloween incident, things had been nice and quiet. I was sleeping soundly in anticipation of getting up and going to work the next day when I was rudely awakened by the sound of dogs barking. Now this isn't unusual and they usually quit and I go back to sleep. Not this time...
I was already on my guard because of the earlier fight, but this time I noticed something different, Denise's voice, and it was coming from outside! I hop out of bed and take a look at the clock on my way out of the room, 3:30 am, ugh. I made my way out back to find three dogs barking their heads off in the back corner of the yard with Denise yelling at them to "leave it alone!". The "it" I discovered was a large opossum on top of the 6' chain link fence. Apparently the dogs decided that it didn't belong there and were trying to knock it down. We managed to get the dogs somewhat quiet and were trying to figure out what to do when Taz jumped and hit the fence and knocked the opossum off, on the side where Denise, myself and three dogs were.
It never hit the ground....
I can only assume that it was pretty much dead instantly, it sure seemed that way the dogs were playing with it. Now we had a bigger problem. One opossum, three dogs, two of which tried to kill each other two days before. How do you get a dead animal away from the dogs. Denise didn't want to mess with it (who could blame her?), I wasn't going to grab it and we couldn't just let the dogs have it (plus they weren't gonna let us get near it anyway.)
I had had enough of this. It was 4am (I really really like my sleep), I had to be up in three hours and I was tired of this crap. I went and got the shovel and grabbed the hose. This was going to end...now! I aimed the hose right at Taz's head and yelled "LEAVE IT!". She and CC backed away...then moved toward it again...Spraaaaaaaaaaaay "LEAVE IT!!", they backed off again. They took one step towards the opossum and got..SPRAAAAAAAAAAAAY..."LEAVE IT!!!". This time they backed off and ran over to Denise who promptly grabbed their collars while I tossed the animal over the fence and subsequently buried it.
It was quite a night. Still didn't get much sleep.... Fortunately, things have been pretty quiet since then, thank god.