Which way Dad ?

Well we were up and out by 7 o’clock, Darren thinking that it was wise to get our walk in early to avoid the later hot sunny weather. As it happens it wasn’t sunny and wasn’t the scorcher the weathermen predicted, at least not in our area of Yorkshire, the better weather was definitely the early morning up to about 10 o’clock as you can see in photo.
Unfortunately the scene above was soon to turn in to an argument with another dog Walker. We’d walked for another 10 minutes or so from the time of photo, I was a few metres behind Darren and the track we were on opened up in to a much wider space. There was a woman with 3 dogs, 2 small ones and a Bull mastiff, she was about 10 metres away, Darren waited for me to catch up to him. The woman’s dogs weren’t on lead, but then neither was I. Darren was hoping the woman would keep the bull mastiff close to her, but all three dogs came towards me, the smaller dogs were fine, though I never like it when I’m surrounded by other dogs, it’s intimidating and makes me uncomfortable, the bull mastiff being a much bigger dog came across at a slightly faster walking pace, pushed me over and stood on me while I was on my back, I screamed out and Darren was concerned enough to grab me and pick me up. Now it takes a lot to get Darren to complain to people about their dogs, some owners are completely oblivious to what their dogs are doing or the affect they are having on other dogs. But in this case he decided to say something, told the woman her dog should be on a lead if it’s going to attack other dogs. Well the was the start of a rather childish 5 minute argument in which she accused Darren of putting human values on his dog, that I was a submissive dog and that if her Bull mastiff had attacked me that I would be dead, she also said Darren shouldn’t have a dog because he didn’t understand them, that I looked like I was about 16 years old, I’m 8 by the way and that she knew the rules on when dogs need to be on leads or not and that Darren didn’t, she wasn’t going to apologise because her dog in her opinion didn’t attack me it was just doing what dogs do.She accused Darren of swearing, he didn’t, but then she swore and when Darren pointed it out she said she swears all the time at home and work. She was quite irritating, was obviously never wrong, thought she was God’s gift to dog walking and dog ownership and then became hysterical when Darren insisted she shouldn’t have let her dogs especially the mastiff to come over to me. After 5 minutes Darren had had enough and we walked on, I was fine, I wasn’t hurt badly, no makes or anything like that. The woman must have immediately got on her mobile to tell someone about the bad man who argued with her as Darren could hear her talking.
We continued our walk and it was good, just a shame about the argument, but what would you do if a bull mastiff was on top your much smaller dog, complain to the owner, or just walk away, sometimes your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.