(Due note: this is a fairly long rant and want to share my experience to maybe give someone on some insight)

About a month ago, I was walking my dog down the street. We usually go to this small park down the road. While my dog is doing his thing this guy comes out of his house with his two dogs that are not on a leash and one of them immediately approaches me and I had never seen this particular one before.

As it's trying to get closer to my dog I have mine on a leash and trying to keep him from getting too close to the strange dog. (Mine is a miniature btw and the other guys was a full size btw) so as i am using each hand to keep the dogs seperate cause it looked like his was fairly unpredicatable, I look at the owner and he's just standing on edge of his property watching. So I say to him in a loud and disgruntled voice, 'What, are you just gonna stand there?' and he did, he stood there for a good solid minute and a half not even responding to my question.

Eventually I started using my body to make a barrier between the dogs and verbal commands telling it to go. Finally, the owner starts using a command to call the dog back to him and the verbal command isn't working. he continues on for another full minute trying to do so. I'm in completely frustrated at this moment looking in another direction ready to flip out on both the owner and dog, the owner finally comes over, tries to get his dog physically by the collar and fails multiple times. Eventually the dog runs off back to the house on his own free will.

The owner didn't say anything to me. Not even an apology. I was fully pissed off and decided to call the non-emergency number for the police. Told them exactly what I'm telling you. Apparently in my area, its okay to have your dogs not on a leash, but they have to respond to a command. When the officer finally came, he pretty much flat out said there's not much I can do, but that he could go talk to the guy.

The next day, the mother and the daughter are standing out in the street pretending that they're seeing someone off as they leave in a car and as I get closer, they just started staring me down, so I stared them back down as well. From then on, I haven't seen any of the family members or their dogs around when I am walking mine; knock on wood. Why is that someone has to get hurt before the police do anything?
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To make the story short. Know the laws in your area. Consider carrying bear mace cause you never know when you will need to defend yourself. If you think a dog is going to attack you, you have the right to defend yourself. I am exhausted of inconsiderate people who just let their dogs loose and don't even keep an eye on them and don't even clean up after them in public areas where there's signs specifying you have to.

Carry a Cell phone and Get a spray that shoots a fog and covers good distance. Be aware of which way the wind is flowing. And always, call the cops afterwards to report the situation so that it hopefully doesn't happen again and that the owner doesn't even have a chance to make false statements against you. Same applies if the situation involves people.

Edit: Also wanted to answer the Ops question. It might make the dog mad but if you get it in their eyes and nose, it will be stunned enough to allow you to make your next move.