Yikes! Some of you people are pretty aggressively anti-dog! I'm wondering if this is a cultural difference again- my mind boggled when I saw a thread on another cycling forum about "do you carry a gun when you ride" and the response was mostly yes, cue lot's of gun-geeking about what calibre, how many bullets, how many bears can you kill with a single shot etc etc. Scary to me! In the UK you take a gun when you are hunting, and try to conduct yourself with some degree of civility around other peoples animals. I never heard of anyone in the UK carrying pepper spray to blast dogs with!