Why are some dogs called ankle-biters?

Hay Friends Of Bitter, Bitter Coffee Park this Time will invite you in the stile of the chat coffe shops on:

Why are some dogs called ankle-biters?

When I was a kid we used to have a little terrier-type rescue dog, quite similar to this one:

Cute, isn't he? Yes, he looked cute. BUT...he was THE embodiment of the term "ankle-biter". He made a sport of it. And he was an ambush predator. He lurked behind doors, walls, corners, furniture, EVERYWHERE, waiting for one of us to walk by and then, always from behind, bite our ankles. Not "nibble", no.......bite. Sometimes, when barefoot, he even could draw some blood. And although he didn't seriously injure you, it HURT.

Thus, walking through our home was quite an 'adventure' for all of us, and you would frequently hear someone scream and curse somewhere in the house. That was kind of 'normal' at home. And also the reason why he spent a good part of the day in the fenced yard. It was a large yard, with the fence facing the street at quite a distance from the house.

What we didn't know was that there was a hole in that fence within the hedge.

How we found out?

Well, we heard that there was a little black devil down our street biting passersby from behind in their ankles. Ooops! That sounded too familiar, so we decided to observe him one day. All of us, the whole family.

And what we saw was somewhere between hilarious and shocking, and resembled quite closely this picture (although 1- we saw it from behind, 2- our dog was a lot smaller and all black, 3- the sheep here was a person and 4- there was a a hedge with a -supposedly intact- fence between them two).

We watched our little darling lurking behind the fence until the person had walked by. Suddenly he disappeared in between the bushes, the person on the other side of the fence shrieked and turned around in the exact moment when our sweet furbaby appeared again inside the yard running full speed towards the house, while turning his head a couple of times to see if someone was following him. All of that within a matter of seconds.

So yes, our lovely little family pet had been entertaining himself ambushing people behind the hedge, stalking them from behind to bite their ankles and make them scream, and then running away as fast as he could.

Suffice to say that this was the last time the "little black devil" had struck in our street...the fence was fixed, and from then on his victims were limited to family members, and one or the other family friend...

Well, that was an ankle-biter. I'd say he even might have been the FATHER of all ankle-biters! RIP. We loved you regardless.

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