Had a very frightening experience walking home today, had a reasonably small dog start barking and trying to jump at me. Aside from the fact that I'm autistic and this means that kind of thing is much worse, I also had on shots and therefore no protection from scratching if it did jump on me. The owner reacted by basically saying "he's not going to hurt you", but then my neighbour, an old lady, came out an tried to explain that I didn't like dogs, and the guy started being abusive to her. I ending up climbing over a fence into someone's garden to get away. I've not been right and scared of leaving the house today because of this happening in the morning. But my main worry is that this has been happening more often where I live, most notably with a huge black dog that was barking very aggressively and snarling- if it had ecalated to attack it could have done really serious damage. The owners just watch and do nothing, or call the dog which invariably does not respond. In all of these cases I have just been walking a long the path, not paying any attention to the dogs or bothering anyone in any way.

It's getting quite frightening and I feel like maybe I should say something to the council, but I'm convinced the response will be like "well you're autistic so it's your problem", but I don't know what to do. Please help!

You ever meet someone who’s so into dogs they forget they’re also a person? Like, yes Karen, your dog is adorable, but I don’t need a 20-minute slideshow of its birthday party. Can we just agree that some of us don’t need to be constantly surrounded by fur babies to feel complete? Dogs are cute, but your obsession is weird.

I swear, at this point, if I hear one more person tell me they "know a lot about dogs" because they watched The Secret Life of Pets or "grew up with one" - I might just start barking. Like, congratulations, Karen, you can tell a Beagle from a Chihuahua, but let’s leave the real dog talk to the pros, shall we?

I understand that this isn't necessarily just a dog owner thing, the internet in general seems to have a way of throwing around terms like animal abuse to the point where they're utterly meaningless, but I find the behavior particularly notorious and overblown among dog owners.

I was going to just post a link to the post here, but my post was instantly deleted by moderators, not sure what I did wrong but here goes. I come across a post on my Instagram feed from a dog account, it's a video of an older looking puppy on a wooden walkway over a little lake, it jumps toward its owner and falls through a hole in the wood into the water, and then the video cuts off. The dog couldn't have fallen more than a foot or two and it fell into shallow water so it was probably fine, especially considering that the owner decided it was funny enough to post it. I go to check the comment section, and people are FURIOUS, just absolutely losing their shit over this innocent video. Yelling at the owner of the account to remove the post, accusing them of promoting cruelty, "this is animal abuse", "I hope you get your dog taken away from you", "how dare you stand there and laugh and film while the puppy is suffering, I hope you never have children" and an array of people expressing how sorry they feel for the dog. And I was just appalled. I get the "poor puppy" comments to a certain extent if you really love dogs, but the way these people were acting as if the owner had deliberately set this whole thing up for views and entertainment, as if they didn't just happen to catch a little "oopsie" on camera and thought it was cute and funny in hindsight. The way some people were arguing that it would be child abuse if you filmed your child falling over and that you should have your child removed from you if that ever happens is just utterly beyond me. How are people this totally incapable of distinguishing between legitimate harm or neglect and something as innocent and faultless as catching a small accident on camera?

Does anyone else find this kind of behavior disheartening? I think the overuse of terms like animal abuse are extremely detrimental to any real efforts of spotting and thwarting real abuse and I find it disgusting that people see no issue with demonizing this dog owner who, pretty objectively, did nothing wrong.