Altercation

When you go to the dog park as often as Maisie and I do, you're bound to have a dog-on-dog altercation every once in a while.  Maisie tends to run away when other dogs get into it, but occasionally a dog sets his/her sights on Maisie.  Unfortunately, that happened this afternoon.  Right when we arrived, a pit/Rhodesian ridgeback mix acted a little aggressively towards Maisie.  Maisie picked up on it and tried to give her a wide berth for a bit. Eventually, it seemed the two had settled their differences and began playing together.

Suddenly things took a turn and the other dog started snapping at Maisie. Maisie retaliated and we had a fight on our hands.  The other dog's owner was able to grab her and they left immediately. His dog had a few cuts on her face, a worse outcome than my dog.
Maisie has a little cut near her right eye:

And a tiny scratch on her front right paw that you can really only see if you enlarge this:

Maisie seemed no worse for the wear...she is a tough little monkey.  I feel it's important to let her keep playing with other dogs and have a positive park experience after a negative incident, so today we stayed for a good 40 minutes post-altercation.  Within the first ten minutes, Maisie appeared to have forgotten all about it.  She acted as she always does...trying to get other dogs to chase her, running and wrestling and rolling in the snow.

The rest of our visit was uneventful, except when I caught her eating poop that someone had failed to pick up.  It's the most disgusting habit I can imagine and I rarely catch her in the act, but I don't know how to stop it.  Just writing this makes me queasy, especially because she licked me on the lips as I bent down to take off her leash when we got home. *blech*

Now Maisie is resting and as usual, wishing I'd get that damn camera out of her face...