Dog Wars

Aw, a new puppy! How sweet! How precious and adorable! How wrong!

Little Ozzy turns out to be the monster that destroys a family's peace and harmony. Or does he? The whole situation is so complex, and the run-up to the Dog War so fraught with complications, that it is completely unreasonable to conclude that it began with any one event — not even the arrival of Ozzy on that fateful day in April.

It makes no sense to see the Dog War as an isolated episode, and once it really exploded, it stirred up a lot of old feelings and memories, recollections and resentments that perhaps would have been better forgotten. The Dog War was just a scrimmage in a much larger and longer running series of conflicts.

And while the history of the Dog Wars is a story of conflict, it is also a story of victory. Although it is a story of struggle, it is a story of triumph too.