It was your fault!

So I was walking my 2 poms today, and about 3/4's of the way through I went past a house where a lady was in her garage doing something, and she had some little dog running around that looked like it was possibly a pekingese/chihuahua mix. Of course, because no one in my neighborhood seems to be aware of the law and benefits about leashes, the little dog ran out of the garage and came towards my dogs. Now, it was kind of growling, but it kept space between itself and my dogs, so I never felt like it was going to hurt my dogs. I'm trying to just get my dogs to continue walking forward, when the lady walks out of her garage and starts yelling at her dog. So this little dog is following me, and rather than run after the dog, and pick it up, this lady is trying to yell at it and kick it to get it to go back to the garage. I swear, if I had not made my dogs sit down, then that dog probably would have followed me home with the lady right behind it. What disturbed me most is that when the lady finally picked up the dog, SHE HIT IT! It was open palm, but very hard and audible. I couldn't believe she would hit it, and for all of her own mistakes! It wouldn't have followed me 3 houses down if she had just picked it up, and above all it never would have followed me if it had been leashed or properly contained. The therapeutic effects of my daily walk was definitely ruined, because of how appalling that was to me.<br><br>This isn't a vent but, I find it humorous that everyone assumes I'm walking girl dogs, or that they always think Darwin is a girl dog, because he's half the size of Prince. Some lady commented that I had beautiful dogs when I walked passed her, and then asked if "she" had blue eyes(referring to Darwin).