That does sound very painful 💀 I'm glad you didn't break anything, tho I wonder how your friend would have reacted in that case (ngl I have come to resent the overzealous Dog Lover™ types a lot in the past years)

But yeah, I also considered that kind of thing. Dogs can hurt people even when they're not being aggressive, especially big dogs. The letter mentions that this is a medium-sized dog, so I'm not sure how much of an issue that could be in this case, but I'm sure there still could be accidents, even if it's "just" tripping or something like that