People have become more civilized in the last thousand years but we really should learn some lessons from the past. The reason I say this is people should still be at the top of the food chain! We (speaking for all humanity here) are smarter than any animal but in today’s society – using our native smarts have not been cultivated in cities.

I reviewed this video about two women that were attacked by a Pitt Bull dog and were taking on lots of bites. I would first like to say that an animal owner should not own a dog he or she cannot control and I would also like to point out that these women were scared and they probably had never had to fight for their lives. Review this video and then I will talk about strategy.

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For many of you that have taken karate lessons and learned how to do all of the basics, you may still be wondering; Will it really work? And, How can I make karate work for me? I have read a wikipedia article (one should not rely on wikipedia as authoritative as it can be edited by anyone) on Model Mugging where a gentleman decided to focus on self-defense instead of traditional karate because it did not work for many women (in his judgement).

Karate lessons will give you all of the tools you need to fight back but it will not fight back for you… meaning you will have to get over the feeling of, “Is this really happening to me” and come up with a quick plan. Part of a karate education is supposed to be exposure to fighting and getting some self-confidence to find some moves that work for YOU! If you are just focused on getting the pretty belt or the recognition that comes with a black-belt… you are probably wasting your money.

I will try to relate some of the moves that give me confidence in almost any situation…. moves that I cannot use in sport karate or full-contact karate for the most part. I will try and relate what it is like to be in a real fight for your life as I have been in plenty (all fights after high-school are really (and should be) fights of last resort), and I will try and put it all together for you. And yes – I think anyone can be trained to fight in a self-defense situation. My most favorite move is the counter-punch or lunge punch. Here is a quick video demonstrating this very simplisticly (there is a lot more to it if you want to be successful).

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The following story is of my wife (let me call her Sly) using self-defense when she was a kid! I should explain that she came from a large family with a single working mother for most of her teenage years. Her mother was away a lot and the kids went unsupervised. I have edited this account to remove much of the identifying information.

I decided to publish this becuase there are probably lots of young girls living in unsupervised conditions due to single working parents. Sly has been a fighter ever since we met and had to use her wits to escape many times when she was younger. I will publish self-defense stories of people not trained in karate to show that anyone can use their wits to increase their chances of survival! This is written in the first person – I will hold my comments until the end.

Watch out for those peeping-toms!

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