To Hershey's Dog-Mom

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

If you're taking your adorable chocolate lab out for a stroll on the bike-path on a lovely Sunday afternoon, please protect your dog and other people using the path and keep him on a leash.

I witnessed an almost-accident at close range as the dog ambled from one side of the path to another, forcing a bicyclist to slam on his brakes and stop hard to avoid hitting him.

He doesn't know any better, he's just a dog, doing what dogs do. You, on the other hand, should.

Comments

[buckturgidsen.livejournal.com]

Nuns: "I just think that people who routinely endanger their pets and the people around them through irresponsible pet-ownership should not be allowed to own pets."

Well, we certainly have no disagreement there. Two questions though: (1) how did we get from a discussion of people with unleashed dogs on the bike path to "people who routinely endanger their pets and the people around them"? That seems like quite a leap. (2) Who establishes whether a pet owner is irresponsible? Taking someone's pet away -- or forcing them to move out of town -- these are both very stiff penalties, so there would need to be a pretty iron-clad test to determine whether some threshold of irresponsibility has been exceeded. Your thoughts?

Sorry that the jump from "license revocation" to "euthanasia or exile" baffled you. I thought it was pretty obvious that if you revoke a pet license that the owner cannot continue own the pet, at least not in Somerville. I certainly wasn't trying to make you into a cruel person, I was just trying to point out that it didn't sound like you had thought through the ramifications of your comment.

[nuns.livejournal.com]

There are several stories in this discussion about people who let their dogs run free in places where those pets run in front of moving bikes etc. This endangers both the pet and the people around them. Not a leap at all, simply a reference to the subject of this discussion. Having unleashed dogs on the bike path endangers both the dogs and the other people on the path.

As for who gets to decide what's irresponsible: there are laws in place that define this. I am simply calling for those laws to be enforced.

Turns out that owning a dog without a license results in hefty fines, not euthanasia. Mentioning euthanasia was alarmist and unfair.

As for moving away: I never advocated making people move away. I advocated tickets and license revocations, in that order. You leapt right to the revocations, and started this whole discussion of forcing people out of their homes, which was also alarmist and unfair.

I never suggested that people should be forced to move away. However, if people really feel that their dog needs more free-roaming space than is available where they live, and they really DO love the dog as much as they SAY they love the dog, they should move away by choice, to provide for the basic needs of their loved one. Alternately, they could find a nice home for their loved one, with a family that can provide for its basic needs.

Instead, people simply ignore the safety regulations that call for leashing their dog, which puts the dog into situations where it can be injured or killed, situations that also endanger other people. That doesn't sound like love to me.

[buckturgidsen.livejournal.com]

Oh I see. So the city revokes my dog license but allows me to keep my now-unlicensed dog. That sounds very well thought out. And when you repeatedly said that irresponsible dog-owners shouldn't be allowed to have dogs, I see now that I should have read this as meaning "irresponsible dog-owners shouldn't be allowed to have LICENSED dogs". I get it now. Sorry to be so alarmist.