For many years, there has been an unwritten rule in Central Park that dogs can be off-leash before 9 am and after 9 pm. Now some crazies called the Juniper Park Civic Association have brought a lawsuit against the Parks Department to end this privilege for dogs and their people.
The Urban Hound newsletter says "We don't think this lawsuit stands a chance (already, a judge has said it lacks reason). " But the leash Nazis won when they sued to keep dogs on leash in Riverside Park and now no dogs run free there.
A similar arrangement is in effect in the parks near where I live. Ultimately the answer is dog parks.
1 comment:
I live in a small town in the western u.s. which has seen a huge influx of people from larger cities recently.
We are used to walking our dogs at the park off leas in the morning. It has always been a civil and friendly affair. No one in the group expects dogs to be other than dogs. Which means that they are basically friendly and love meeting other dogs to play with--and at the same time, there is the occasional barking and posturing that dogs will do sometimes especially on first meeting.
Recently, however, two big mcMansion developments were put right next to the park. These people's dogs are always on-leash, both the dogs and people are tense and stressed. One dogless woman screamed clear across the park at me and my dogs. "Get your dogs on a leash!" I'd never seen her before. My dogs were with me, snooping and enjoying themselves and showed no interest in her whatsoever. The people with dogs are just as bad, just as ridiculous.
We DO have a dog park. One dog park. It is about as big as four big house lots. There are a couple of bushes. This park bores me and it bores my dogs. We went there a couple of times and they just sat and looked at me. What are we doing here, they wondered.
People like to think that dogs are sooooo different from people that they don't mind sleeping their lives away while we are off at work. They don't minding living their lives at the end of a tether. They can be ghetto-ized into tiny parks with nothing to do or smell or investigate.
It's a shame that we are so terrified of anything non-human that we have to destroy it.
We punish dogs for our fears. The solution is for humans to grow up.
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