I don’t know about other states in Australia, but here in the West, it seems the city has gone to the dogs. They’re everywhere. Bunnings started it, and now people think that everyone else wants to engage with their animals. People ignore signs that are there for a reason, like ‘no dogs allowed’, and ‘all dogs must be on a leash’.
Those of you who are avid dog lovers probably can’t see a problem with not following those rules, but they are there for the comfort and safety of the people who also engage with those areas. Not everyone loves dogs. Some people are scared of them. Others have allergic reactions that take longer to recover from than the moment of engagement with an unleashed curious animal that slobbers on them to say hello.
That person who always gets slobbered on is me. I don’t hate dogs, but neither do I love them. If they stay where they’re meant to be, I generally don’t care. What I do get annoyed about is having to push your animal down off my body when I pass it because it’s unleashed in an area that calls for animals to be controlled. I get sick of being licked when I enter cafes or shopping centres where someone has left their animal right beside the door. I think I must emanate a secret scent that dogs adore (the same one that tells every mosquito in the vicinity where I am) because it happens to me on a very regular basis. Last time I went to my singing lesson, my coach was babysitting a friend’s dog. She let him in from the back door because he was whinging, and he raced straight over and tried to jump on me. She said she’s never seen him react that way; I said I was used to it. A friend’s daughter’s dog has the same reaction. She’s one of those big black energetic ‘puppies’ with massive strong paws who looked the size of a miniature pony at only a few months old. She would race up and jump all over me or lick my head. All things that made me very uncomfortable when I was seated because her mouth was at my head height. She’s kept outside when I’m visiting, but if she manages to get in while I’m there she comes straight for me. I know she’s only trying to be friendly, but it is still very intimidating.
I need to point out here that I am allergic to dogs. Being licked sets off itchiness, rashes and a headache. Being in the same room that one is either in or spends a lot of time within gives me the same reaction, along with sore eyes and a feeling of dryness in my mouth. It takes about 20 minutes to start having a reaction to dog dander and much less if I come in direct contact with one. I grew up with dogs, not knowing my constant headaches and rashes weren’t as much hay fever as they were allergies. I’m aware of this reaction, and so I take steps to avoid it – such as taking antihistamines when I’m visiting someone that has a dog and avoiding places where animals can be found in abundance.
What then bothers me is when people don’t have the same consideration for others and assume you’re perfectly okay with their dog in your space. I’m not if that animal either shouldn’t be in that space or should be on a leash but isn’t. Two weeks ago, my husband and son were sitting on a bench in a park, having a coffee. Some people were walking their dogs. Most were doing the right thing. The one who wasn’t let his animal off the leash, and it came straight for my family. It started pushing its nose around my husband’s coffee cup, and he told it to go away. He grew up with dogs too and isn’t allergic to them, but he still expects that people will control their animals responsibly and isn’t happy when they don’t. The animal didn’t go away and bounded around him and my son. The owner wandered over and laughed about it. Hubby told him it wasn’t funny and to control his dog and leave them alone. The owner got offended, as people tend to do when they’re in the wrong, and said, “It’s just a dog”. Hubby responded that he didn’t care what it was; it should be on a leash and leaving him alone.
I had a similar experience last night with my mother. My mum is 85 years old and absolutely tiny at 4 foot 10 inches tall. That’s about the same height as a child in middle primary school. She walks with a cane for stability. For a treat, given it had been a hot week and she doesn’t have air-conditioning, I drove the 90 minutes to her house and took her out for a meal. We chose to go to the beach park because the sea breeze was in, and the temperature had dropped considerably as a result. There was a lovely cooling wind swirling around us, and we were enjoying sitting at a picnic table on the grass, watching the sun gradually lower and more and more people come out to get a breath of fresh air.
Some of those people had their dogs with them. We weren’t bothered about that. There were plenty of signs where we were sitting that stated, ‘no dogs allowed’. For people who prefer to not read signs, there were also symbols – a dog inside a circle with a cross through it. Pretty clear messaging. Further down the beach was another set of signs proclaiming, ‘dogs allowed off leash’. Again, we had no problem with people having their dogs off-leash in a dog-friendly area because that’s not where we were.
Yet, three times in the hour that we were sitting eating and watching the waves, we were approached by unleashed animals with disinterested owners. When seated, my mum’s head wasn’t any higher than that of a small standing child. We weren’t bothering anyone with our dinners on the picnic table. So you can imagine our perturbation when a large red dog bounded over to us and stuck its face right into Mum’s. It was a huge, solid animal. She stared it down and said, “No. Go away”, but it persisted. It had frothy slobber around its mouth, which was level with Mum’s eyes. Mum has had two lots of eye surgery in the last year, so that’s not where she wanted an animal to be. It tried to come around to me, and I told it the same thing: “No. Go away.” Again, it refused to leave. Its owners then came along the path, because it had gotten well away from them, and called it. It ignored them too and stayed standing shoulder to shoulder with Mum. We knew it was interested in her dinner, but we also didn’t know the dog well enough to know if it was going to become aggressive. The owners kept calling, but they didn’t move any faster to try to remove it from our vicinity.
Eventually, the owners, at the same ambling pace they’d used coming along the path, got level with us and said, “He can smell your dinner. He’s a sucker for chicken”. I don’t care if he’s a sucker for caviar – he was in a ‘no dogs allowed’ area, off-leash and interfering with people who were sitting in an area where we were supposed to be safe from animals. Why should we have to put up with having a large, slobbery dog literally in our faces, stopping us from enjoying our meals?
He wasn’t the only dog to come and bother us. Two more did the same thing. One was a slightly less large white dog with big dark orange spots on its hide, the other somewhat smaller. What kind of dogs they were isn’t the issue here, though – it’s the people who do the wrong thing, make no effort to discipline their pets effectively and then expect other people to be all right with that. I’m not okay with having dogs in my face while I’m trying to eat or being interfered with by one when I’ve taken all the right steps to be in a dog-free area. When did this attitude start that because you love your pet and its family to you, that I have to have the same love and interest in it? Why is it okay that my personal space and enjoyment of an outing are dependent on people who choose not to control their animals? Standing on a path calling an animal’s name with no sense of authority tells me your dog isn’t well trained to start with and shouldn’t be let loose amongst people who might be knocked over or otherwise interacted with in a way that isn’t positive.
Mum tells me that my first negative encounter with a large dog also happened at the beach. I was about four or five years old and standing in the water. I was paddling, and she had her eye on myself and my two sisters – one a toddler, the other a year older. It wasn’t a dog beach, but someone had let their large shaggy dog off the leash anyway, despite the number of people around. It was bounding through the shallow water, having a wonderful time. She realised it was on a direct course to my location and would have knocked me down into the water in its enthusiasm. Being tiny and also having her eye on a baby at the water’s edge, she couldn’t move fast enough to get to me. Thankfully another man also saw what was happening and ran into the water, grabbing me out of the dog’s path. Again, it was the choice of an owner to ignore the rules, with the consequence that other people who had every right to be where they were doing what they were doing were impacted in an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous way.
When I worked in a primary school, I regularly saw parents doing the wrong thing with their dogs. It is a state-wide rule that animals are not allowed on school grounds. That rule is there for the protection of children. You might not think your dog will bite, but streams of children rushing past it, yelling and laughing and doing what kids do might prove otherwise. I witnessed one parent who absolutely knew better bring his boxer dog to a sports day. He had it on a lead, but he wasn’t controlling where it went. It leapt up on the chest of a child who was about 18 months old and knocked it down. The child started crying. The mother picked him up and cuddled him to her chest to comfort him. The dog owner, who was handsome and could be very charming, smiled at the mother and said, “Oh, sorry”. She responded with, “It’s okay”’. Except, it wasn’t okay. The dog should not have been there, and it had interfered with a child who wasn’t old enough or strong enough to defend itself. I walked over and told him to take the dog home. He said he’d walked down with it to watch his child’s race. He had older children at the school and knew about the ‘no dogs’ rule. He might have been there to watch the race, but he wasn’t standing apart from the crowds keeping his dog in control – he was right in the middle of the areas where the kids were running around doing tabloid games. He seemed to expect that his engaging grin would disarm the other parents if anything went wrong.
The attitude that other people have to accept your animal’s poor behaviour or your lack of ownership over it has to stop. If you can’t control, won’t control or don’t know how to control your animal, don’t take it out when people are about. It is bad enough that I have to walk through layers of animals, some of whom are lying in my path and some who bark at passers-by, to get into a café to enjoy the safer dog-free air inside. I’d rather stay home, which doesn’t help the economy at all. I’m also willing to bet I’m not the only person avoiding these locations. I feel sorry for the wait staff who have to step around animals sprawled out on crowded front decks and eating areas to be able to do their job of bringing people food.
Last time I went to Bunnings, which I try to do away from peak times when people bring their pets instead of taking them to the park, the door greeter told me she’d had to turn away someone with a snake. He couldn’t see why he couldn’t bring it, given it was his pet, when everyone else could do the same thing. Bunnings allowed dogs because they didn’t want tradies leaving their animals in a hot car while they bought the equipment and materials they needed for their daily work. It wasn’t so that it could turn into a place to parade your pets. I’m still amazed they could ban onions because someone slipped, but they allow dogs in owner’s arms or in trolleys that put them at face height to children. Don’t even start me on how many times someone must have been called to clean up a ‘code brown’ because some pet owner has let their dog urinate or defecate in the aisles and hasn’t done anything to fix the mess. I’ve seen dogs lift their legs against trees that provide shade in café forecourts or on chair and table legs, with no response or even recognition from the owner who is sitting sipping their coffee and generally ignoring their pet, that their animal has done something that will impact the safety or enjoyment of a fellow café attendee. I will never understand why people put their pets in a car, drive to a café and then force them to lie under a table while they have a coffee or a meal, then put them back in the car and drive them home. Whose benefit is that all for? It certainly doesn’t seem to be about the pet they profess to love.
Why does your pet have to be my problem? Take it somewhere it wants to be, like a dog-friendly park. Stop letting it go in areas where it isn’t allowed to be. Those areas have been designated dog-free for a reason. The best example of someone ignoring those rules to adverse effect was the day we went to the Toodyay Moondyne Joe festival. It was clearly advertised that no pets were allowed. Someone ignored that rule and brought their dog. Part of the festival fun is when a farmer lets his sheep wander down the main road. Whether the person who came knew that or not is irrelevant. Everywhere had signs posted saying ‘no dogs’, and it was on the website that people accessed to hear about the event. But someone decided their dog wanted a long drive and to be paraded up the road amongst crowds. You can see what came next. The dog broke free from its owner’s control when it saw the sheep and started running at them. The sheep got upset and tried to get away from the farmer. They were bounded in by the people who were lining the streets, but they were bothered by the dog, and it ruined the spectacle of having sheep wandering peacefully up and down the main road as part of the parade.
Don’t bother thinking I’m just having a rant because I hate dogs. I owned dogs before I realised I was allergic to them. I loved them enough to take them places that were appropriate for them to be in, kept them on a leash when requested, and left them home if I was going out for a drink or meal with a friend. I didn’t see them as something to be promenaded about. I also took our badly behaved shih tzu to dog training to learn how to control her effectively when she was leaping on visitors and refusing to heel while out walking. I feel sorry for animals who aren’t given clear boundaries and good training and get into trouble for being an animal in an area designed for humans. My sister got bitten on the face by a sausage dog when she was five, but we have never blamed the dog. It was on its own property, and she bent down to pat it on the face. Its response, in fright and self-defence, was to bite at the thing it perceived was attacking it. It was elderly with poor vision but clearly still had good reflexes. My parents didn’t ask for the dog to be put down though because they recognised we were the ones who had approached it and interfered with it in its own territory. That would have been a completely different situation, however, had it occurred while we were out and if the dog had approached us unleashed.
It’s YOUR pet. It’s YOUR responsibility. Don’t assume your animal will not respond on instinct simply because it has never put a foot – or a mouth – wrong in its own environment. If I’ve seen or been involved with this many incidents, I wonder how many other people are encountering the same issues on a regular basis but are being tagged as dog haters by the very vocal pet community who want all the rights but aren’t willing to control their animals when out and about. They may be ‘fur babies’ to you, but don’t expect me to accept them as my family as well.
A Glorious Mess 