posted
First it was the trash cans, with the dogs that run loose in the neighborhood constantly knocking over our trash. Today, I found myself bringing water out to a dog that belonged to a house up the street, and showed up on my front porch with her tongue hanging out almost to the ground, poor baby. It's August in Alabama. Dogs, if they have to be out at all, should be somewhere with a water source. The first thing I did, the first thing when I got home from my class, was to let in my puppies and get them water. And they were in a well shaded backyard and had full water bowls when I left. I mean, it's just common sense. I was hot and thirsty being outside today and I'm not wearing a fur coat.
So I call the number on the tag. And the lady that answers the phone tells me she appreciates me calling, but the dog isn't missing she just likes to get out and wander. See, they have no fence, so there's a doggie door, and the dog just goes out when she wants to and lately she's been wandering farther and farther away from the house but they don't worry because she always comes back.
I tried to be diplomatic and still get my point across. I stressed several times how hot the dog was, and how much water I'd had to bring her. I told her I would bring the dog to her. She said no, don't worry, the dog will head home later. I said "I've never seen her running loose around here before, so I assumed she'd gotten out of a fence." I stressed the word FENCE with hopes it would subliminally sink in - this dog shouldn't be running around loose.
There's nothing I can do, either. There's a leash law, but it's unenforced. When I tried to get help on the trash incidents, all they did was put flyers in people's mailboxes asking them to please remember the leash law. It did nothing. When I called back, the cops said that was all they could do.
This poor baby. Her name is Nellie. She's a yellow lab mix and looks to my untrained eye to be about 9 months to a year old. Left wandering around, fending for herself in a subdivision that has a not insignificant amount of traffic, and on a day where the temperatures exceeded 90 degrees. These people don't deserve a dog as sweet as her.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
The people on my street leave their trash cans all over the sidewalk. I have to kick them out of the way to make room for my bicycle.
(This is totally irrelevant, to be sure; it was your comment about knocked-over trash cans that sparked it.)
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Grrr! What kind of idiot leaves their dog to wander in a residential neighborhood? Has this lady never heard of responsibility, or perhaps even just the simple idea of actually caring for a pet?
Have you tried just calling animal control and having the dog picked up? Around here, the owner has to pay a fine to get the animal back. Maybe doing this could send a stronger message that the dog shouldn't be left to wander the neighborhood?
posted
We're a mostly rural county with no animal control. Unfortunately. For a while the dogs that ran loose got so bad my kids were too scared to go outside and ride their bikes.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
We had some neighbors that had a dog wandering over our neighborhood (when the didn't have him tied to a tree). He was a sweet dog and good with kids. His owners failed to tag him or anything, and so on July 4th, he wandered into a neighbor's barbeque and party. Two of my neighbor's cousins fell in love with the dog and begged their parent to take him home. Because of his lack of tagging, their parents agreed to take him. What is really sad and strange is that his original owners never even came looking for the dog. The happy part of the story is that his new home is on a large farm where he can safely roam.
I can't imagine my dog disappearing and not even searching for him. Still, the dog is in a better place.
Posts: 392 | Registered: Aug 2004
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That's scary. When groups of dogs start wandering like that, it's only a matter of time for that pack mentality to crop up. Dogs that normally would be well behaved will suddenly act like a wild dog.
My dad has a solution for the wandering dog, but it's a violent solution (not deadly, just mildly violent), so I'm not sure you want to hear about it.
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posted
The worst offender was a husky, and the owners eventually got rid of it because of so many complaints about its aggression. Heck, I wasn't lobbying for the dog to go, I was lobbying for a fence!
So, it's not as bad as it used to be. But still, I think there is some kind of disconnect in the thinking of people in my subdivision. They want dogs, but they don't want to build fences.
Yeah, fences are a pain, I just built one for my Aussie puppies, but I wouldn't have gotten the pups if I didn't want to build a fence.
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quote:That's scary. When groups of dogs start wandering like that, it's only a matter of time for that pack mentality to crop up. Dogs that normally would be well behaved will suddenly act like a wild dog.
This isn't necessarily true. When I was growing up we lived out in the country, in a tiny little community of *maybe* 25 people. Each household had a few dogs, and no one had fences to keep their dogs penned up. The dogs definitely had people, but they were also most definitely neighborhood dogs--everybody took a kind of nebulous responsibility for them. They ran around together, of course, but they never started acting like wild dogs. Every now and then a new dog would come into the group that liked to chase cattle, but the community had pretty good luck at breaking the individuals of this (I wonder how, actually. That seems like it would be hard, but as a kid I never really questioned it), and the larger pack never really got into the habit of it.
Everybody kept plenty of water out in the summer, and there were lots of ponds and streams for them to drink from as well. Plus a lake. There were also a couple of families, ours being one of them, that had basements that were accessible from outside, and that kept them open so that the dogs could hang out someplace cool in the summer, or dry during a storm.
I think that the neighborhood dogs were a pretty key component of my childhood, really. It's a lot more fun going hiking in the woods when you've got 6 or 8 dogs frolicing around you while you're doing it.
Now, that said, I'm not saying that Belle is wrong in her situation--the two situations aren't really comperable.
The neighborhood dogs were
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