Thoughts on leashed dogs.

I have been reading the book, "Merle's Door" by Ted Kerasote and am at the chapter called Looser Leash. In it, he details the need for looser leash laws or at least areas where leash free dogs can roam and play. The San Fransico SPCA advocates loose leash laws in its area, stating that:
"Off leash areas are essential to the well being of dogs. Regular off leash play makes for healthy, well adjusted dogs. It burns off pent up energy, builds confidence, improves a dog's social skills, and helps prevent aggressive behavior. Conversely, limiting dog play results in under-socialized, under excersized, under stimulated dogs and often leads to behavior porblem." (could this be talking about people too?) The New York dog advocacy group FIDO states pretty much the same thing. Kerasote even challenges the reader to this thought experiment.
"Put a collar around your neck, attached to a six foot lead. At the other end of the lead is a dog who is at least twice and perhaps four to thirty times your size. Now go to a party, and try to talk with an other human being while your dog pulls at you, barks at you, and, through the leash that connects the two of you, transmits its annoyance, impatience, hurry, and concern, Is it any wonder that there are so many neurotic dogs?

But yet, there were 4.7 million dog bites occuring in the US in 1994 alone. So where is the logic of having more dogs off leash?

Of those bites, 75 percent of the dog bites did not occur between an off leash dog and a pedestrian. As a matter of fact, only 1.1% of the dog bites occured in the outdoors where a off leash dog might be met. Rather, the majority of the bites were in the family home were the bitee knew the biter!! You run a better chance of going to the ER for cutting off your toe with your own lawn mower than you do from getting bit by a dog, leashed or unleashed.

The threat to the public from dogs comes not from supervised free-roaming dogs but from solitary, caged or chained dogs that spend their entire life in what is a red-zone that they call their territory. Cross that red-zone line and you have trouble. Living like this makes a dog depressed and aggressive. What is needed is an area that dogs can be leash free for hours at a time and release this anxiety and spend time with their own. Kerasote claims they need four things. Green space, safety from cars, exercize, and conversation with their own kind. And if you think about it, so do humans. As these criteria decrease in availability, you get stress, depression and psychosis sets in. In humans, we treat it with drugs and what not and wring our hands on how to deal with it. With dogs, we sequester them so that they are virtual prisoners in solitary confinement or we "euthanize" them.

Whether by instinct or accident, I have allowed my dog Gunnar to have a very loose leash from the beginning. I have taken him on as many family vacations as I can, I play with him EVERY day in an open space where he can run, jump and go silly. And while I have worked very hard to teach him to walk on a leash properly, I have let the leash go more and more and now he walks, under my command with out a leash. He is still a dog and has his territory (house and yard), but both in and out of that territory, he is a very well socialized dog with many friends and he has very polite manners. Maybe if more humans got off of their leash, went to a green space that was safe from cars, got a bit of exercize, and conversed with more of their own kind, maybe we would not bite each other so much.

And the next time your local park district is going to make another bare open field into another baseball diamond, step up and suggest a leash free dog park.

TAKE OFF YOUR LEASH!

Later!