More Dog Control (and related misunderstandings)

Dog owners in Toronto are no longer allowed to walk bitches in heat or any unaltered males in parks, period, full stop. Canadian saluki breeder Maril Semph sent text from a friend but no link:

"Effective February 01 2008 Toronto did ban all intact male dogs and
females in season, not just from off-leash dog parks but from all
Toronto parks.
It is a nightmare!

"I would have called the CKC but in the original proposal that was
circulated last summer there was no mention of this rule. Then the
city held discussion groups about the proposed changes for all
people who were interested and in one of those groups, one single
person complained of agressive un-neutered males.

"Following that when the rules were finalised it was suddenly
included, based on the complaint of one single person, and no
ability to discuss the rule. We had a matter of days before it went
to council. I and some fellow show dog owners wrote a lot of
letters and asked for an exemption clause for certain dogs
(including show dogs) but it passed with the rule included.

"There is a LARGE fine for violators. If a dog walker is caught with
an intact male they can lose their dogwalking license (they must all
be licensed now and they have a two strikes and you are out
policy)."

DOGWALKING LICENSE??

Matt, we might just have to post the "Harden the fuck up" video.

Meanwhile, Los Alamos NM-- the county not just the town-- has proposed dog and other animal regs that among other things would not allow dogs off lead for anything but work, which does not include hunting-- as a matter of fact they would not allow any dog to pursue any wildlife, period. Dr. Gail Goodman sent me a PDF, which I can send to anyone interested. I wonder if Stingray and Lab Rat can add anything?

In NYC you can now be fined for feeding pigeons in your own back yard. (Incidentally, virtually all claims of pigeon- borne disease are false.) HT Margory Cohen.

An overpopulation of migrating coots offends the residents of a California subdivision. I don't know who is more pathetic-- is it the anti- control housewife who opposes killing any because "I have two small children. What if my dog got out in the yard and they mistook it for some wild animal?"

Or the developers:

"Savaikie recalled that in January, two days after she learned about the possible fate of the coots, a new sculpture was dedicated at a shopping center being built across the street from Bridgeport.

" "The Birds of Valencia" features dozens of silver birds in a celebration of the region's annual migration.

"It will be placed in the middle of a man-made lake."

Finally, an idiot gets called out by Luisa at Lassie Get Help:

"Jon Katz has parlayed inept stockmanship and mismanagement of his dogs into a Slate column, a movie deal, the odd radio appearance and a string of books, and there's a website, too, but I won't link to it.... He is a willfully ignorant, patronizing author who wants you to believe everything he tells you about dogs in general and border collies in particular even though, gosh, he's never claimed to be an expert or anything. And besides, experts are just big old snobs, ha ha ha! He is like that man who wrote The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California back in 1845 with directions to a new route he'd never actually traveled himself and when a group of settlers took his "shortcut," they wound up struggling across the Wasatch Range and the salt flats of western Utah and were trapped in the snows in the High Sierra, where they ran out of food and resorted to cannibalism.

"On second thought, he's much worse than that."

Read it all!