Tag: dogs

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More Advice from the Neighbors

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We do “pick up after” our dog. But if I were to somehow not see The Dog take a dump after dark, or forget to bring a plastic bag with me, or suffer some other lapse of responsibility, I sure hope the pile would happen right under this sign. My antagonism toward this precious advisory isn’t rational, and I can’t really explain it. I suspect, though, that part of my feeling arises from the belief that the sort of people who put up notes like this wouldn’t give you the time of day if you passed on the street–unless it was to tell you that if you want the time, you should be careful enough to own and wear a watch.

The other day, I was walking The Dog when we approached a woman sitting in a lawnchair alongside the sidewalk. Her back was to us. The Dog was about 40 or 50 feet ahead of us. He passed Lawnchair Woman, and I approached. I got ready to say, “Hi, there,” which is my normal greeting to someone I meet in such circumstances. But as I approached, I heard her croak, “Six feet.”

Me: “What?” “Six feet. The city ordinance says you have to be within six feet of your dog.”

Discussing this later, I agreed with someone who has a much calmer demeanor than my own that the proper response to such an utterance is a simple, “Thank you.” After offering thanks, the proper course of action is to continue on your way and count yourself lucky that this person does not live next door.

I won’t recount what I actually said or what Lawnchair Woman said by way of retort. But it wasn’t “thank you.”

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Advice from the Neighbors

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One thing about living in Berkeley: You can count on encountering advice from all quarters on how to conduct yourself in public; sometimes the advice is very detailed. Here are a couple examples dealing with the plague of dog waste, Now, the town does have a law on the books about this: If your dog bestows a precious leaving on lawn or sidewalk or village green, you, the dog’s best buddy, need to pick it up. And the evidence is that most people do. Given the number of dogs around, it’s uncommon to find evidence of their alimentary workings underfoot, and the public garbage cans all over town are brimming with those little plastic newspaper delivery bags, all filled with crap of the non-editorial variety.

I guess I wonder who the signs speak to. If you are the kind of person who thinks nothing of having your dog take a dump on someone else’s lawn, and there are plenty of that kind, do these signs stir your conscience and make you think, “Gee–I should really think about other people sometimes!” And if you are the kind of person who does your best not to leave fecal surprises for your fellow townsfolk to step in, do these signs do anything more than irritate you a little? I suppose there’s a middle population of people who walk around not knowing what they’ll do when their dog unloads. These signs might make them say, “Jeepers! That’s a good point!” But since you actually have to prepare yourself to deal with the eventuality that your dog is going to be leaving day-old Alpo around the ‘hood–you need to carry bags, etc.–there really isn’t a middle group. If you’re not prepared, by definition you’re in the Dump and Run Club.

As far as the dog urine sign below: What it says may very well be true. Though the sign says in small type at the bottom that it is the work of “people who love dogs and flowers,” I question whether the authors have actually observed one of these lovely dogs. Because, even with the most fastidious owners in the world, most dogs are gonna go where they’re gonna go (and mostly that means where another dog went).

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About a Dog

Scout, upon his arrival in Berkeley.

I mentioned, more than a week ago, that I’ve got a story about a dog. Here it is:

A week ago last Saturday, we were down in Paso Robles, a town at the southern end of the Salinas Valley. For me it was a bike-riding trip: I was signed up to do the Central Coast Double Century, a ride that starts from Paso Robles, crosses the Coast Range at a relatively low spot and goes out to Highway 1, then north to the lower end of Big Sur. From there, it recrosses the mountains at a much more rugged and much higher spot, then descends into and tours the valleys and hills to the east. Two hundred and ten miles in all, and something like 14,000 vertical feet of climbing.

While I was doing all that, Kate went with a big group of people from Paso Robles down to a wild place called the Carrizo Plain. Carrizo is a national monument, a big, open expanse of rangeland at the eastern foot of the coastal mountains. It’s dry, remote and forbidding, The last California condors soar there, and pronghorn (antelope) and elk have been reintroduced.

A long story made short: The group found an abandoned dog at the edge of a dry lakebed on the plain, 10 miles from the nearest highway and 20 miles from anything you might call a town. and we wound up taking him home to Berkeley with us. We named him Scout. He’s gotten his shots and been checked out by a vet and is smart and sweet and so far very calm, which makes it all the more mysterious how he wound up out in one of those places that really is the middle of nowhere.

We’ve been checking online lost and found listings for San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield, the nearest cities (though “near” in this case means about 60 miles to either place). Lots of dogs reported lost, though none in this area and none bearing any resemblance to Scout. After a week, I called the Carrizo Plain visitors center to ask if anyone had reported a dog missing.

“No,” the woman at the center said, “and let me tell you what happens with these dogs. People come out here and just leave them, no water, no food, nothing. It’s a real bad deal.” Occasionally, she said, herders will shoot the strays to keep them from harassing sheep grazing in the area. Starvation or thirst or coyotes take care of most of the rest, though occasionally the monument’s rangers will catch a dog and take it to the animal shelter in San Luis Obispo.

“This is far enough off the road that you can put the dog out and drive away and they can’t chase you,” the visitors center woman said. “People split up and decide they can’t keep their dog, or they don’t want to take it to the shelter — over in Taft you just put the dog down a chute and they usually just put it to sleep. But this is a bad deal. You wonder what people are thinking.”

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70 MPH Dog

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Sunday on Interstate 5, getting close to Red Bluff in the northern Sacramento Valley. You get used to seeing all sorts of interesting dog antics in moving vehicles. A neighbor is fond of driving around with his beagle on his lap, sticking its head out of the driver’s window for a better look at the passing scenery. Cute, I guess, but fundamentally dumb (why, for instance, should the dog get tangled up in the deploying airbag when the inevitable comes to pass? For now, we won’t discuss the merits, or lack of same, of taking pictures while driving; besides, I only took the picture above).

So here’s a little pickup truck moving at the I-5 speed limit, 70, with one very active passenger in the back. The dog’s ability to get his head out into the wind and keep his balance was pretty impressive. But again, it seemed fundamentally dumb on the driver’s part. Regardless of the dog’s agility, Newton’s laws (see “bodies in motion,” etc.) are in full force on the nation’s highways; it doesn’t seem like it would take much to separate dog from vehicle. Later, I wondered whether the loose dog in the back was breaking more recently announced (though perhaps less universal) laws.

California (and probably most other states) requires that dogs in pickups be cross-tethered or in a secured carrier so they don’t go tumbling into traffic. But the apparently pertinent passage of state law — California Vehicle Code Section 23117 — includes an interesting set of exceptions. Dogs don’t need to be secured if their owner is a farmer or rancher (or works on a farm or ranch) and they’re being transported on a road in a rural area or to and from a livestock auction; and they can be loose in the truck, apparently, if they’re being transported “for purposes associated with ranching or farming.”

Still. Seventy miles an hour on an interstate seems like a stretch. When we were passing the truck after the first picture was taken, we saw there was a second dog in the bed of the truck, too. But it had a more hunkered-down approach to highway travel.

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