by Jerry Donaldson
Here on the beach, dogs have become an issue. Again. Off-leash dogs can bring happiness to their owners and the others around them. Poorly monitored off-leash dogs just annoy people. Some dog owners fail to see this and don’t take the simple steps required to avoid trouble: pick up poo, don’t let the dog run wild, leash up near wildlife.
I grew in the sixties in a good part of Washington D.C., and I remember everyone’s dog just roamed the neighbourhood. One of the neighbours had a litter of puppies yearly, because many of the dogs weren’t neutered. But that’s the way it was in 1964.
My dad owned a 1962 Mercury Monterey, the first car he’d ever bought brand-new. It was loaded, top of the line, but it didn’t have seat belts. They weren’t standard equipment in 1962, and Dad hadn’t thought to order them. On road trips he and my mother sat up front. My brother, sister and I sat in the back. My parents drank beer and smoked cigarettes in the car. Every now and then Dad’s right hand came across the back of the front seat to swat at us when we became restless and began to poke at each other.
I’m in my sixties now and still have unresolved issues around each of my parents, now both long-dead. I try to make allowances for the fact they met and married in 1952 in the bombed-out moonscape of postwar Liverpool. So they struggled, for sure. And things were different 70 years ago, yes, absolutely. And yet I tend to view their behaviours through the lens of the present day.
Society changes, behaviours become outdated and we all struggle to keep up. But it is clear to me, as I pick up yet another pile of some other dog-owner’s poo, or grit my teeth and approach a stranger to ask him/her control his/her dog on my beloved Cadboro Bay beach, that it may not yet be socially unacceptable to allow one’s dog to misbehave in public. Hopefully that day will come soon.
On The Beach 