Man’s best friend a joy during curfew
Joking online post offering to let people borrow dog for late-night walks draws plenty of replies
MONTREAL — When the Quebec government announced it was imposing an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to limit the spread of COVID-19, Ita Skoblinski posted a tongue-in-cheek message to her local community Facebook group, offering to let people borrow her dog for latenight walks.
The Montreal woman saw the message as an excuse to post a cute picture of her husky, Waylon, and poke a little fun at the curfew, which includes an exception for people walking dogs within a kilometre of their homes.
But, to Skoblinki’s surprise, she received serious responses.
“People sent me kind of long messages about themselves, saying they would love to take the dog out,” she said in a phone interview. While she found the messages “very sweet,” Skoblinski was quick to clarify that she’d been joking.
“Even if we wanted to, it doesn’t make any sense ... How would they go home after they drop him?” she said.
Some rescue organizations report COVID-19 led to a surge in demand for pets, as people moved to working from home. Animatch, a Montreal-based dog adoption service, wrote on its website that it received 7,500 applications last year compared to 3,500 in 2019, leading to its first-ever dog shortage.
But the curfew that took effect Saturday night in Quebec and its exception for dog walkers has added a new twist. Several ads for dog rentals — presumably jokes or hoaxes — have sprung up on sites such as Kijiji and have been widely shared on social media, as have posts like Skoblinski’s.
And, in Sherbrooke, Que., a woman who was caught walking her husband on a leash was handed a fine for violating curfew rules — despite protesting they deserved to fall under the dog-walking exemption, according to media outlet La Tribune.
Elise Desaulniers, the executive director of the SPCA, says the idea of people adopting dogs just to go walking makes for “lots of funny memes on the web,” but she hasn’t heard of it happening in real life.
But while it’s hard to measure if there was an increased demand for pets last year because of changes to how the process happens, she says it certainly seemed like “a lot of people” were looking to adopt in 2020 due to decreased travel and more time at home.