Maybe we wouldn’t need pet bans if owners were more responsible

According to a 2017 study in the Society & Animals journal, humans feel for dogs more than they do for their fellow man.

The researchers behind the study showed more than 200 university students a series of fake newspaper clippings, some describing the suffering of canines, others describing the suffering of adult human beings.

The verdict: the students appeared to feel sorrier for the down-and-out dogs than they did for the down-and-out people.

The study is old news. But I wonder how its participants would respond to new news: a real-life newspaper clipping from last week, one that concerns the suffering of dogs and people alike. One that pits dog rights against people rights.

According to reporting by the Star’s Francine Kopun, pet owners who live in the dense Toronto condo community of CityPlace are currently “fighting back against a ban on new animals in two of the condominium towers in the downtown development.”

In 2016, the condo board that oversees the properties passed a rule requiring future residents to “register their existing pets at the management office.”

And this month, Kopun writes, “signs went up reminding owners that no new pets are being permitted in the building and that unregistered pets must be removed.”

Jen Fischer, a community resident, told the Star she was forced to re-home a dog she was fostering. Fischer launched a petition to challenge the ban, one she says “can set a really dangerous precedent.”

But for the many condo residents in CityPlace and beyond who don’t like dogs, it’s the absence of such a ban that sets a dangerous precedent. It may be a hard reality for dog lovers to accept (trust me, I’m one of them), but there are millions of people on this earth who think dogs are annoying at best and dangerous at worst. And though we may not understand these people, or like them very much, they do have a point.

For example, you may think you own the friendliest dog, and you may consider yourself an extremely responsible owner. All of this could be true, but what’s also true is the fact that there are irresponsible owners all around you.

These include people who let their dogs off leash where they’re not supposed to, for example, in public parks where kids are playing and elderly people are power walking.

“He’s never done that before!” is not an adequate response when your 60pound Labradoodle knocks the wind

out of a sexagenarian midstride. But a far worse response is: “He has done that before.”

Last week, I was nearly bitten by a dog in the city’s east end. “This isn’t the first time he’s tried to bite someone,” the owner told me after his terrier, unprovoked, attempted to take a chunk out of my wrist (luckily he only caught my watch). “I don’t know what to do,” he said. Maybe try a muzzle? Another point in favour of the anti-canine crowd: When dogs aren’t aggressive, they are enabled to go to the bathroom in all the wrong places.

This year, a Toronto condo resident posted video footage to Reddit that appeared to solve the mystery of why dog crap continued to appear on his balcony.

It turned out his neighbour’s dog, an adorable ball of white fluff, was routinely slipping through the barrier that separated its owner’s balcony from neighbouring ones, and relieving itself on the aggrieved resident’s balcony.

But if it’s not on the deck, it’s in the stairwell. I recently moved out of a condo in Toronto’s west end whose stairwells were consistently covered in management-composed letters pleading with residents to stop letting their dogs defecate on the stairs. This is not an anomaly. These pleas line the halls of condos across the country.

The problem of Dog People getting into it with Non-Dog People is not unique to Toronto. It’s universal to urban settings, where pets are abundant and green space is scarce.

But what’s frustrating is that the problem is nearly impossible to solve.

For example, policies of the kind at CityPlace seek to limit the number of pets living in a building, without aggressively addressing the issue of irresponsible pet owners.

And if you don’t thwart existing bad owners, it doesn’t matter how many new dogs you prevent from moving into a building. All it takes is a handful of selfish owners to make life unpleasant for everybody, even residents who have dogs themselves (most people don’t want to smell feces in their stairwells).

In the end, no one need suffer, be they canine or human, if careless owners made a small commitment to change their behaviour.

(Or perhaps, if every condo building in the country sought the services of PooPrints, a “DNA waste management” company that collects dog DNA from condo residents’ pets, rendering all unscooped poop in the hallways traceable by science, and all crappy owners susceptible to steep fines.)

If you want your community to be accommodating to you and your dog, be accommodating to your community.

Pick up after your pet. Don’t let your dog off leash where little kids are running around. And if your dog bites people, for godsakes, muzzle him in public.