Before the lockdowns, the UK’s dog population was between 6.5 and 7.4 million.
There are now at least 1 million more.
Lack of social contact has led many people to get a dog for company. Do they have interesting conversations? Do they discuss the books they have read?
Chislehurst is about to get its second dog food shop. What goes in must come out. Dog faeces in the UK are estimated to amount to at least one thousand metric tonnes daily.
As a local village idiot, who is out collecting litter on most days of the week, I get the impression that far more than our fair share of that quantity is dropped in Chislehurst. Most dog walkers do bag it, but they stuff it in noisome street litter bins, toss it into the undergrowth, drop it on the edge of the pavement, or in the gutter, or decorate a hedge. I spend a lot of my time pulling the bags out of litter bins, so that there is space for legitimate litter, including the scores of plastic take-away coffee cups.
I now digress a little. When last able to take a holiday, we went to Northumberland, where I had a novel experience. When phoning a restaurant in order to book a table for two, I was asked: “And how many dogs?” My reply was: “Forget it.”
In the renowned Ship Inn, Lower Newton, Northumberland, We suffered a couple sharing a table and bench seat with their two dogs.
We were the only couple walking the beaches without at least two mutts in tow.
Down here, it appears to be moving in the same direction. Dogs lead their owners into the take-out coffee shop. How long before dogs will parade around Sainsbury’s?
When social distancing, one has to step into the road in order to allow the dog and dog-walker, sometimes with up to four dogs, to commandeer the pavement.
And some of these dogs are so ugly. The French bulldog is one such. Selective breeding has given them malformed heads. This is cruelty. One benefit is that the compromised airway limits the life expectancy of the breed.
Don’t get a dog, consider the adoption of one or two of the thousands of children who need a permanent family placement.
I am old enough to remember the seven shillings and sixpence dog licence.
Bring back the dog licence and make it £100 a year.
Ok, no government will dare to do that; there would be revolution.
Ok, bring back the dog licence, starting at £10 per year, increasing over time.
When I saw you had recently written 2 blogs on dogs it reminded me that 2 years ago when I started reading your blogs I read one which referred to dogs as a nuisance. I had meant to respond to it at some stage but more important issues took precedence.
I have a dog, Hilda, a black Labrador now aged 9. We support each other mutually and she would be a very difficult dog to hate even by someone who purports to be a dog hater. I could be wrong about you but what you have written makes me define you more a dog owners’ hater.
There are lots of reasons to hate dog owners and you have listed a few: the in-breading like for the poor French bulldog in the picture; people who buy dogs as present or out of boredom and don’t know what to do with them when the dogs get in the way of their lives and in fact can’t be bothered to look after them; those who have bought dogs during the lockdown, especially the first lockdown, so that they could find a good excuse to get out. In France every year during the summer holidays you come across dogs running along the motorways because their owners have abandoned them to their own fate. There are all these people walking their dogs, clearing the mess but leaving the pooh bags on the path or anywhere else and you can see the bags months later, still there fouling the place even if they are supposed to be biodegradable bags. You would think that if they had dropped a bag by mistake they would pick it up the next time they saw it but no! They don’t seem to care about the environment. They are probably from the same families than the Shooters Hill 6th form centre students who are now back and have started to litter the streets and the front gardens again.
However all isn’t as grim as you describe with regard to dogs and dog lovers. After reading your article a good 2 weeks ago and I decided to do my own survey of the situation about dog shit in the areas where I walk Hilda. Comparing with the situation when I had a dog in the 1980’s and when it was sometimes hazardous to walk in certain parks and even on the pavements without walking in dogs’ pooh, my very unscientific research of the last 2 weeks reveals that even on Woolwich Common it is very rare to see any – obviously I can’t check the whole square mile and in fact on the Common there is the added factor of numerous colonies of rooks which feed on the protein present on the dogs’ dejections. There is a whole range of other Greenwich parks where I walk with Hilda and it has become extremely rare to come across dogs’ pooh. When Hilda was a puppy (9 years ago) I didn’t walk in Eltham South Park because it was so dirty but even with the added number of dogs since the Covid19, it is clean – well to the naked eye and the sole of shoes anyway because obviously the grass and soil must be full of all sorts of bacteria. I walk in Charlton Park, Maryon Park (where the film Blow Up was filmed in the 1960’s I think), Gilbert’s Pit, Greenwich Park, Shrewsbury Park, Plumstead Common, Eaglesfield Park and Oxleas Woods of course, which are wonderful at this time of year. And my favorite walks are anywhere along the Q14 Thames path, where there is sometimes some mess but less and less since some one is leaving lino cut messages on the pavements and the riverpath saying “Bag it and Bin it”. Even reticent dog fowler owners must find it convincing.
Even if the number of dropped pooh bags seemed to have gone down since the lockdown, unfortunately they have replaced by 100’s of masks, mostly around the 6th form college and on the Common, between the hospital and the south circular. There is also quite a lot of horse shit on certain parts of the Common where the army exercises the horses daily – the rooks feast on it – and in the streets too. It reminds me of my mother, such an elegant woman, who would get out with a spade and bucket every time farm horses passed our house and we (my brothers and I) would hide in shame, but she had the best geranium in the area.
Lastly I am convinced that it is good for responsible people to have dogs, or cats, as it takes serious discipline to look after them well, but not only that: people talk to one another more when walking a dog, it may start by someone asking you whether you could let them have a pooh bag because they left theirs at home, just talking about the weather , or exchanging training tips. Hilda is so disciplined that I often think Pavlov would have been proud of me. Some teachers would do well to train their pupils to do a trick or two (especially the Principal at Shooters Hill 6th form Centre).