{"id":10131,"date":"2024-04-14T12:45:33","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T12:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10131"},"modified":"2024-04-14T12:45:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T12:45:34","slug":"canine-chicanery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=10131","title":{"rendered":"Canine chicanery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dog waste only\/damesnet<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Now there are lots of things that are exercising my mind at the moment, but three days into a streaming cold my head is beginning to clear, and instead of venting my rage at the political tomfoolery that seems to be everywhere I am putting out a heartfelt plea in another direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calling all dog owners: and that\u2019s one heck of a lot of people, as apparently there are well over 10 million dogs in the UK, so roughly one mutt for every 6-7 people including babies.  Of my random group of seven, I am definitely not the dog owner in the group. Please don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 I like dogs as long as they are well trained and, preferably, live away from the city. However, if they are urban pooches, I have a bone to pick with their owners. It\u2019s quite simple: thank you for collecting your dog\u2019s business in one of those green plastic bags that dog owners tie to the straps of their bags and rucksacks, resembling nothing so much as a line of flags down a mast fluttering in the breeze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes I am grateful for this, but sadly an increasingly significant number of you seem to think that having scooped the poop, it is acceptable to leave the bag lying around on the pavement, where unsuspecting feet have a habit of treading on them.  There is something extremely unpleasant in the sensation of something soft and yielding under your tread, when you were only anticipating concrete pavement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point I wish to extend apologies to those dog-owning damesnet readers who would not dream of behaving in such a manner, but there are plenty of your compatriots out there who do, I regret to inform you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am afraid my complaints don\u2019t stop at street level, and these are directed at dog owners out of town.  When I go for a walk in the countryside, there will inevitably be other people out with their dogs, who are usually free to run around. And so it should be, except I don\u2019t want Fido to run at me, jump up at me, lick my leg and generally cause me to pause, dodge and swerve to avoid him\/her.  At this point I inevitably look up, see the owner a little way off and hear them calling to Fido who doesn\u2019t take a blind bit of notice.  As the owner and I draw closer to each to each other the typical comment is \u2018S\/he\u2019s just being friendly\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m afraid this is not how I make or keep friends, so I rein in the comments I would like to make and walk on briskly.  All of this is avoidable if only people trained their dogs; one of our close friends has recently retrained as a dog behaviourist.  The course was extremely thorough and extensive and took quite a while. Our friend commented that it felt as much of a physiology course as a behavioural one. But she maintains that training a dog not to jump up at strangers\/run through their picnics\/race up to toddlers and lick their faces uninvited is in fact a pretty straightforward process as long as THE OWNER CAN BE BOTHERED TO DO SO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So there you have it \u2013 whether your dog is on the streets or in a field, we non-doggy people do have both rights and reasonable expectations.  Over to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

..resembling nothing so much as a line of flags down a mast fluttering in the breeze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,63,297,355,67,182,56],"tags":[76,19,356,97],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10131"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10149,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions\/10149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}