ICONOCLAST BLAST BY SETH BARNES
By (Seth Barnes ).
It’s a good time to be a pet in the United States. Our little furry friends are receiving love and attention at a rate heretofore unseen in the history of our country. You can barely go a day without reading a news report on all-time high ownership rates. Americans spend billions of dollars a year on their pets. I must say I’m envious. It’s not acceptable for a grown man to spend all day sleeping on the floor waking up only to scarf down a bowl of food followed by an afterdinner chew on a squeaky toy. For a pet, this is the norm.
In Santa Monica, some pets are more controversial than others. We have to assume that most house pets are pretty well off. After all, comparatively, Santa Monica is an affluent community and some of that disposable income is undoubtedly dedicated to maintaining the quality of life for the cats, parakeets, hamsters, lizards and rabbits in our midst. These guys also are out of sight and out of mind for most citizens, so even the bitterest anti-pet curmudgeon can’t complain about them.
Dogs on the other hand are a walking controversy on the order of Howard Stern or Michael Jackson.
I’m a life-long dog owner. You can catch me walking my golden retriever with my girlfriend any day of the week. And if you notice such things, you’ve also noticed that there are a lot of dogs in the city. The sidewalks and byways can resemble a West Coast Westminster Dog Show before and after work. For those not disposed to love our four-legged companions, this causes some consternation and dismay because Santa Monica is a crowded place with little open public space.
The typical complaint goes something like this:“The only patch of green grass I can see in this world is a shoddy little rectangle in front of my dwelling. Dog owners use this as a defecation target range with their pooches. Sometimes they don’t even bother to clean up.”
Of course the truth is that the vast majority of dog owners do clean up after their dogs. Most of us are almost forced to work second jobs to support the canine toy and food habits that are tallied in our monthly budgets, so believe me, we have plenty of access to special baggies for this very purpose. As with anything, there are a few bad apples in this respect that give the rest of us a bad name.
And after “Doggie Housegate” this summer, when City Hall wrestled with Valerie Hiss over 60 “doggie houses” she generously mounted in a quest to encourage owners to clean up their “doggie debris,” I think it’s pretty clear that the message is out there that unless you’re a selfish lout, the only choice you have is to clean up after your dog. For goodness sakes, people are spending thousands of dollars of their own money to make sure we do so.
But even if dog owners could boast of a 100 percent clean up rate, I’m sure we’d still have some ardent dog detractors in town. One reason for this is the desire of many owners to extend the doggie domain beyond the city streets to the ocean. Unleash The Beach is a well-known action committee trying to establish reasonable, safe use of the beach for dogs — there are a host of bureaucratic county laws that have to be dealt with, so it’s not just a matter of passing a city ordinance. And not surprisingly, the campaign has met some pretty fierce resistance.
I’ve heard some utterly hilarious descriptions of the supposed apocalypse that will befall the oceanfront if dogs are allowed on the beach on a limited, regulated basis: Scenes of filth, feces and harmful bacterial conditions that are straight out of a Michael Crichton novel.
Do these people realize we’re dealing with a bay that routinely has thousands and thousands of gallons of human sewage leaked into it? A bay where I see syringes and raw trash floating in the water on a regular basis after a rainstorm? An oceanfront that is fronted by millions of people in the second largest metropolitan area in the country?
I hardly think dogs are going to add to the damage we’ve already inflicted. The real problem is that Los Angeles, and to a greater extent the Westside, is vastly overpopulated. We’re starting to crowd each other out, and we all seem to have divergent priorities for our public spaces.
From what I’ve heard, some progress has been made by dedicated organizations like Heal The Bay to clean up the oceanfront. We should focus on big picture efforts like this instead of wringing our hands over whether or not responsible dog owners can handle taking care of their dogs on the beach for a few hours before sunset each day.
But I’m not going to hold my breath. After all, the status quo on this issue has been notoriously hard to overturn. And it doesn’t help that doggie detractors growing annoyed with the population density of their chosen city take out their rage on our pets.
Doggone it.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 14, 2006. Read the original PDF.