Indianapolis, IN

Mon 9 July 2007

So, I’m thinking about the national protest against keeping your dog chained up that took place this weekend. According to the Indianapolis Star, a 19-year old college student chained herself to her porch for 12 hours on Saturday in South Bend. I guess there is some substance to the protest. According to a woman from the Humane Society, dogs that are chained up for long periods of time tend to suffer from anxiety, tend to bark more and tend to be more aggressive toward strangers if they do escape. I understand that people need to be kind to animals (I don’t want to make PETA mad at me), but I just don’t think I could chain myself to my front porch with a dog collar. That just seems a little extreme to me. (But then again, I’m not much of a dog person. I just don’t trust them. Dogs to me are like an unexploded landmine, just waiting to go off and attack.) And supposedly there were 99 people in 32 other states who participated in the “Chain Off 2007” event. Across the nation, states and local governments are passing laws that restrict the amount of time a dog can be attached to something stationary. In the case of St. Joseph county (where South Bend is), dogs cannot be chained up for more than three hours at a time. But my question is: What do you do if you have to go to work? Are you supposed to spend hundreds of dollars on a large chain kennel to put them in? What if you have more than one dog? Isn’t putting a dog in a kennel worse than keeping a dog on a chain? Are you supposed to spend hundred of dollars to put up a tall privacy fence? Some neighborhoods require special permission for these kinds of fences, and in some cities (such as Chicago), they are prohibited. Perhaps people with dogs only work for 3 hours at a time (a novel idea, but I doubt I’d get any real work done). I understand they have an objective, but I think that it’s sad to create a law because people just don’t have common sense. So, I guess while I was sitting in the gazebo eating hamburgers from the grill and drinking a Diet Coke on Saturday, others were chaining themselves up like animals. In the words of a favorite teacher of mine, “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

: dogs, chaining dogs, Chain Off 2007, Humane Society, cruelty to animals, PETA, laws against cruelty to animals