Be Nice!

[Laurie, Fudge, and Vern]

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a lot of benefits to getting older, except that you get away with less sugar coating and more blunt talk.  I have just decided the older I get the less likely I am to bottle up my feelings and suffer fools gladly. Whether this is a good plan remains to be seen and some members of my family will tell you my age has nothing to do with any of this and I have never bottled up one thought or feeling or kept quiet about things that bug me. The other week, John and I had to go to the funeral home for a viewing and there was a man with a flashlight parking cars for what couldn’t have been more than ten cars in a rather smallish parking lot.  As I turned the corner, both John and I agreed that his pointer was facing the parking lot in the direction he wanted me to go, and so I turned the way he was pointing and as I drove by him he yelled, “HEY!”  His tone and loudness immediately irritated me and without thinking I screamed back, “WHAT?” Of course, John pointed out that we were in a funeral home parking lot and a fistfight with the mortician/parking person was not going to bode well with the family inside.  I quickly pointed out that a loud HEY was going to get a loud WHAT every time from me and by that time the guy was at my window and I stopped debating heys and whats long enough to say, “May I help you?”  He was obviously upset that I did not take his flashlight more seriously and instructed me that he was there to park cars and since I had such an enormous car, an ordinary minivan, I would probably not be able to maneuver the ordinary parking lot containing ten cars tops without his help and I should park off to the side.  It was clear that the authority he had been given when he was assigned to park cars had clearly gone to his head, so I parked where he told me, but did state to John that the day I couldn't park my minivan in a pull up spot without help is the day my license should be revoked.  John said he wished I had rolled up my window before stating the obvious.

 

The point I am trying to make is not that I have a propensity to want to fight morticians or authoritative figures, but that sometimes rude behavior can get the best of me.  I try to be nice and considerate, but something about that guy screaming at me got to me that day and I reacted.  Sometimes, the littlest thing just rubs a person the wrong way and other times we may feel strongly about a topic and something causes us to act in a way others may not understand.  I feel this way about chained dogs.  I have never in my life understood why people get dogs and chain them up outside.  Here in PA, I am ashamed to say you see it a lot and nobody seems to get too worked up about it and the laws here protect the person doing the chaining.  In many counties, and I live in one of them, you are allowed to chain up your dog 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as long as you provide food and shelter.  Some people here buy those large runs that look like oversized crates, add a doghouse, and stick a dog out there.  The dog is confined to this space and set apart from the family.  I have heard all kinds of excuses…the dog is too wild in the house, the dog pees in the house, the dog is a hunting dog, the dog is out there for protection….and none of them seem good enough to me to cast aside a family member and subject him or her to a lifetime of separateness, solitude, boredom, and loneliness. Besides, what kind of protection can a chained or locked up dog provide? It seems to me it would be far safer to have them in the house. 

 

Seriously, if I was able to confine a member of my family outside for an indefinite period of time any time they did not listen, acted wild, or got on my nerves, both my girls would have spent their teenage years outside and far enough away from the house that I couldn’t hear them yell the word MOM ever.  That one syllable word can be the longest word in the English language when you have two daughters who thought their mom should settle matters like Judge Judy with sworn testimony, affidavits, and witnesses.  They could never understand why they both got in trouble and I cared less about who was right and more about how to make them stop talking.  If my dogs had to behave to stay inside, then they would be in trouble, too.  Vern loves the outdoors. Some days I have trouble getting him back inside and the colder the weather, the better.  It would be easy to say he prefers it outside and put a dog house out there and find out what it feels like to sleep an entire night without having to take him out, but I would miss out on all the perks of owning an inside dog.  If I stuck both my dogs outside, I would never know that Fudge likes to spoon in bed in the mornings and her swinging paw means to keep rubbing.  I wouldn’t know that Vern’s big paw on your shoulder when he sits beside you on the couch means he wants to cuddle and when he yawns he likes to have you say, “Vern, you have some big teefers.”  If my dogs were outside dogs, I wouldn’t know what it felt like to come home and step inside my house to wagging tails and joyous dogs.  I would miss so much and never really understand what all the fuss is about when people talk about the love they have for a dog.

 

Yet, even if I listed all the things I would miss if I stuck my dog outside on a chain or in a run, it would never compare to what the dog would miss in his lifetime.  My neighbor has a couple of chained dogs outside.  I have reported him so many times and nothing ever changes. It’s all legal here in Pennsylvania, because he has a couple of crappy houses for the dogs and sticks food and water out there. I have been down there in person and asked once if they could at least move one of their dogs to higher ground after seeing the rain and mud pool in the area he used to have him at the bottom of a hill.  They moved him, but he is still chained. When I take Vern out in the middle of the night, I can hear his dogs barking and it makes me sad that this is the life they have been given.  The irony is not lost on me that I am taking Vern out in the middle of the night because I worry about his comfort and yet there is a dog just down the hill from us who is outside in the cold and rain and no one cares about his comfort. Once, John waved at our neighbor as we drove by and got an earful about waving to a jerk who treats his animals the way he does and even though I understood John’s natural inclination to “be nice”, it felt wrong.  It’s the same feeling I get when people tell other people to “be nice” when they get upset when someone posts they had to put their dog outside because it was too much for them to have the dog in the house.  I would bet any amount of money that my neighbor does not spend the time or money vaccinating his dogs, or applying flea or tick medicine, or administering Heartworm medication, or keeping him clean, and nothing he ever said would make that right in my book or qualify as love for a dog by the biggest stretch of my imagination.  So, maybe it is time to stop being so nice and time to stop worrying if you offended somebody and speak up any way you can.  At this time when we have so much to be thankful for, please take the time to Google who you can write in your city or state to voice your opinion on chained dogs and how we must stop allowing this to go on.  Maybe if enough of us stop being “so nice” we can make a difference, because I am a firm believer that people who do this in the first place aren't going to be stopped by "nice" and stricter laws are the only thing that will work.

[Miss Ellie]

Well said Laurie...your neighbour and countless others that treat their dogs in such a way don't deserve to have these beautiful creatures for pets...they should be taken away from people like this and given to people who want them and who will love them and give them the care they deserve...stricter laws FOR SURE!