I like dogs, I really do... it's the dog owners....

When I was young my family always had a dog. I like dogs, I really do. I just don't like them running around off the leash in Central Park, defecating and urinating wherever they choose while destroying valuable habitat.

My attitude can best be summed-up by Tony Hendra's New York Magazine article that was published in 1998. A bit of it is below. The whole article can be read here.

In one sense, this is quite literally a turf battle. Meadowland and lawns make up only a small fraction of the park system’s 27,000 acres. Grass is therefore at a high premium; but it is grassland that dog owners want for their animals. Other than team sports (which are restricted to specific areas), no casual use of our common space destroys turf like unleashed dogs. That happy tumbleweed of gamboling fur that so delights the New York canophile of a dewy morn conceals myriad claws ripping the grass out by the roots; this is particularly the case when the grass is dormant or wet.

And when Max or Princess or Sugarpie pauses for a quick tinkle or dump, the exhausted blades and the soil beneath them are clobbered yet again and, less retrievably, poisoned by their ultra-acidic waste. The costs here can be significant. Example: It took $17 million to restore turf in the Great Lawn. Just to repair dog damage in the relatively small Riverside Park last year cost almost $100,000 (on top of regular restoration and maintenance); the citywide estimate is at least half a million. Yet we all foot the bill. Dog-license money supports the licensing agency itself; dog tickets go into the city’s general coffer. Rover’s freedom isn’t free.

The problem isn’t just cosmetic. Dogless people -- bike owner, skate owner, or mere kid owner -- quickly learn to dread the honeyed assertion “It’s okay! He’s really friendly . . .” Friendly doesn’t quite cover the genome of a pony-size wolf-hound with the dentition of a teenage alligator. Flesh will be bitten, bones broken, picnic food stolen, small bodies exposed to ringworm, hookworm, and strep throat from slobbery tongues. A variant -- Rover Semi-Unleashed -- is the widespread use of the Flexi-leash, a tripwire that allows Rover’s owner to be anywhere up to a kilometer away from Rover. (If you square its length and multiply it by ?, you’ll get the acreage to which he/she believes he/she holds current title.) The reality here is not the cheery apology he/she yells as you crash to the ground; the booby-trap expresses, as so much else in our urban habits, hostility. Rover Semi-Unleashed is a weapon.

A subset of dog-as-weapon: dog-as-deterrent. Almost 40 percent of dog owners buy dogs, big dogs, because of fear of crime. At home, these animals may provide security; outside, off-leash, they can be a deadly menace. Parks officials say attacks by big dogs on smaller dogs are multiplying, but fast-moving dogs (and owners) are rarely apprehended.

The least admitted, most antisocial motive for letting Rover off the leash is that you won’t “notice” when Rover takes a dump. The preferred M.O. is to maintain (a) a minimum 50-yard lead on Rover and (b) an air of intense distraction, as if you’re utterly swept away by the Symphonie Pathetique of your inner life. You will soon develop the uncanny ability to turn as soon as the turds have been deposited, and to whistle irritably for your pet, feigning ignorance of his whereabouts.

None of these nuisances are altogether new. In some form, they’ve always existed in a densely packed, vertically organized city. But the harshness of the discourse is alarmingly new. Among militant canophiles, Holocaust imagery is rampant and by no means confined to the West Side. PEP (Park Enforcement Patrol) officers are routinely heckled when enforcing the laws as “Gestapo,” “Nazis,” and “Brownshirts” (actually, their shirts are green, and they’re unarmed). Charles McKinney, the administrator of Riverside Park, is referred to in flyers as “a dictator.”

One somewhat confused canophile, enraged by the “storm trooper” tactics of the PEP officers arresting her, gave her name as Eva Braun. Carolyn Dolgenos, who was arrested two years ago by PEP officers in Central Park during a celebrated fracas over her unleashed bichons frises, compared herself, according to the Times, to “Jews in the concentration camps.” She also likened her arrest to that of “blacks in the South,” an interesting take given that both the arresting officers were black and Ms. Dolgenos is a countess (which is to say she’s married to a count). Racism is sometimes quite overt: A West Side flyer giving tips on how to deal with PEP officers, a large number of whom are black or Hispanic, sneered, “Remember: it takes an average of 30 minutes to write a summons. Spelling is hard for them.”

Then there are the obscenities. Many letters received by Parks from people who have been harassed by unleashed dogs cite foul language on the part of their owners. Laura Meyer, dog lover and chair of the Parks Committee of Community Board No. 8, which serves the Upper East Side, says of Carl Schurz Park, “You ask people to pick up after their dog and they shout obscenities at you.” Big Dog and Tourette’s syndromes appear to be clinically linked.

Passionate dog lovers like to think of themselves as gentle, genial, outdoorsy folks made even more gentle and genial by the love of a good dog. But let that love or its object be challenged and they adopt a snarling, bared-teeth defensive mode just this side of actual canine behavior. (Indeed, on several occasions, PEP officers have been bitten by dog lovers in the course of making arrests.)

Call it Rover Rage.