Pets can be nuisances, need to be contained | Letter to the Editor

Published 11:37 am Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Recently, arriving home, my wife found two dogs, a rottweiler mix and a pit bull mix, running almost all the way up the quarter-mile drive to our house. They followed her toward the house. She stopped and called me to warn me to try to get our cat in. No luck. As we soon found from her faint calls, she was 40 feet up a Douglas fir a little ways back in the woods. It took us about a half an hour to talk her into climbing down.

I don’t know if the dogs chased her up. What I do know after a little research is that dogs running “at large” in the county are, by definition, “nuisances,” subject to impounding and fines, as is any domestic animal that “enters on a person’s property without the permission of that person.” That’s no different from the fellows with the meat truck coming up to the house and setting up their shop on my porch. A nuisance, and trespassing. And the dogs’ owners are responsible for their dogs’ trespassing, just as much as if they themselves came to my door uninvited.

I wish we could get the distinction clear: “domestic” and “wild.” Wild comes from before people and includes ants, termites, wasps, bees, hummingbirds, crows, as well as raccoons and deer. With the wild, there was and never will be any question of ownership and boundaries. We can, of course, shoot and poison. Whether we like it or not, they’ll visit and range.

Domestic is our human overlay. There are boundaries and laws. There is responsibility. We people can be more or less thoughtful, careful, civil. From our domestic cat to someone’s domestic dogs: You’re a nuisance; stay off my property. I don’t enjoy climbing up and down 40 feet of tree.

— Cal Kinnear