Things we love about dogs and Melbourne
Sometimes we forget how lucky we are with our Melbourne dog parks.Not lucky in that there are too many or that they are built on prime land. Because the truth is that the parks that exists are mostly hard fought for and built on city dumps. Only the economic cost of extracting the garbage seems to keep these parks preserved.
But we are lucky perhaps that man dumped garbage so thoughtlessly and now so relatively close to the city, making a loophole for future dog park enjoyment.
We are not lucky with our animal protection laws giving more protection to deadly local snakes than the dogs we own, but we are lucky that we can mostly get around the parks in summer with only a few incidents.
The real luck comes into our weather making so many lush green grass parks in winter all but a few months of the year being very scenic.
I know that many states and other countries have extreme heat or cold for most of the year. Many other countries have dustbowls for parks littered with thorns. We are so lucky that we have good weather, generally, lush parks, and councils that mostly make good decisions in allowing some space to be a shared space for dogs to learn to be social.
The unfortunate thing is that only good students of dog behavior know vital continued socialisation is for dogs all the way through their life.
Happy dogs happy cities happy councils. Much of the dog issues we have in society are from dogs not being supervised daily in local off lead dog parks. For dogs mental and physical wellbeing they need to exercise and freely associate with their own kind. They are a pack animal that craves, needs and desires contact with other dogs. Dogs that don't like other dogs are anti social purely through their lack of continued contact, it is not a natural trait.
It is true that not all people like dogs. And only one quarter of Australian households now own a dog. As the information age rises, the empathy age passes. Nobody has time to bond with animals, to take them for walks, to do the right thing by this noble creature we helped create.
I am always astounded with the amount of rampant neglect for dogs we have in our communities how forgiving they are. They don't have to love us, but they do. But treated badly they can fear us too. But as anyone with a passing familiarity with dogs will know, the choice is mainly us humans to choose.
