My friend Annie just got her first article in the New York Times national edition, which is pretty darn sweet, if you ask me. I might even say it’s totally awesome. I will admit that I’m a bit jealous, but also immensely proud of her. I guess that’s what a degree in journalism will get you. At any rate, the article is about the mill site, and an attempt to bioremediate the dioxins with mushrooms, so it’s not only cool, but also interesting.
So go read it!
While Henry Makepeace frosted cupcakes, Jennifer Thackeray was frowning into a microscope, examining something which really should not have been there. Were her boss to notice this, Jennifer realized, she could experience some awkward questions, something along the line of what exactly she’d been doing at the back bench all these months, and why the seedlings under the window appeared to be moving, despite the fact that the lab was sealed up tighter than a Republican’s anus on 15 April.
Jennifer Makepeace hadn’t always worked in biology. Originally, she studied philosophy, and when she found herself exploring the nature of consciousness in plants, she realized that she wouldn’t be able to learn what she wanted to know from the staff at the philosophy department, so she started taking biology instead, and participating in some decidedly unscientific experiments.
The lab was already viewed with disdain by most of the faculty at the university, as well as academia in general, because the notion that plants could think, let alone have consciences, was considered absurd. Yet, in a serious of cautious experiments, Jennifer’s boss had proved just that, and Jennifer aimed to go even further, giving plants the tools they needed for free will. Freeing them, in other words, from the constraints of ordinary existence.
In addition to being a philosopher, the young Jennifer had also been a radical, dabbling along the fringes of the ecological movement, although she never really took the plunge. While she attended the campus animal rights group meetings on a regular basis, she rarely actively participated in anything, although she was involved in a lab rat heist gone horribly awry once, which resulted in a flood of extremely fat albino rats skittering around the English department for four months before the last of the animals could be rounded up.
One thing that Jennifer Thackeray firmly believed was that, given the chance, nature could correct itself, and she thought that empowering nature with the tools for social justice might speed that process up, just a tad.
Jennifer Thackeray, in short, was building a chlorophyllically enhanced army.
Henry Makepeace was pursing his lips as he painstakingly piped flowers onto his cupcakes, and thinking about the fire at Giuseppe’s. He thought that he might call the fire chief later, just to offer his services, as a friendly sort of thing, but really he was dying of curiosity, and he had a vested interest in finding the lighter-happy rapscallion who had perpetrated the deed. After all, who knew how long it would be before he had spit roasted goat again?
Brad Whittaker was staring disconsolately at George MacInroe, and wondering why he had never noticed the dapper lawyer’s sizable beer gut before.
“It’s no use looking that way,” MacInroe said. “we’re trussed up tighter than turkeys, and apparently, when you’re behind the waste treatment plant, no one can hear you scream.”
Brad Whittaker screamed anyway.
Stella Carlisle was reviewing her copy of The Sun Also Rises, making notes on her steno pad and occasionally flicking her pen against the railing in irritation. As absorbing as Hemingway could be, she suspected that most of the talk at the book club would be about the fire, rather than the book. She wondered if perhaps she should suggest that the meeting be moved to next week, but remembered that Henry would be out of town, so that wouldn’t be any good.
James Farrier was studying a typed postcard with an obscured postmark, and wondering if he would have time for a quick bite before his meeting with the mysterious “Jennifer,” who probably had nothing for him anyway.
Officer Carlisle was also reading The Sun Also Rises, concealed below his steering wheel while he pretended to be watching traffic on Main Street. Agent Parker had suggested that the assistance of the police force was no longer needed at the MacInroe house, or in the MacInroe disappearance investigation, and the fire department hadn’t cleared Giuseppe’s yet, so Officer Carlisle figured that he would look for a suitable passage to bring up at the book club, given that his mother had just invited him, so he wanted to make a good impression.
Agent Parker was in an uncomfortable call with Washington, trying to explain why it was that all of the files in MacInroe’s office were in complete disarray, and covered in twigs. Despite his best effort to point out that nothing was missing, the voice on the other end of the phone did not sound impressed. The voice on the other end of the phone was also, apparently, late for a lunch date, and it started to get downright testy by the time Agent Parker mentioned the fact that the back door appeared to have been unlocked, possibly forced, and that he really wanted to leave to take a shower, seeing as how he was covered in questionable substances after his compost pile adventure.
Right around the time that James Farrier was eating a falafel by a nondescript water fountain, the members of the book club were filing into the house of Henry Makepeace, and hurling themselves upon the lavish spread of food, which he modestly insisted was “just a few things I whipped up.”
As Stella predicted, the focus of the book club was on the fire, and to her astonishment, the conversation was dominated by Kevin and Henry, both of whom surprised the group by announcing that the fire was obviously arson. Had the two had a chance to speculate, they might have surprised each other with their theories about the motive, but unfortunately the body of George MacInroe, tightly wrapped in electric blue nylon cord, was hurled through the living room window before this could happen.
Italian physicists claim that they have found dark matter. Which would be pretty sweet, if the find can be verified.
Police find panties, police flip out. Where did panties come from? Real estate open houses. Note to self: hide panties if my landlord ever decides to sell my house. Also, I hate the word “panties,” except when used alliteratively, as in “purple panty plucker prods pundits.”
A letter from a soldier on the Western Front written 90 years ago has been discovered in a garden shed, and it’s sparking a nation-wide search of Australia.
You think your life is tough: a Haitian women held on to a dead body to stay afloat after the boat she was on capsized. For nine hours.
If Obama were in Clinton’s shoes, opines Tony Harndon, he’d be forced to drop out. So, the question is, why is Clinton still in the race?
Congress is close to passing a bill to ban genetic discrimination, which I think is a good thing.
Remember world hunger? Yeah, it’s still going on. And it just got a lot worse.
To say that I have been looking forward to this book would be an understatement. For one thing, I really like Mary Roach, because although Spook was a bit of a disappointment, Stiff was awesome. Furthermore, Bonk is about human sexuality, and I have a puerile mind, so it was pretty much guaranteed to at least amuse me.
As indeed it did. While Bonk is not quite as luminous as Stiff, it was pretty darn good. It had the irreverent air I love so much, complete with witty footnotes. Mary Roach is a woman who knows how to use a footnote, to provide interesting information which she’s just dying to share, even if it doesn’t really belong in the text.
She was also quite the intrepid adventurer for this book. In addition to writing about sex research and the people who perform it, she participated in a few studies, after realizing that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to observe. While she kindly glossed over the gory details, I thought it was pretty awesome and bold of her to take the plunge for her readers. She even enlisted her husband at one point. If love isn’t participating in awkward scientific experiments which you know your wife will write about, I don’t know what is.
Basically, Bonk is about the history of sex research, with an emphasis on Western research in particular, and it’s pretty expansive; Roach cites medical texts which are thousands of years old, in addition to talking about groundbreaking 20th century research like the Kinsey Reports and Masters and Johnson. No topic is left unturned, from penile gloving (not what you think, and chapter six), to monkey sex.
Bonk was pretty informative, in a way, and it kept me entertained. I would pretty safely recommend it, especially if you enjoy walking down the street with a book about sex and suddenly running into everyone you know. Seriously, when I was walking back from the library with Bonk, I ran into like 12 people, all of whom asked what I was reading. And then I had to explain, and there was an awkward pause.
The best exchange, by far:
“You readin’ a book?”
“Ah, yes, it’s a little habit I like to indulge in sometimes.”
“You gonna read the whole thing?”
“Er, yes, I was planning on it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Er, research on human sexuality.”
“Oh.”
Demographics:
Bonk, by Mary Roach. Published 2008, 319 pages. Science.
There’s a great op-ed in the Times about the Supreme Court’s historical struggles (or lack thereof) with the death penalty, and I think it’s worth reading, because it is fairly short, and I think that it makes some great points.
Basically, the crux of the article is a condemnation of the Supreme Court’s recent approval of Kentucky’s death penalty method, drawing upon a history of the Supreme Court’s previous involvement in death penalty cases. The Supreme Court has been asked to rule on whether various methods of punishment are “cruel and unusual” before, and they’ve also been wrong before.
Death itself is not all that unusual, and I assume that’s why the death penalty is still permitted in this country under the “unusual” part of the clause, although I might argue that an execution is a rather unusual way to die, and I believe that it’s also a cruel one, although apparently the Supreme Court doesn’t share my feelings on the matter. Given that the justices on the Supreme Court are supposed to defend and interpret the Constitution while also dealing with changing social mores and interpretations of the Constitution, I think that the Court’s record on the death penalty is particularly interesting, because the Court tends to reflect social values, albeit about 40 years behind. The last officially recorded lynching in the United States was 40 years ago, incidentally.
In the 19th century, the Supreme Court gave the thumbs up to both death by firing squad and death by electric chair (two methods which are still in use today), despite evidence which suggested that such deaths were hardly humane or usual. I’m curious to see if these methods would be supported today, if the Court was asked to rule on them. The lethal injection is clearly cruel and unusual, as ample people have testified, and it’s odd, to me, that it got the vote of approval; maybe in 40 years, the furor over the lethal injection will finally catch up with the Court?
Of course, the multiple-drug method starts with a drug that basically paralyzes the prisoner, so there’s no way to tell if the prisoner is in agony or not during the administration of the subsequent drugs. Rather convenient, isn’t it? I think that the issue might be brought to the forefront of the public mind if execution witnesses saw the truth of the matter, rather than a sanitized version. People seem to have this vision that it’s like putting a dog to sleep, but it’s not quite that simple.
And it’s obviously quite a moral quandary for people other than myself, such as physicians, many of whom (rightly) refuse to participate in executions. In some states, physicians can even be sanctioned for offering their services to executioners. And while one might argue that the presence of a doctor makes the process more humane, I think that taking a stance on the entire procedure as totally foul is pretty important, and it does delay executions, which is good.
It disappoints me that the Supreme Court supports the death penalty, and that a lot of Americans seem to do so as well. It also reminds me of the fundamental divides in this country. Personally, I find the thought of taking another human life unconscionable, no matter what the crime is. Yes, there are people on Death Row who have done terrible, evil things, and I think that they should never be released, but I don’t see how killing them solves anything.
And, honestly, if you’re all about retribution, I think that rotting away in prison is a far more fit punishment than moldering on Death Row for awhile and then snuffing it. I’m pretty well versed in vengeance, if I do say so myself, and I think that people take this whole “eye for an eye” thing way too literally. Why take an eye and have done with it when you can slowly break someone down over the course of years? But I digress.
We already have a fairly clogged, inefficient, and deeply flawed justice system. American prisons are overcrowded, and I suspect that a fair number of people in prison really don’t belong there. It makes me wonder why it is that we continue to waste money on an antiquated and barbarian method of punishment in the 21st century, especially when our government is eager to criticize other nations for using the death penalty. Banning the death penalty seems like a moral imperative, to me.
In Iran, people get executed for being homosexual, which is awful. But in the United States, you get executed for being too black or too poor to defend yourself, and, in a way, that’s more awful, because we pretend that it is justified and reasonable. Defensible, even. After all, it’s justice, right?
A curious gourmet traveled to Bangladesh to learn more about the source of the prawns in his curry, and fortunately he writes for the Guardian, so we get to hear all about it.
PETA is pressuring Al Gore to address the issue of meat eating, which makes sense, since I feel like meat eating is the elephant in the room for the green movement.
“Ballooning priest rescuers find balloons but no priest,” reads the headline, and I am hooked.
Dissident bloggers don’t just face problems under totalitarian regimes; there are a few roadblocks in the land of the free and the home of the brave, too.
Rice supplies are starting to tighten up, to the point that retailers are rationing.
America seems to be getting pretty mean these days, and Ted Rall wonders why that is.
You do know that photographs in fashion mags are heavily altered before publication, right? I always assume that this is common knowledge, but I wasn’t aware of how heavily modified some images are until I checked out some before and after comparisons (click on ‘portfolio’). Looking at those images was quite eye opening, as I suddenly realized that all of the porcelain dolls I see on magazine covers have skin that’s actually a lot like mine, with small blemishes and natural imperfections. And that even “perfect” actresses and models are altered before being placed in the public eye.
I find that pretty depressing, myself. We constantly rail on about the unrealistic beauty standard promoted by the fashion industry, but it’s kind of a shock to be actually confronted with it. Of course, I knew that image manipulation happens, but I don’t think I realized the extent of such manipulation. It certainly didn’t occur to me that even for the perfect, there is no perfection, thanks to this society we live in.
Yesterday, this article was published in the Telegraph, and the fatosphere started responding, along with feminist bloggers. For those of you who don’t feel inclined to read the article, the short version is that many fashion magazines are starting to alter images of models and actresses to make them seem less thin. And I stress “less thin,” although the Telegraph opted for “fatter,” because these women aren’t fat, they are still thin. Very, very thin.
My response to the article was mixed. On the one hand, I thought it was interesting that magazines are actually altering images to make their subjects look larger, although still nowhere close to real women. On the other hand, it depressed me to think that these magazines have chosen to cover up the real consequences of dangerous thinness, probably in response to rising public outcry about the issue, and to make them seem more attractive.
As Ann says in the post at Feministing, if you want pictures of healthy models, hire healthy models, rather than modifying photographs of unhealthy models to make them look healthier. This seems pretty straightforward to me. She also made a very good point when she discussed the fact that extremely thin women don’t actually look that attractive, what with tiny breasts and bottoms, and jutting bones, so altering their images encourages people to pursue a thin look without revealing the physical cost.
Image manipulation of this type is simply a clear, blatant, lie. It conceals an important reality: the fact that anoretics have sallow, nasty skin, ashy hair, jutting bones, and a variety of other grotesque symptoms. The reality is that if you want to be as thin as the people in magazines, you’re going to look awful, but you might not realize that, since the truth is concealed from you.
The fashion industry is brutal for people on the inside, and pretty awful for those of us on the outside who are still influenced by it. I’m not sure what kind of message photoshopping to add flesh might be sending, but I don’t think it’s good, and I would love to see even one fashion magazine use honest, unaltered images straight from the camera. Just for once, it would be nice to see the truth, rather than an elaborately constructed fiction.
There seems to be growing awareness that maybe being extremely thin is dangerous, and some action is even being taken, like banning anorexic fashion models from fashion shows. Yet, at the same time, I see casual references to the “obesity epidemic” everywhere I look. I wonder if anyone’s left in the middle anymore, when a size eight is fat, all the models are all under size zero, and even they aren’t perfect enough for the exacting standards of the fashion industry.
Planning on flying soon? Get ready to pay extra for a second bag.
Scrap metal is booming in Vermont, as well in other regions of the country, thanks to rising expenses for extraction of virgin resources.
A vote for Clinton is a vote for “totally obliterating Iran,” in case you care. Is anyone in doubt that the Clintons have gone totally insane in their lust for power?
Vegan Erotica is a website that, uhm, well the name is pretty self explanatory. Basically it caters to kinky vegans, and the Phoenix New Times has a neat profile of the founder.
Muslim girl power is on the rise in the United States, and I think that’s pretty neat, especially given the abundant misconceptions about Muslim women among many non-Muslims.
The Afghan government has banned five soap operas from India. I guess that’s what American liberation buys you these days.
Please be warned that if you get all riled up about infertility issues, you may not want to read this post. And if you decide to read it anyway and you get all riled up, don’t blame me, because I warned you.
I picked this book up at the library as a personal challenge to myself, because it’s about a topic which I find repulsive, yet morbidly fascinating: fertility treatment. I noticed it on the new and noteworthy shelf, and I thought it might be interesting to read a scholarly work on how fertility treatment is changing society and morality. I also thought that since I have such issues with the whole fertility treatment deal, it would be an engaging personal challenge to force myself to read about it, and to try and put myself in the shoes of people who struggle with fertility issues.
I should stress that I do not have a problem with people who struggle with infertility; obviously, it’s not their fault. And while I am not interested in children, nor do I have any, I can understand, on some level, the desire to have children. I am just disgusted by the fertility industry, and to some extent the people who buy into it, primarily because I don’t understand it, and I was hoping that this book might provide some interesting insights, but I don’t mean to sound like I am personally attacking anyone here. “To each their own,” as they say, and it’s not my place to tell anyone what to do, or to act like I understand complex situations I am not involved it.
This book certainly provided insight and some thought-provoking material, along with more ammunition for hating the fertility industrial complex, as it were.
But let’s start with why I take issue with the whole fertility treatment thing, because on the off chance that one of you lazy people does decide to comment for once, I figure that’s a question that might get asked. My main reasoning for disliking it isn’t that it’s unnatural (although it is), but that I think it’s wasteful and vain. I believe that as long as there are children without homes in the world, people shouldn’t be spending tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of dollars on having children that are “theirs,” with their own genetic material.
I realize that infertility is probably immensely lame, and I am not even going to pretend to understand what people with infertility are going through, because I can’t. I can understand the desire to have children, but where I get lost is when people are willing to have their own children, by any means possible. It just seems ludicrous to me, when the money wasted on cycle after cycle of IVF could be saved to create a college fund for an adopted child. And it obviously causes a lot of angst and heartbreak, which makes me wonder how worth it fertility treatment is, if you destroy a partnership over it.
I learned a lot reading this book, and that’s one of my primary criteria in deciding whether or not I like a book. I think the author really did her research, and it really shows, and for the most part, I found the book both interesting and balanced, although the author made a few one-off comments that I found kind of irritating and offensive. But, overall, the book was quite good.
A great deal of the information in this book was new and surprising to me, and maybe it’s not to you, but I’m going to go ahead and talk about what surprised me anyway. For example, apparently the rate of adoptable infants in the United States is actually on the decline, and especially white adoptable infants, which have always been the majority. (African American and Hispanic women are statistically less likely to give their kids up for adoption.) One ramification of this, of course, is that it’s hard to adopt children with an American cultural background, and as this book pointed out, some parents have strong reasons for not wanting to adopt internationally: for example, if you adopt a kid from China, you automatically cut the child off from his or her cultural heritage, and that’s a choice some parents aren’t willing to make.
This certainly assails my position that as long as there are children without homes, people should not be doing fertility treatment, and it also got me thinking about the difference between foster care and adoption. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of kids in the United States who really, really need homes, but many of them are severely damaged and they come with baggage, unlike fresh, new-born infants. So if you’re sticking to infants, and cultural background and a sense of belonging is an issue to you, fertility treatments start to seem more…defensible. Hey, this is not to say that international adoptions shouldn’t be done; I know several people with children from international backgrounds, and those kids seem happy and healthy. Their ethnicity might be foreign while their culture is American, and I have no doubt that this is weird for them, but they seem to be doing well. I would love to see more serious studies on this, personally.
Another interesting titbit I learned is that in situations where women do IVF treatments after age 42, the chance of success with their own eggs is, uhm, basically nil. So all those actresses in their 40s with kids who did IVF? Those are donor eggs. Without exception. When older eggs aren’t viable, they just aren’t, although it is possible to conceive naturally after 42 in some cases.
One of the big issues that the book talked about was the moral and social implications of egg and sperm donation. Mundy talked about adoption, and all of the shifts there, from traditional closed adoption to open adoption to coparenting, and the book really got me thinking about children of egg and sperm donors, and their rights, and how we deal with them as a society.
Do egg and sperm donors deserve to know where they came from? I argue yes, because I think it’s crucial to know one’s health history, and because I don’t like secrets, as a general rule. Coming from donated eggs or sperm doesn’t make a child any less wanted or loved (in fact I would say he or she is almost more wanted and loved, given the lengths his or her parents went to), but it helps to explain why someone might not look like the rest of the family, or why someone might be more prone to certain health problems.
Of course, a lot of egg and sperm donation is anonymous and virtually impossible to trace, and some donors prefer to keep it that way. They don’t want to be responsible later in life for the kid, or they don’t want to deal with meeting the child, or whatever, and I understand these feelings. (If I was in a position to sell my eggs, I would probably do it anonymously.) So do we set up a system where the medical records of donors are available, along with basic biographical information, but not their names? Or allow people to send letters through a third party? What happens when one donor donates enough material for sixty children to be born, and the kids meet each other, don’t know it, and get married? (I know, I know, unlikely, but I think it’s something which bears considering.) What do you do with extra eggs and sperm, anyway, let alone leftover embryos?
Do parents always know what’s right for their children? I would argue no, especially when your children are adults, and concealing origins could be dangerous, humiliating, or just shameful. I think that the desire to conceal adoptions came from shame, and the desire to conceal the use of fertility treatments comes from shame. (And no wonder, with people like me running our mouths off about how repugnant we find it.) Maybe being more frank about these things would dispel the shame.
Furthermore, the book really underlined the differences between fertility treatments like drugs to stimulate ovulation, and the use of IVF and other treatments which I will, for lack of a better word, term “artificial.” I’m still pretty opposed to fertility drugs, because they elevate the risk of multiple birth significantly, and that carries a lot of medical and social issues, as I learned. I was dimly aware that multiple pregnancy is dangerous, but I wasn’t aware of how dangerous it was; even twins are risky, let alone “high order multiple births” like sextuplets. It isn’t just dangerous for the mother, either; the children are also at risk of a range of health problems.
And, as Mundy pointed out, low-income households are more likely to use fertility drugs, and to be unable to cope with the explosion of spawn that ensues. In IVF, there’s a little more control over how many kids you have, depending on how many embryos you put in the uterus, but with fertility drugs, there’s no control. And low-income people can’t afford seven children, several of whom might have severe developmental disabilities. Aside from that, multiples are highly stressful for their parents, and Mundy interviewed several parents who expressed regret, and anger at not being made more aware of the risks.
IVF isn’t without risks either; American doctors are apparently keen on popping as many fertilized eggs in the uterus as possible, resulting in the need for “selective reduction” (killing of unwanted embryos), or the risk of carrying multiples. And what do you do when you go through IVF and the embryos are implanted in a surrogate, who might have her own personal issues about selective reduction, or concern about carrying multiples?
The author also touched upon the reasons for infertility, and she raised a number of interesting points. Thanks to fertility treatments like IVF, parents can now pass infertility on to their children, along with some potentially dangerous birth defects. Maybe there’s a reason infertility happens, Mundy suggests, and it has to do with the welfare of the species. Are we weakening the human race by developing technology to overcome infertility?
She also talked about the way that fertility treatments are reshaping the structure of the family, and that was interesting to read about. Thanks to advances in infertility treatment, for example, gay and lesbian couples can have kids, which I think is awesome (my one exception to generalized loathing of fertility treatments). And more complicated situations are arising, like a kid with two parents in addition to a birth mother (surrogate) and a donor mother and/or father. Thanks to some open-minded donors and families, contact between children and donors isn’t impossible, and in fact sometimes complex relationships evolve, which is kind of, well, for lack of a better word, neat. It’s neat to see how humans adapt to new and formerly unknown situations.
Everything Conceivable really illustrated, for me, the complex ethical and social issues involved in fertility treatment. I really cannot recommend it enough, no matter what your stance on the issues covered might be, because it was worth reading. I can’t say that my opinion on fertility treatments has changed, but I certainly feel better informed, and being better informed is pretty much always a good thing.
Demographics:
Everything Conceivable, by Liza Mundy. Published 2007, 406 pages. Science.
Command and Control
If there’s one thing in this world I universally loathe, it’s dog owners who can’t be bothered to control their animals, or take care of them. Now, we all know that there are a lot of things I’m not very fond of, but this particular pet peeve (ha ha) of mine has been exacerbated of late, so I’m going to take a moment to rant about it, because I can.
I really don’t understand what is so hard about keeping dogs under control. I think it’s pretty obvious that no one likes loose dogs, because dogs can be dangerous and unpredictable, and even if your dog is nice, your dog can still scare people, or knock children over, or, hey, run out into the street and get hit by a car. It’s really not just a generic distaste for dogs that makes me loathe loose dogs, it’s a concern for animals who are allowed to roam free in situations which could be dangerous for them and others.
Yesterday afternoon, I was nearly savaged by some idiot’s dog which was just roaming about, willy nilly, because their yard doesn’t even have a fence. As it turns out, the dog was also obviously nursing, and new mothers tend to be testy no matter what the species, so there were a few minutes there where I was actually concerned, especially when the dog started snapping at my bag. The owner, of course, was nowhere in sight as I bellowed and careened around the alley trying to shake the dog off.
And I was struck with a moral conundrum. I feel like if a person came at me like that, I would do whatever was necessary to stop that person, including hitting and kicking. Yet, I felt hesitant to do that to the dog, because, well, dogs aren’t people. It’s not the dog’s fault that her owner is reckless and stupid, and being violent with her would probably make the situation even more agitated. I’m not really sure how to defend myself against a dog which is freaking out, especially when I don’t know the cause, but I was intrigued to find that I was unable to go with my gut reaction, which was to repel the dog in any way that I could. Fortunately for me, her puppies started freaking out, so she ran off before I was forced to do something drastic.
Most of the time, loose dogs are just annoying, not dangerous. They poop on bike paths, for example. They bark constantly, which is just obnoxious. Some even growl and snap, but obviously don’t mean to do anything about it. The neighbors down the alley from me have a very young and very sweet dog who jumps out of their yard and tries to follow me whenever I walk past, which is irritating for me, because I feel like I can’t just keep walking, because the dog will follow me, but it’s not like it causes bodily harm. Other loose dogs are just exuberant, with lots of energy, and some people just plain aren’t into that.
Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm, but controlling dogs is just common sense, to me. I think that the rules of behaviour dictate that you keep your dog on a leash, or in a secured area, because, guess what, not everyone likes dogs, no matter how nice they are. In fact, some people are afraid of dogs. As in really, really afraid, because they were savaged by loose dogs at some point. And dogs chase other animals, like pets, and, say, farm animals. I lost several pets growing up because of irresponsible, reckless, thoughtless dog owners who thought it was perfectly acceptable to let their dogs run loose.
Furthermore, at least in California, it’s the law. You have to keep your dog on a leash or penned, and you can get in trouble if you don’t. And your neighbors will probably hate you a lot less when they’re not dealing with your dog constantly. Pretty much everyone without a dog who lives next door to poorly controlled dogs secretly wishes that their neighbors would slip on banana peels, or receive an IRS audit, or something equally unpleasant. Trust me.
I believe that dog owners who don’t control their animals are stupid, and rude, and reprehensible. Their behaviour exhibits no respect or thought for society, and a profound lack of interest in thinking about other people. It also suggests that they don’t care about their animals that much, given that loose dogs can be rounded up by animal control, and if they make it onto farms, farmers are entitled to shoot them. So think about that the next time you let your dog off the leash “just for a minute,” self righteous dog owners.