Thoughts on personal space and public spaces
Human beings are complicated creatures. They contain multitudes! They can be eminently reasonable, and they can be wildly, infernally unreasonable. It’s a conundrum for the ages.
Case in point: When you ask an off-leasher to please leash their dog, they often have a look of total surprise and confusion in their eyes, as if never once has this option occurred to them. They can be literally standing anywhere, from under a “No dogs” sign in a nature preserve to a hospital labor & delivery ward, and still have this reaction. Leashes? Never heard of ‘em! How preposterous! Don’t you know everyone on planet Earth unanimously and wholeheartedly loves my dOgGo?!
Yet when I’m telling even a small part of this story, people I’m talking to tend to respond with words of recognition and empathy, and often with their own dog attack story. I think there’s a silent majority (including many wonderful dog owners) whose daily lives have been impacted by the modern wave of crummy dog owners, and they’re rightfully scared to speak up due to the stigma around, well, questioning literally ANYTHING about dogs. And the stigma is real, y’all. Doesn’t matter if you’re asking someone to pick up after their dog or if you’re a dog attack victim yourself—there’s an immediate amygdala response from so many people when you dare to ask for basic common decency. If all you suffer is ostracism for expressing such a forbidden opinion, you’re one of the lucky ones.
But this is exactly why it’s important to speak up. The relief that washes over the faces of people when they realize they can talk freely to me makes it all worth it. They feel seen, and they feel safe to speak to their own struggles and horrors.
Gather ‘round kids, I’m going to take you on a journey. A journey about independence and autonomy, about personal space and public spaces. About what civic participation looks like in an era full of splashy pet projects but bereft of efficiency and accountability. About me engaging in the time-honored human tradition of fumbling around and learning some things, and then fumbling around some more. About entitlement and outrage, and about just trying to walk down the street.
Buckle in, it’s longread time.
For a little bit of stage-setting: before this all started, like most people I’d had plenty of fine experiences with dogs and plenty of bad experiences with dogs. The sum total of my experiences (including being bitten myself, and becoming kind-of a dog owner—those were two separate incidents lol, but both during college) left me squarely in the camp of being Not a Dog Person, which was a simple matter of preference but nothing that loomed large in my personal identity. I just figured that overall, dogs were like many other species in that some are great and some are jerks, and I didn’t have a lot of time or interest to sort those out from each other, so in general I just didn’t think much about them.
I grew up in the area, have lived in the city for 24 years, and have lived in Church Hill for 13 years. I never felt consistently unsafe in any neighborhood until the past three years.
Setting a simple boundary
On a walk in the park during COVID, that feeling of relative safety started to change for my family. We were walking through Libby Hill Park like we did almost every day, and our toddler was running along on the sidewalk about 8 or 10 feet to my left. I don’t remember seeing anyone else walking in our view, or being aware that there was a dog nearby at all. But after turning to say something to my husband, I suddenly heard a bloodcurdling shriek—if you’re a parent, you know the difference between your kid’s delighted / surprised / mad shriek and their shriek of pure fear or injury, and this was the latter—and turned back to see my kid’s head hitting the pavement hard as she was knocked down by a large, reddish dog (breeds are not my forte; I think it was a retriever or a setter?) jumping on top of her. Once she was fully on the ground screaming, the dog proceeded to run over her multiple times while its owners just stood there and stared. I felt my feet were in quicksand and I couldn’t get to her fast enough, but I scooped her up and carried her home where we inspected her for injuries and tried to calm her down.
She had some bumps and scratches but it didn’t seem like enough to need professional medical treatment. I didn’t call Animal Care & Control or the police, which I now regret. Because when we gloss over and minimize acts like the one my kid went through, we also decline to add our voices to any other complaints or more-serious injuries inflicted by the same perpetrators, and deprive the community of another data point for documenting a pattern. It insulates people from natural consequences, and they walk away thinking to themselves, “See? It doesn’t bother anybody.”
But it does bother anybody, and it certainly bothered our kid. At that point my attitude was still mostly “That was awful, but life is pain. These things happen. I hope it doesn’t make her afraid of dogs.” But in the weeks after the attack, C was terrified any time we had to pass a dog, and her grip would tighten on my hand and she would start whimpering, no matter the dog’s interest level in us. I thought “Maybe she’ll forget about it after a while,” but the increasing levels of menace we experienced over the next few months with dogs reinforced her nervousness. Anything I would tell her to try to assuage her fears would immediately be disproven by the next dog that charged us across the playground or aggressively strained to get at her.
Human beings are natural problem-solvers, so I spent time thinking about what, if anything, I could do to fix the situation. Why had the first incident happened, and how could I have prevented it? Was 8-10 feet too far away to be from your child while walking in a huge, uncrowded park? (Seems like no if you want to avoid helicoptering, and if anything, I want to supervise my kids appropriately while letting them learn to roam farther from me the older they get.) Why hadn’t I seen the dog coming in advance, and why was there this “it came out of nowhere” feeling? We’re longtime Richmonders, which naturally comes with a certain amount of situational awareness when you’re outside, but after this we started keeping our heads on a swivel even more intentionally.
Still, no matter how aware we were of our surroundings, there were plenty of times where a dog who “seemed fine” would suddenly turn on a dime and come at us. As off-leashing grew in popularity in the neighborhood, we were no longer able to just walk casually down the street, sit on a bench, and take a break while the kids played on the playground. We had to now be on high alert the entire time, and it completely marred our experience with the parks we used to love.
From the instant we entered a playground or turned a street corner, we were scanning constantly for dogs. There were many times at the playground when I had to walk around and physically position my body between off-leash dogs and the play equipment, ready for when they charged the play area. There were several times when we walked up to the playground only to see several large dogs running laps around the mulched play area, and as I didn’t feel confident about defending myself alone with two small kids, we turned around and we went home. Where I used to take the opportunity to take a walk and enjoy how much it would refresh me any time I was sick of sitting in front of the computer, I suddenly found myself more likely to reach for the car keys because outside had become a fraught place. In fact, the constant stress we were going through when we left the house fundamentally changed how we related to the outdoors, which I think of as a major tragedy given how much hiking and nature meant to us.
The more research I did on what predicates dog attacks, the more clear it was that there’s just no ability for humans to predict with any real certainty what a dog is going to do at any given moment. Any dog can bite, and all dogs are “fRiEnDlY” until they’re not.
Animals are simply unpredictable no matter how well you think you know them, which is something a lot of people probably enjoy about them. Pet “experts” publish these long lists of signs you can interpret, and it just gets more and more nuanced and outlandish as you read. It’s like “Hang on a second, strange dog that accosted me in a park. Let me just consult this 20-page packet on whether or not you’re feeling aggressive right n—AAAAAAAAA!” Should people who don’t even own dogs, let alone small children, have to become dog-whisperer-level experts to simply walk down the sidewalk to school every day? Should we contort ourselves into smaller and smaller boxes to try to travel unnoticed by any dog who happens to come around the corner?
The amount of this kind of “interpret the signs” content that’s aimed at children and parents strikes me as particularly off-kilter. Trying to convince children that they can predict with any real accuracy what an animal is about to do is ludicrous, and trying to re-educate them out of their natural fear of dogs is akin to forcing them to hug and kiss a relative they’ve never even met before. Humans are born with all kinds of tendencies, some logical by modern standards and some not. Part of your job as a parent is to help them sort out, over time, the irrational fears versus the rational ones. For example, if your kid’s afraid of the vacuum cleaner, it makes sense to show them and tell them that the vacuum cleaner isn’t going to “get” them. But when the fear is perfectly rational, you’re doing a disservice to downplay it and gaslight them about it.
Like almost everything in life, there are risks involved. We can’t know for certain what a given risk is, but data can help us make our best guess.
I try to avoid hand-wringing over something that’s a relatively tiny risk. For example, I know someone who notifies every parent they know about every freak accident that befalls a child on this planet. At first I would read the whole thing and then spend the next two weeks lying awake at night, miserable and unable to get the image of the unfortunate victim out of my head. Eventually I shifted to a more practical procedure: I’ll do a cursory scan, look up how often this accident actually happens (maybe it’s…twice a year or something for the whole human population), make any reasonable changes to our house or gear that I need to just to be on the extra safe side, and then get on with my life. If it doesn’t have a pretty high occurrence rate for their age group, it just doesn’t make good statistical sense to focus much energy on it. I’m thankful for the “gift of fear,” but I want to worry about things in proportion to their risk.
This personal policy was another thing that forced me to take the increase in off-leash dogs seriously. Because despite the dismissive “dog attacks are really rare tho” platitudes that tend to come up, they’re not rare at all. And they’re rapidly getting more common.
“CDC Wonder recorded 81 fatal dog attacks in 2021, the most ever recorded in a single year. This is a 69% increase from 2019 (48 deaths) and a 131% increase from 2018 (35 deaths) in CDC data.”
CDC via Dogsbite.org
That is way more fatal attacks per year than I would have assumed, but I’m not just concerned with deaths. Frankly, I would like for my kids to avoid not just death by dog attack, but reconstructive facial surgery, and (at the risk of being greedy) any kind of hospital visit whatsoever.
“Dog bites pose a serious health risk to our communities and society. More than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States, and more than 800,000 receive medical attention for dog bites, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). At least half of those bitten are children. … Children are the most common victims of dog bites and are far more likely to be severely injured.”
American Veterinary Medical Association
Looking at the actual data, certain habits I had seen (and to my shame, even half-heartedly tried to employ) savored strongly of gaslighting: like parents denying a child’s experience by trying to convince them to ignore their own eyes and ears, repeatedly chirping “Aw he’s just playing” while a dog knocks them over or “Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you” when a dog snarls in their face. How can we tell them these lies when, demonstrably, the dogs absolutely are after you? How can we spend all day every day trying to show kids how to be sensitive to and interpret signals in their environment, and then tell them to ignore obvious aggression signals if they happen to be from the World’s Best Pupperino that can do no wrong?
Given the unpredictability of dog behavior, it seemed like a no-brainer: our family would need to set a simple boundary not to be around unleashed dogs.
Since Richmond has a leash law, this should be simple, right? People will definitely leash up if you just ask nicely, right? Lol.
A boundary trounced (and amended)
Once I had learned more and thoroughly read the city’s leash laws, including the fact that dogs of any kind (leashed or unleashed) aren’t allowed in playgrounds and sports complexes, my first assumption was that people must not know about the laws. Of course, most people wouldn’t blatantly disregard the laws if they knew it was stopping others from moving around freely, right? Right guys?
In response to politely asking things like “Hi there, can you please leash your dog?” or “Hello, would you mind leashing up please?” we got responses ranging from blank stares and shrugs to cursing and threats. Over many months of asking folks politely to leash around Church Hill, exactly one person ever leashed their dog (shout-out to that lovely guy!).
Hearing things like “No, she’s fine” or “I don’t give a #$@% about the laws” or “You got something to say to me?” or “Don’t tell me what to do you #@%J@#Orj3” or “I pay taxes too, you know, so I can do what I want!” over and over again forced us to slowly come to terms with two facts: (1) yeah, off-leashers absolutely do know about the laws and know it bothers people, and (2) asking nicely only exacerbates their entitled attitudes and makes things worse.
If the initial incident at Libby Hill Park was etched indelibly on my consciousness, another one at Machicomoco State Park added several underlines and neon highlighter. While hiking through the woods on a winter day (also in February 2022), we could see a large, off-leash black lab approaching on the trail. My husband called “Can you leash your dog?” to the owner who trailed a couple dozen feet behind it, and she shouted back “Nah, she’s friendly!” We slowed down and the owner began to catch up to their dog, but as the dog passed us, it lunged across me to get at C (now 4 years old), growling and snapping. In a moment that I will never forget, the owner grabbed the dog’s collar just in time to pull it back as its teeth whiffed the air an inch away from C’s face. That image—the open mouth, the teeth bared, the tiny bit of air between its snarls and her cheek—is one that replayed in my head as we hurried back to our car and watched the dog further harass people trying to get in and out of the park’s public bathrooms. It was on a loop as we continued on our journey and tried to enjoy the rest of our plans that day. It was with me when we got home later, and as I went about my business at work that week.
As unpleasant as this close call was for our family, I’m grateful that it snapped me out of a posture of relative complacency. After the encounter, the owner and her dog just trotted off wordlessly as our daughter screamed and I dry-heaved. The rest of their day wasn’t ruined; they didn’t have a single wrinkle to worry about or consequences to consider. I realized that in a situation where the aggressors had all the muscle and all the power, we were very lucky that it was only a near-miss. It could have gone very differently, and has gone very differently for so many families whose lives have been changed by a moment’s violence.
Both adults in our household are non-confrontational, to a fault. I love to discuss things in-depth with friends, but I know I’d rather do just about anything than have arguments with strangers in public. Now I had to rectify a conflict between priorities: my innate desire to “not rock the boat” and my family’s basic bodily safety. Where I had been trying before this incident to seek solutions cautiously and ambiently, and in ways that wouldn’t ruffle anyone else’s feathers, I had to finally ask myself what I was giving up (and forcing my kids to give up) in order to tiptoe around others.
It’s worth noting here that Animal Care & Control never once showed up during these months despite many conversations, and it was pretty clear they had no intention whatsoever of enforcing the existing leash laws. I started emailing RPD and Animal Care & Control officials with regular updates and repeatedly asking for enforcement, as I very much don’t view enforcement as a private citizen’s responsibility. The resounding message we heard from the city’s inaction was the same as many other cities: “No one is coming to help you. You’re on your own.”
All of this was rolling around in my head in the days and weeks after Machicomoco. Things in our neighborhood were getting worse, and we had had a number of issues with even trying to pass leashed dogs safely on the sidewalk. On a typical day in Church Hill, we often encountered dogs blocking the whole sidewalk: sometimes it was an outstretched leash making a complete clothesline you couldn’t cross, and sometimes it was dogs and owners stopping to leisurely “greet” each other (leaving no room for anyone to pass).
One day I started to employ our usual tactic for avoiding this issue—walking my kids into the street until we could get well beyond them and re-enter the sidewalk—and I just stopped mid-stride. In one of those “all has become clear” moments, I could see a bunch of scenes from my life sharply: dozens of detours into the busy street with two small children, trying to explain once again why we couldn’t use the playground to two little disappointed faces, squinting at my computer screen trying to figure out how we could walk to school without having to pass the playground and seriously considering going well out of our way, and a zillion other ways I had tried to contort myself into nonsensical shapes to fit alongside the New Dog Order. I realized what I was modeling for my kids—the idea that they don’t belong, that our other friends and neighbors who are responsible pet owners don’t belong, and that the most aggressive and inconsiderate dog owners are the ones who get to decide who’s in and who’s out when it comes to public spaces. This is a poor message to send if I want to raise our kids to be good citizens and willing servants but not doormats.
So now we were at a crossroads. Having learned how badly an off-leash dog could wreck our day (or entire weekend), how quickly these encounters could turn violent from both dogs and owners, and that there seemed to be nothing we could do to get people to leash up (or let us pass unmolested alongside their leashed dog), we had two choices for what to do next:
- Shrink our world. Stay indoors. Stop using the parks and playgrounds. Stop playing sports. Stop attending outdoor events. Stop walking and biking and scooter-ing, and start driving more often. Stop volunteering and participating in park and neighborhood cleanups. Be less involved in the community, and stay home as much as possible.
- Defend ourselves when necessary. Stop asking folks to leash proactively, as from experience, we knew it only escalates negative contact and elicits hate. Hope that off-leash dogs would leave us alone, but fill our pockets with self-defense tools and deploy them when approached.
We chose option 2. And that was it. I had asked and asked, and I was done asking. I was done having my family trampled by the entitlement of others.
After that, the objective became simpler: to simply walk. There were going to be no more illogical detours, and no more leaving spaces like the playground when we wanted to be there. We were not going to see ourselves as victims, and we were going to try our best to live out of a spirit of dignity instead of fear.
Let’s explore self-defense
If we were going to start using sidewalks and parks freely again, we had another challenge on our hands: how to be in those spaces without wrestling with off-leash dogs. No more “let’s see if it stays over there,” “let’s see if it notices us, hopefully it won’t,” etc., all the while being very aware that if it came down to combat with some of these things, we were going to lose. So we needed to ensure we wouldn’t have physical contact with them at all, with a fairly high level of certainty.
A small modicum of personal space is a reasonable thing to expect, and had now become non-negotiable for us. But I had to admit a bit sheepishly that I didn’t really know how to protect my own personal space well. In twenty plus years living in the city, I’d never had to.
First, we started carrying around a wooden baseball bat. It was simply the only thing we had around at the time that fit the bill, and I think of it fondly as the first tool we used in taking our agency back. But it’s a pain to carry everywhere, and hard to fold up and pop in your pocket when you go into a shop or restaurant. So I did some research into more tools that could help us move about safely and decided to try a pocket air horn, which is a cheap dog training tool you can find online.
The air horn can be used long-range, so if you manage to get it out and do a short blast by the time a charging dog is still ~10 yards away or so, you’re good. The dog will either stop in its tracks, or trot off in a different direction. No fuss, no muss. No need for begging, pleading, or opening yourself up to abuse from dog owners by asking them to do something they’re going to refuse to do anyway. It simply achieves the goal of preventing a physical altercation with the dog, and you move on.
We’ve been able to prevent a bunch of altercations with the air horn over the past two years, but one of the times I was most grateful for it was at Chimborazo Park in November 2023. I was walking C from the middle area of the park (where her soccer practice had taken place), across the field so that we could exit at the western edge of the park and head home. Crossing the field was the most direct route to our destination, but even if we had wanted to skirt the field using the sidewalk along the park’s southern edge, we couldn’t have done so because it was closed for construction. A large, white off-leash dog started charging us. I blasted it once the dog got within range, and it turned and ran the other way. This is a bad quality video, but most of the time when this sort of thing happens, I don’t get any video at all, because I don’t have the wherewithal to film it, handle my kids, and get my tools ready for self-defense. But it still shows what we deal with on a daily basis. The thing that breaks my heart most is that you can hear the fearful tone in C’s voice. She’s such a happy, chill kid most of the time and I hate that she has to feel this way when simply minding her own business, walking home from soccer. And I hate that there’s no good way to respond as a mom. How can I comfort and bolster my kid while also acknowledging the reality that yes, that dog is 100% coming straight for us at top speed and yep, its teeth are bared? I hate the impossible pickle it forces us into.
Though by now we’ve tried out a number of things and added and removed tools as we’ve learned more over time (and figured out which ones were easier to carry, more effective, could be used for long- or short-range, etc.), the air horn remains my favorite tool by far.
Of course, leashes themselves don’t stop bad behavior, and they don’t do much when you’re elbow-to-elbow in a crowd. Once, at a food festival at Union Market, I watched a Dogue de Bordeaux make its way through the crowd, pulling hard on its leash and trying its best to get to any food within a 15’ radius. A guy had set his plate of oysters down briefly while he shifted whatever was in his hands to get a better grip on it, and in that instant the dog saw its opportunity and lunged, nipping the edge of the plate before the guy hurriedly grabbed it and held it up high. The owner was busy gabbing while facing the opposite direction, so she didn’t see it—not that she would have done anything anyway. Next it turned toward us, where we were sitting on hay bales eating our lunch. I knew that if I said anything to the owner in advance, she’d act appalled and yell at us for aSsUmInG tHiNgS before anything had even happened. “Maybe it’ll pass us by,” I thought. But sure enough, the Dogue de Bordeaux walked right up to my kid (who was eating, with her back to the dog) and shoved its head onto and then over her elbow to get to the plate that was in her lap. I am constantly, constantly reevaluating encounters we have and trying to think about how to improve my reactions for next time, so later I thought I probably should have leapt up when I first saw it and put my body between it and my kids, full plate of food and super-crowded space notwithstanding. But now it was too late for words, and too late for asking the owner to control her animal (which she was already choosing not to do). I gave a short blast on the air horn and it backed away, thankfully.
She yelled at me, but I couldn’t really hear her over the sound of pure relief after seeing space increase between the dog’s head and my kid’s face, as well as the brief jolt of gratification for having done something hard (sticking up for myself in public—an introvert’s most detested task). Most of the time I don’t say anything to bad dog owners because it’s an exercise in futility, but sometimes I’m visited by l’esprit de l’escalier. If I had had the wherewithal, I should have responded: “We get to choose whether your dog gets on top of us or not, and today and every day, we don’t consent to this. Don’t like it? Consider keeping your dog to yourself.”
To this day that was one of the only times someone yelled at us for using the air horn, and you know, I’ll take it. Most people seem to know quite well they’re doing something illegal and just plain arrogant when they let their dogs run amok, so maybe they’d feel a little silly complaining if they heard a minorly unpleasant sound while doing that illegal thing.
A community-wide cause
Once I started visibly wearing the air horn clipped to my bag starting in early 2022, it turned into the most unexpected talking piece. Chatting with other folks in parks and playgrounds, an exchange would typically go like this:
Them: “Oh what’s that?”
Me: “An air horn to deter off-leash dogs. Best purchase I ever made. Works like a charm.”
Them: “Oh my gosh. Where’d you get that? I need to get one. Let me tell you what happened to my dog / grandma / kid / etc. because of an off-leash dog…”
And just like that, they went deep into storytelling mode, and I was learning a lot more about their life and experiences than small talk would have allowed. This happened with people I knew well, and with complete strangers. It happened with fairly big adults just like me, and with elderly folks and families with small children. I started hearing so many stories that were similar to my own, and while it sucked to find out how much of an epidemic this problem is, I’m really grateful for those conversations. As I said in the intro to this piece, people felt seen when they were able to share what had happened to them without worry of being screamed at or ostracized, and I felt validated too. After everything we had been through so far, it was good to know it wasn’t just me.
One of the most memorable stories I heard was about a friend having to push her dog onto the hood of a nearby vehicle to get away from an attacking off-leash dog, somehow shattering the vehicle’s window in the process of scrambling up behind her. “I had to pay for the damage, but it was worth it,” she said. But why should she (or anyone) have to pay thousands in glass repair when she was just out for a peaceful walk, all because of an off-leasher’s ego? It makes no sense.
And one of the most bizarre stories was related by another mom at the playground. I complimented her daughter’s neat-looking vintage-style bicycle that was parked nearby, and she thanked me but said “I’m actually really shaken up right now.” Her daughter (4 or 5 at the time) had just been riding her bike in Libby Hill Park when an off-leash Saint Bernard ran up and knocked her off the bike. She ran to her daughter and yelled for the owner to come get her dog, but I don’t think the owner was anywhere remotely nearby. When the owner finally arrived, she didn’t leash up and she didn’t offer any apology to the kid sitting bruised on the ground. She just said “Yeah, my dog is triggered by wheels” and shrugged. The level of fury I felt while hearing this story! I did not want to believe that someone who truly thought their 100-pound dog was “triggered” by something as common in a busy city as wheels, would choose not to leash it and then complain that someone else’s perfectly normal park activity had caused the altercation. The day that the ultra-coddling of Saint Bernards trumped small children riding bikes on the list of “reasons societies have parks in the first place” was a sad day indeed.
Around the same time, someone shared a post on the /rva subreddit complaining about off-leash dogs, and it got a huge response. I did a search and found a number of posts about the issue going back several years, many of them including tons of comments with examples of bad experiences. Searching other social media sites like Facebook and Nextdoor turned up the same. It’s such a universally recognized annoyance that it was even immortalized in a Peedmont piece (our beloved local satirical news).
The more research I did, the more the dots started to connect about why this problem has been allowed to fester. One of the most heartbreaking things I learned was that some people hadn’t visited our beautiful Church Hill parks in years because they didn’t feel safe to walk through them anymore. Off-leashers yell “Well nobody was here!” or “Nobody uses this dumb playground anyway,” and it turns out that a lot of people have done the same thing I was doing: they’ve removed themselves from those spaces specifically because of bad experiences with off-leash dogs. The idea galled me that the parks we all care for together on a volunteer basis, that we view as the “gems” of our neighborhood, are viewed as off-limits to some when they should be welcoming and open to all.
One woman I respect and admire, who’s super active in volunteering with the parks, was more surprised than anyone to hear about the information I had been gathering. This illuminated a blind spot: her assumption had been that though she saw flagrant violations of the leash laws daily and conflict arising from off-leash dogs, she hadn’t gotten any formal complaints about it so she figured it always “worked itself out.” But what she hadn’t realized was that the silent majority here is just that—silent.
A lot of people don’t even know that volunteer parks groups exist or how to contact them or whether this would even be in their purview. Most people fear the stigma against reporting dog-related crimes, so they don’t report. ACC ignores complaints they do get and routinely reports about what a “great” year they just had, and of course they’re not going to proactively share their data on any reports with the relevant park volunteers. When someone has or witnesses a bad experience and internally decides “This place isn’t safe for me” and turns around, never to return, nobody hears about that in any kind of an official capacity. There are no data points around those kinds of decisions, which leaves off-leashers with all the deniability power.
The city’s inaction allows gangs of off-leashers to take over while others who (understandably) don’t feel physically comfortable enough to stand up for themselves are pushed out of our parks and off of our sidewalks. What had crystallized for me through all these conversations was that just being present and visible in our public spaces, in our parks and on our sidewalks, is important to signal to others that yes, you belong here too.
While all this research was going on, we tried everything we could to address the crux of the issue, which is non-enforcement of existing leash laws. As with all bullies, if off-leashers can be pretty certain they will never experience any consequences for it, they have no incentive to change their behavior. We worked with the rest of the Friends Of Chimborazo Playground to increase signage and point people to the dog park two blocks away. We linked up with other Friends of the Parks groups to speak at a City Council meeting to support budget for hiring park rangers who could enforce leash laws. RPD and the Friends of Chimborazo Dog Park passed out flyers and talked to dog owners about the leash laws too.
Meanwhile, encounters with dogs got worse. Off-leashing reached epic proportions in nice weather, and passing leashed dogs on the sidewalk continued to be a scary prospect some of the time, with (as I mentioned earlier) people blocking the whole sidewalk by forming a clothesline situation with their stretched-out leashes and refusing to move, and dogs who seemed fine suddenly freaking out and snarling / barking / clawing the air as their owners tried to drag them back onto their side of the sidewalk.
Since ACC officials would ignore us completely or respond dismissively like “Eh nobody really does that though, right? This isn’t a real problem,” we began to report off-leashers to Animal Care & Control every time we saw them so that there would be more complete records in the system, and we continued following up with ACC officials and City Council via email. We started building a collection of videos so we would always have recent proof to back up our claims.
Over time, I slowly improved at remembering to start filming anytime I saw an off-leash dog. This has probably been the weirdest adjustment for me because I’ve always felt gross about the everybody-film-the-evildoer thing that’s grown steadily in our culture since the advent of smartphones. And indeed, plenty of people just can’t wait to get some virally rude ~content~ out there so they can farm more status points. But there’s the Let Us All Enter the Shaming Coliseum Together crowd, and then there’s the I’ve Tried Literally Everything Imaginable And Have Finally Arrived At This Stage crowd. To be fair, my interest is in advocacy against the crappy behavior itself and not in the public shaming of the individual. So I just pop the videos straight into our compendium for City Council, ACC, and RPD instead of cutting them for maximum TikTok-style choppiness.
But now when I think about precious old Past Tess, a sweet summer child who wanted to believe you could just talk calmly to someone who was up to no good and resolve the situation, it’s a humbling thought. It reminds me that dog mayhem apologists are just like anyone else in that even when new information becomes available, they want to believe the narrative they’re already invested in—in this case, that “everyone” is in control of their dogs, and that off-leash dogs don’t just run up on families for no reason (and that a lot of other violent, preventable things don’t happen because of dogs too). We all dig in our heels and cling for dear life to the most ill-advised nonsense sometimes despite eleventeen signals to the contrary. Some of us more than others (lol), but I think the experience is universal to some degree.
Speaking of violence, by the fall of 2023 attacks on pets and close calls in the neighborhood from off-leash dogs had reached such a fever pitch that people were casting about for solutions. People started tagging me in posts, knowing I was active with the Church Hill Association and asking if there was anything they could do to help. Since the CHA is a local non-profit and not an enforcement agency, it hadn’t ever really occurred to me that they could do much about it, and I also didn’t want to be that girl banging the gong about my pet issue. But enough people followed up with me about it that I felt like I should at least bring it up at a board meeting, which eventually led to a membership vote and our December 2023 Letter from the Church Hill Association to Cynthia Newbille. Dr. Newbille responded by calling a meeting with us and ACC and RPD, and to prepare for that meeting I created the Unleashed Dogs – Examples & Resources doc that I’ve continued to build on over the past few months. Looking through that document can be pretty powerful, because it’s made up of quotes from residents all over Richmond and you can quickly get a handle on just how deep the issue goes, how much it’s affected people’s daily lives (especially dog owners), and how much the level of tension has risen out in the community. The city’s negligence in enforcing our laws has directly created this tension by forcing private citizens to become their own enforcement agency (come on guys, that’s NEVER a good idea), and will be directly responsible for violence that comes from it.
I remember a while back when someone made a nasty post online about the Friends of Bandy Field for trying to stand up to off-leashers, it smacked strongly of “It’s not bothering anybody!” energy. I have my own story of a negative thing happening because of an off-leash dog at Bandy Field, many others have theirs, and it’ll go on this way until things are enforced. But I guess things like a volunteer member of the Friends of Bandy Field being knocked to the ground by an off-leash dog earlier this year, necessitating total knee reconstruction surgery, would never make it onto the average off-leasher’s list of concerns. Their good time is what matters, and it’s all that matters.
The bottom line is that you are not more important than anyone else. None of us is more important that anyone else. So if you’re an off-leash enthusiast, your slight convenience (using a public park as your own backyard) for a thing you actively signed up for (dog ownership when you presumably don’t own your own field) isn’t more important than other peoples’ basic right to walk undisturbed. This seems so clear and simple, and yet here we are.
Why the rise in antisocial behavior, and why now? I’m not an expert on “untangling the skein” as they say, but there seem to be a few obvious factors at play:
- People who really can’t train or take good care of dogs deciding to get them anyway throughout the pandemic, then making all of their bad decisions your problem
- Living in a densely-populated area that’s reached peak dog saturation (urban areas simply weren’t designed to handle dogs in every house, and all the shelters are full-to-bursting)
- Living in a specific spot where we have to pass two popular parks to get to school and back every day (“look at all these parks,” they said. “your kids will love it,” they said 🥴)
- Having small children that apparently just look really, really yummy to dogs (dogs seem to attack less if I’m out walking around by myself, but I’m working with a very small sample size here)
Those topics each deserve their own posts / dissertations / encyclopedia volumes, but today is not the day for that.
As for the choice we made to simply walk, two years later we had no regrets. The time spent espousing this philosophy was so much more peaceful than the period of constant menace that preceded it. We had no illusions that this peace would continue indefinitely though; we were pretty aware that some of the off-leashers had noticed we had started confidently reentering the spaces we had been afraid to enter, and that they didn’t like it one bit. I figured it was just a matter of time before one of them would take offense at my shocking lack of a desire to cower in a corner for them, and would go ahead and try to smear me on the internet.
But any time someone says “Aren’t you scared?” I say “Best hill to die on I can possibly think of.” As much as I would like for this to be coming from a place of nobility, I have to honestly say it’s coming from a place of practicality and of, well, nausea if I choose the opposite. I mean, when the authorities have made it clear they’re never coming to save you, what’s the alternative? Stop being a part of the community? Stop enjoying the outdoors in the city I’ve lived in my whole adult life, and have worked to improve? Turn my brain off and be a robot Stepford Wife for the whims of every rampager on the street? I’m a lot more scared of those prospects, frankly. Life is too short.
If I hadn’t gone down the community research rabbit hole, I might feel differently. But I can’t think of much that’s more important to me than sticking up for accountability and basic common decency, and for using what little confidence and social capital I have to show up on behalf of folks who don’t feel safe enough to do so themselves. And since I know the term Karen “has become synonymous with woman among those who consider woman an insult” (or at least, if we’re being extra generous, any woman who stands up for herself at all), that doesn’t really bother me either. At this point, it’s a term that’s somewhere between completely meaningless and a rueful badge of honor. Of course, working in the trenches at Tumblr Support for eight years and having seen the absolute worst things people can say in the internet’s wildest cesspool (affectionate) probably didn’t hurt my resolve either.
The bzzz heard ‘round the globe
Eventually I got to enjoy the classic bittersweetness of correctly predicting how The Shouting Class will behave. Last month we were walking back from school dropoff like usual and were treated to an absolutely picture-perfect display of off-leashers being tOtAlLy In cOnTrOl of their animals. The dogs came after us, but we were able to fend them off and report it to ACC once we got through the park. An ACC officer did follow up with Matt (a first!), was super helpful, and alerted us later that night about a neighborhood Facebook group post claiming that a “deranged” attacker had come up out of nowhere and terrorized some saintly dogs. Faith partially restored in our institutions? Time will tell.
It’s hard to imagine why someone who knows darn well that’s not what happened (assuming they were, in fact, there) would want to post such an outright fabrication. It’s certainly another drop in the vast bucket of proof that the stigma around expressing even the smallest criticism about dogs is strong and growing. They are our culture’s sacred cows.
As much as I grumble that having to film these jokers is exhausting, I was sure glad I had done it that day. And it was a good reminder to me that insurance against false narratives is another good reason to do it. My punishment for neglecting proper camera equipment though was that the hand-held phone video is not amazing. I was using my phone to film with one hand and trying to wield off dogs with the other hand, and the sound gets fuzzy so you can’t hear very well that one lady got in my face yelling at me, though you can see her approach. You can also see that we kept moving steadily throughout the video, turning toward the threat as anyone would, but still continuing to move toward home like we always do. You can also hear a guy following us through the park at the end of the video, trying to ask where we live. I’d give that guy an A- if he’s going for extra creep factor points, which is coincidentally the same grade I’d give myself for overall efficiency in this round. My only criticism was that I wished I had managed to get my air horn out of my pocket in time to use it, but by the time we realized they weren’t just chasing the ball or whatever but were actually making for the gap in the fence to run us down in the alley, we could already “see the whites of their eyes” as the saying goes, and my free hand just had time to grab the closest tool.
You always want to avoid feeding the trolls when humanly possible, so my first instinct was to ignore the post. But I thought about some of the rare other occasions in life when I had regretted not going ahead and setting the record straight in a timely fashion, and this situation felt like one of those occasions. Internet haterade, rumors, misinformation, and such love to make the most of a first-strike advantage, and it’s hard to change the already-made-up minds of folks who’ve been targeted after the fact. As I quoted in my FB response, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” But I felt like I should at least put the truth out there for posterity. Here’s an excerpt:
Today, as always, we did not approach anyone’s dogs. That’s the whole thing, see: we would like to avoid dogs, so seeking them out is not really a thing we do. They ran up on us, and the pack of dogs actually started pouring out of the fence and into the alley to get to us before we even entered the park, but we stayed on our usual course and got out our tools. Note that I did not say a single word to the off-leashers, but was approached and harassed while simply trying to walk through the park and maintain a clear path to do so, with one off-leasher trying to find out where we live. Ultimately no dogs were touched, but we were able to create enough of a path to keep walking.
Now, if only there was some way to avoid conflict with those who choose not to have contact with dogs while in the park! Oh right! Those pesky leash things. But if the off-leashers acknowledge that they decided to get a pet that they believe requires running off-leash in a field, knowing full well that their city has leash laws and that they themselves don’t own a field, they would have to confront some unpleasant truths about their life choices. So, predictably, they (1) make those choices everyone else’s problem, and (2) they resort to personal attacks.
The fact is, I don’t need special purposes or permissions to enter a public park, like I do almost every morning. I don’t have to cower, or cling to one corner of the park that’s dog-free in a given moment. I do not need to wait until the off-leashers feel like finishing their hour of power; indeed, we should all be able to use the park peacefully at the same time if only basic park rules (set up for that purpose) are adhered to.
Not wanting to get into a protracted comment battle that would no doubt suck away too many hours and brain cells, I turned off notifications and went about my business. I think it didn’t register as much more than a blip to me because while people have reached out after reading the post and said “Wow! I had no idea some people were so psychotic,” it’s not a new thing for me. I had that “Wow!” moment over two years ago, so this was just like…a regular weekday for me.
I have to admit, though, that in the spirit of leaning into my strengths I toyed with the idea of changing my license plate to “TSR LDY,” before chirping back “Just kidding. That would be too much, right?” at my husband’s raised eyebrows.
The dog days are over
I’d been keeping notes about this whole journey for over a year, piecemeal scraps that I hoped to finally sit down and sort through and type out properly into a coherent account. I don’t know if I’ve managed to be coherent (my 11th grade English teacher was right; wordiness has always been my downfall), but I know it’s been good for me to get it all out onto the virtual “page.” And it’s helped me make some sense out of the crock of senseless rigamarole that we’ve been dealt.
In case it needs clarifying, I’m not the hero in this story (imo, the one single ACC officer interested in carrying out the department’s objectives holds that title—iykyk 🥇). I’m an imperfect mom, trying to make the best of a really weird situation and have enough courage to both (1) not ruin my children’s chances of growing backbones someday and (2) not feel completely ashamed when I think of these events later on.
I got some really nice, supportive texts and messages in the days after my response, including one from a stranger who simply said that she was sorry she had believed the story in the first place, and thanked me for speaking up. That meant a lot, and has served as a good reminder that some people really are reasonable and really do adjust their opinions when they learn more. I can tip a little (okay okay, maybe a lot) into cynicism at times, and I just feel really grateful for little reminders like this that pull me back when that happens.
I was told during another conversation that somewhere in the comments, a woman said she knew my kid had been attacked and that it was annoying that I wouldn’t “stop screaming about it.” Though I don’t think I’ve ever actually “screamed” about it so I can’t take full credit for that, I’ve never been prouder of an insult.
I’ve thought about that phrase “stop screaming about it” intermittently over the past couple of weeks, rolling it around in my head a bit. There are certainly things I wish people would stop “screaming” about. But when a neighbor is being subjected to a significant and ongoing threat, as so many have been in our city, even in my most cynical moments it doesn’t feel right to give them the Miss Hannigan treatment with a firm “aw, shaddap.” I keep coming back to concern. Concern feels like the appropriate posture here, if not outright indignation.
I hate to think that this is a really poignant sign of the times. Is this where we’re at? Have we reached the point where people want mothers whose children have been harmed to just “stop screaming about it”? To stop ruining everyone’s good time by pointing out an unpalatable truth? To roll over and give up? To sweep their childrens’ hurts, maims, and yeah, even deaths under the rug? Because if so, I don’t want any part of that kind of a motherhood. What a difference it would make if every child had just one adult who was wholly and truly in their corner.
Kindness and humility and living in community with people matter to me. I consider those things to be vital ingredients of “the good life.” Sometimes I think wistfully of myself during the beginning stages of this journey, when I was still so hopeful that “just talking to people” would set things right. But when I dig deeper and really examine my memories of those months of asking nicely for folks to leash, I don’t see genuine kindness and humility, and I definitely don’t see community. I see naïveté, and I see the desire to appear kind and humble enough for the biggest blowhards to deign to leave me alone. This has led me to a painful but necessary pocket of growth. Maybe now I’m more ready to interrogate my actions when I find myself reaching instinctively for the “smooth handle” in every situation. Am I being kind, or am I being a doormat (and perhaps being unkind in the long run)? When I flatten my needs and the needs of other neighbors in order to “keep the peace,” am I really being a peacemaker?
And when we’re talking about an ongoing situation where someone’s boot was, is, and continues to be on my neck? I hope I will always work to remove it, as any reasonable person would. And if it’s on my kid’s neck? Well.
Still, I’m grateful for whatever that impulse is in me that made me want to hope and made me want to seek cooperation in the first place, even if it makes me look (and feel) like an utter cinnamon roll sometimes. I hope that no amount of rude awakenings will entirely snuff out that light in me. And I never want to define myself by negative things that have happened to me in the past; my world is made up of so much more than that and I think the past is the one thing Kylo Ren was right about.
If you’re wondering how C (our youngest kid) is doing now, she’s doing alright. Having a solid routine and language around what we do when a potential threat approaches has been helpful, and has made the average day walking around the neighborhood easier. She still plunges into paralyzed fear when we have a close call or when she sees a dog charging across a field, and who can blame her? My heart rate rises too. But my face isn’t on eye-level with two rows of sharp teeth, so it’s easy for me to keep from whimpering.
Most days, we don’t talk about dogs. And she’s even slowly started to be okay with pretending to play with dogs (a puppy stuffed animal that came with a play vet kit) again, as of this winter. Her resilience in spite of what she’s gone through inspires me every day.
If you made it all the way to the end of this, I hope you’ll accept my hearty thanks and send me your own ridiculous longread if you ever write one.
🖤
parasol party 
