Hardly a week goes by without receiving a letter or two, and sometimes a “Kick” to boot, on the subject of bad dog owners. These are the thoughtless, sometimes misanthropic owners who let their unruly canines harass smaller dogs and innocent people alike in public walking places. Kinnikinnick Park in Sechelt is often the scene of the offence, although Gibsons and Pender Harbour have their hotspots as well.
This week a letter came in from a Toronto woman named Julia who was recently visiting her mother in Sechelt. It’s a long letter but it’s worth boiling down to its essentials because it might wake some people up.
Julia’s story is a real horror story. Eight times in her letter she uses the word “terror” or a variant thereof.
Walking with her mother in Kinnikinnick Park in early September, Julia wrote, “all of a sudden this snarling, extremely vicious-looking dog comes rushing right up to us at high speed, his teeth bared, his snout all scrunched up, sharp white teeth gnashing, growling, barking like mad, rushing at us again and again, lunging with total aggression.”
Julia stood between her mother and the dog until it finally backed off and ran down the trail.
“We were left stunned, terrified and trembling. My heart rate had shot right up and we were both pale, shaking at the knees. I felt incredibly shaky and wobbly – I can only imagine how my mother must have felt.
“And then – that same dog came rushing back up at us again! Snarling, barking viciously, growling, hair all raised up, all his spikey teeth showing – total terror all over again, one minute after the first assault! Again I shoved my mother behind me and did my best to shout at the dog to try to get him to back off.”
Finally the dog’s owner showed up and, after about 10 attempts, managed to call her dog off.
When Julia and her mother got back to their car, they were shaking and “felt upset, angry and totally powerless.”
A few days later, the last day of her Sechelt vacation, Julia was walking in Kinnikinnick by herself when “all of a sudden yet another vicious-looking dog is ferociously charging me, snarling, madly barking! I yell at the dog to try to get it to back off, but it’s lunging at me again and again.
“This time the handler is accompanied by about six or seven other dogs, none of them on leashes, of course. When I tell her this is totally unacceptable, she yells back: ‘This is an off-leash dog park!’”
Julia walked on, “and sure as rain – on the other side of the park, that same dog charged me again. The same terrifying vicious charge, complete with mad insanely loud barking, white fangs, snarled up nose, hair standing on end – charging again and again.”
That was Julia’s vacation in Sechelt. She says she will not be returning to Kinnikinnick unless it is once again designated as an on-leash area for dogs.
“And, as long as the park remains off-leash, I truly pity the kids, seniors and everyone else who, in the upcoming weeks, months and perhaps years, are going to be terrorized by dogs ferociously charging at them,” she wrote.
It takes only a few bad dog owners to transform beautiful public places into the setting of a horror story. We hope some of them have read what Julia had to say.
