Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Re: Companion animals in community

[Casey Morrigan (cjmorr]

We have dogs and cats here at Two Acre Wood.  We worried more than we needed
to at first about how to manage them and clean up after them.  We figured
out how to do that really quickly.  We found out we were really responsible
about cleaning up after them - we found out how much it didn't work to let
them wander and poop.

We built a dog run at one corner of our property, since we are a small
property (two acres, actually ;>) and we have a few active dogs that needed
some play space bigger than our postage-stamp yards.  Our own family dog
hated being up in the dog run, since it is out of sight of humans, but other
dogs like it and play with other dogs in it.  So it's been valuable to some
of the dog owners here.

We found we did need to ask visitors to leash their dogs.  We had lots of
incidents of a guest dog sailing onto the property and of course getting
into territorial disputes immediately with other resident dogs, none where a
person or dog was injured, luckily.

We have one resident dog that used to dash madly from car to home trailing
its extendable leash, which would sometimes wrap around the ankles of a
terrorized young child on the central plaza exactly like a bolo.  A quiet
conversation with the adult owner ended that.  This dog is an occasional
barker, but not too often.  Our dogs have not been barkers, meaning of
course that their owners had trained them not to bark.

We now have two dogs only (used to have 4), but lots of cats (8) in our
14-unit cohousing.

I sometimes take a community member's dog when I go jogging.  Good all
around.

Now if I could only work up the courage to speak to the non-cohousing
neighbors whose small dog barks all day long....sigh.

Casey Morrigan
Two Acre Wood
Sebastopol California



-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of
watertiger [at] earthlink.net
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 1:04 PM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_Re: Companion animals in community


Hi Cohousers,

Reminds me of a question I have for you all:

I'm a prospective cohouser shopping for a community to join and a home
to buy.  My question is about how well or not companion animals have
integrated into the the various cohousing communities.  My interest is
specifically in bringing my companion dogs with me.  Any cautionary
tales or success stories will be appreciated.  Do any communities have
special dogs-can-romp-and-play-off-leash areas or trails?  For example,
what are the rules at Heartwood for use of the trails when hiking with a
dog?

Regards,

Karen


On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 12:36 PM, Mac & Sandy Thomson wrote:

> "If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin'
> somebody else's dog around."

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