Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Trillium Hollow Pet Policy - Thanks For All The Input

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Nancy Baumeister <nancybee [at] peak.org>
is the author of the message below.
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
after deleting long quoted policy and making a shorter link to details.
--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------

I hesitated to bring the topic up at this time because I know that you
at Trillium Hollow are at the end of the policy-writing process and not
at the gathering-information  time in the process. So, understand that
my comments are not aimed at suggesting that you (Trillium Hollow)
change your policy.

But, for those communities which maybe considering a pet policy, I
wanted to make a comment that banning specific dog breeds is not an
effective way to create safety around dogs.

For more information check out this book
> *Dogs Bite: But Balloons and Slippers Are More Dangerous (Paperback) *
> by Janis Bradley
> Amazon Book page via: http://tinyurl.com/z3pcf

( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books
  &field-author-exact=Janis%20Bradley&rank=-relevance%2C%2Bavailability
  %2C-daterank/103-8580576-4851867 )

  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1888047186/103-8580576-4851867?
  %5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155 )

There is more to the book than I can excerpt here, but the part that
really made me sit up and begin thinking about action for our community
is her discussion about educating children about appropriate behavior
around dogs. She notes that we take extensive action to protect children
around swimming pools. We teach them not to swim unless adults are
present, we watch them while they swim, we put fences around pools and
yet 1000 children drown each year. In contrast, we do very little to
teach kids about how to behave appropriately around dogs and we do not
always supervise very small children around dogs and still only 10
children are killed by dog bites in a year. This number could readily be
reduced to zero. For our community, I intend to suggest that we do
explicit teaching for kids around how to treat dogs. I think that this
will make them safer in our community and throughout their lives out
there in the world.

Signed, a dog lover
Nancy Baumeister
CoHo Ecovillage
Corvallis Oregon

Charles Maclean wrote:
> Fellow Cohousers -
>
> After many years of indecision we've adopted a new pet policy.  It appears
> below.