Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Dogs in Community

[Joanie Connors (jvcphd]

Whether a community is dealing with pets or people, it is important to
look at all the levels of parenting involved - the individuals with
their pets and/or children, the community with its members.

Good parenting involves balancing all the important needs and people.
No one should be more important than anyone else.

People need to be safe, and running dogs are not safe - especially for
children. There's lots of statistics out there about both dog bites
and dog attack fatalities. People should be able to walk and sit in
the outdoors without worrying that they, their pet or their child will
be attacked.

Unfortunately, people can put their rights, or the rights of their
pets or children above the rights of the community, and that will rob
energy from the group (resistance scenarios will occur and probably
escalate).


On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Naomi Anderegg
<naomi_anderegg [at] yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Angela & everyone,
>
> Never mind the dogs--what about having clear and consistent expectations for 
> people?
>
> I think that part of it goes back to the "parenting in cohousing" 
> conversation from a week or two ago. Different people have different 
> expectations for their kids. Different people have different expectations for 
> their dogs. If you have either, you want to make sure that the rules of the 
> community are something that you can live with before you jump in. But, I can 
> see how this could be a potential deal-breaker as far as deciding whether or 
> not to live in a particular community. My cats, for example, go outside 
> unleashed. (They like going outside. It makes them happy. Judge all you want. 
> I don't care. My cats are happy cats.) Unless I had great reason (like an 
> awesome job) to move to part of the country with cat-killing coyotes, or 
> perhaps another environment inhospitable to cats, I don't see this changing. 
> At the same time, even though I really do think that cats should be able to 
> go outside, I'm not going to insist that my neighbor let her cats go
>  outside. Her cats. Her business. I would be willing to compromise by, say, 
> putting a bell on a cat that's killing song birds, if a neighbor requested 
> that I do so. (This isn't something I do now or plan on doing anytime 
> soon--so it really would be a change in behavior.)
>
> But you, as a community member, have to take this stuff with a grain of salt. 
> All your neighbors aren't going to be *perfect* parents or have the same 
> expectations for their kids as you have for yours. Nor are they going to be 
> *perfect* pet-owners. Nor are they going to keep their expectations (of 
> anyone) completely consistent.
>
> So you have policies to make sure that everyone can kind of get along and to 
> communicate the expectations of the group. That's why they're there--to 
> create that "clear & consistent expectations" atmosphere for us!
>
> Naomi
> Birmingham
> not-yet-cohouser
>
> --- On Fri, 6/24/11, Angela Alston <angela [at] dallascohousing.org> wrote
> Sadly, owners who fail to train their dogs properly give dogs a bad rap.
>
> Your dog wants to please you: if you are clear and consistent about
> how s/he can please you, everyone is happy.
>
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