A crucial public service, or a place to lounge? The purpose of a dog park

Reviewing the various aspects of the budget that officials prepared for Illinois state government’s upcoming (beginning July 1) fiscal year, there’s one aspect that has managed to catch my eye – dog parks!

Rocco, Carmelo encounter a friend (left) at the local dog park. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

It seems that Illinois officials thought to include some $400,000 that will be given to officials in Chicago and Aurora to be used to either develop new, or improve existing, facilities where pet owners can legally let loose their animals.

AS IN THOSE areas completely fenced in so that a dog owner can legally bring their precious pet, unhook their leash and let them run about. Working off the frustration of being chained up the rest of the day.

The idea is that it’s pet exercise. They can run. They can play. They can interact with other dogs – although one aspect of every dog park I’ve ever seen is the separate portion maintained for dogs who act up.

Almost like a ‘doggie jail’ for those pets who just can’t “play nice” with each other.

My own experience with dog parks involves the two canines my father and step-mother have. I help out with their walking, and periodically am the one who puts the dogs in the car so we can make a 5-minute drive to their neighborhood dog park.

WHICH I HAVE to admit, it’s like the two dogs (Rocco and Carmelo, a black standard poodle and tan goldendoodle respectively) eagerly anticipate the trip. Getting them to climb in the car is never a hassle. Although sometimes, Carmelo tries to then move to the front driver seat – and oftentimes will have his paws up on the steering wheel as though he’s going to take the automobile out for a spin.

Carmelo (right) encounters a pack at the park

Then, we arrive at the dog park (which is a fenced-in area about the size of two football fields where it is legal to unleash the animals and they’re encouraged to run around to their heart’s delight). It’s like the excitement level boosts the moment the dogs realize exactly where they’re going.

In fact, the real trick is to wrestle with the dogs long enough until we actually get past the locked gates that demark the point at which the municipal “leash” laws no longer apply.

Plus, I always find it intriguing the notion that any dogs who happen to already be in the park come running over to the gate to “check out” the newcomers.

WHICH INVARIABLY CREATES a noisy racket – everybody in sight is barking at each other, and it doesn’t end until the dogs are safely inside and off the leash.

Then, there’s the sight of dogs galore running all about. And sometimes my father’s pooches managing to find another doggie or two whom they feel some special bit of attention for. They make a new “friend,” so to speak. Other times, they “wrestle” with each other.

Carmelo gets playful at the dog park

Personally, I find it enjoyable to know I can let the dog off the leash and they can have some freedom (of sorts) to run about as they please. Which is why I find it odd that some people seem to think the dog park is a place to find a bench to sit in the sun and watch while their own dog is perched nearby. It’s like those people won’t let their pets have any fun.

Then again, I’ve heard of some dog owners insist they’ll never take their pets to one of these public parks. They insist their precious pooches will get contaminated by the germs carried about by everybody else’s mutts!

OF COURSE, I have to admit that Rocco once developed a pretty serious cough – one severe enough that he was taken to the “vet.” Who ultimately diagnosed it as “kennel cough,” and said it most likely was something he caught off another pet at the dog park. Some medication and a two-week time period away from the park turned out to be the cure.

My father playing w/ pooches at park

Now I know some communities have had these facilities for some time, while others are trying to turn any sizable plot of land they have into a dog park. I know in Gary, Ind., officials are contemplating using a one-time Little League baseball field as a dog park – on the grounds that the outfield fences already are in place. A one-time center field can become a new doggie playland.

Over here in Illinois, the General Assembly signed off on providing $50,000 to the Chicago Public Schools to develop a dog park in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, and $200,000 to the Chicago Park District for a place in the Hyde Park neighborhood and another such facility elsewhere. While the Fox Valley Park District will get $150,000 for a new dog park in Aurora and upgrades to an existing park in Montgomery.

It might be the smartest money spent, if it encourages people to not let their pets roam free and unleashed. Now if only we can get all pet owners to pick up their animals’ poop, we’d have a better world.

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No more carriage rides by Christmas?

There are times when I think elected officials have way too much free time on their hands, which causes them to come up with cockamamie concepts that don’t benefit the citizenry of Chicago in the least.

Will this soon be an obsolete Chicago site? Photos by Gregory Tejeda

Take, for example, the discussion currently being contemplated around City Hall to abolish the notion of horse-drawn carriages that operate in certain parts of the city – mostly the upscale neighborhoods that draw a lot of tourist traffic.

THERE ARE THOSE people who think it’s downright adorable to ride around the city while being pulled by a horse, most likely with a driver wearing a quaint costume.

Personally, I think there’s something off about riding around while watching a horse’s tail swish about back and forth in front of me, while having to smell the aroma of the beast – and quite possibly also see it defecate on the streets of Chicago while we ride.

In short, taking such a ride is not something I have ever done, or have had a desire to do. But I also think the people who are getting all worked up over this are grossly exaggerating things.

I think that a ban on an aspect of Chicago that some people find intriguing is overkill. I don’t see the harm.

I KIND OF view it as being similar to the game of golf – something I personally have no interest in playing, but I certainly don’t think it would be appropriate to go out of my way to restrict those people who do enjoy it.

Will aldermen someday feel compelled to abolish remaining payphones?

For the record, the Chicago Tribune reported how a City Council committee is scheduled to take up the issue on Wednesday. An ordinance now pending would do a sudden-phaseout of the licenses that carriage operators have to obtain from the city in order to offer such carriage rides.

Since the current round of licenses expire in November, it would make the people who get a carriage ride in coming months to be among the final who enjoy such an experience.

Should tourists spend money at Water Tower Place instead of  horse rides?

If the political people, many of whom seem to be the aldermen representing the wards of the Near North Side that actually have such rides as a regular neighborhood feature, get their way, such carriage rides would become as obsolete as the idea of street cars clanging down city streets.

SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T seen in over a half century.

Personally, I think someone somewhere in a floofy neighborhood is getting too worked up over the aroma of a horse. Which I’ll admit isn’t the most pleasant to experience. But it’s something one usually catches a whiff of for a second or two before it goes away.

I just can’t see it as something worthy of creating a new law to abolish. In fact, this may be one of the few times I’m inclined to agree with those right-wing ideologues who think that any time a government enacts a new regulation they’re somehow impinging on our personal freedoms.

I can’t see how a carriage ride is somehow a threat to Chicago – unless you’re somehow careless enough to step in a pile of horse-dung. In which case, it’s more a case of your own carelessness, rather than some sort of threat to the public safety.

BESIDES, IT MAKES me wonder what would be the next target of people who want to see carriage rides as somehow corrupting the character of Chicago. Will they see those Chicago Police officers who are part of mounted patrol units as some sort of threat to the public safety of the citizenry?

Will we be calling for those cops to be put out of commission? Or will we just try assigning those officers to units of cops riding bicycles around the city?

I bring this up because the most disgusting thing I ever saw that involved a horse in Chicago involved a mounted patrol officer. He was on his horse in the streets that are part of Grant Park when the horse decided to relieve itself.

Keeping 'the Loop' safe?

The flow of urine hit the asphalt pavement, flowed downstream and wound up heading straight for a spot where three teenagers were sitting on the sidewalk. Three teens whose Chicago memories now include the time they got peed upon by the police.

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Can’t we agree on anything?!?

We’re in an era of rabid political partisanship and one in which the proponents of the old-school way of thought are openly resisting any thought of change, no matter how progressive or fair-minded it might be.

Heroic? Or misguided?

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock that some people can find offense in anything, particularly things that once might have been considered sweet and innocent – but now are regarded as evidence of the callousness oft expressed in our society.

WHAT CAUGHT MY attention was reaction to a story by the DNAInfo.com website for Chicago that gave us a feature story about Chicago Police Department officers who put their own physical well-being at risk to save a dog.

Specifically, a pit bull that was stray and somehow got into Lake Michigan and was thrashing about in the water trying to avoid drowning to death.

The website reported that the two officers, one of whom is a recent graduate of the Police Academy. It seems the officer in question was paying attention during class, in that he used a maneuver learned at the academy to get into the water and pull the dog to shore.

As things turned out, one of those television news helicopters was flying overhead and got video from above for the incident. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals was pleased to see such kindness to a dog – and DNAInfo reported that the department was sent a certificate, along with a box of vegan cookies.

NOW I’M SURE some people will feel compelled to joke that if the activist group really felt appreciative, they wouldn’t have sent the cookies – or anything vegan.

Compassionate? Or cold-hearted?

But one group seems to have taken offense to the whole incident – the activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. They’re the ones who in recent years have been going out of their way to show how law enforcement is focusing its ire on people of a certain melanin complexion.

They’re quick to trot out the lists of names of countless young black men who wound up dying or being beaten severely while at the hands of the police. So perhaps they’re not eager to see anything placing the police in a positive light.

Or perhaps it’s the idea that an animal received an act of kindness from police?

Self-defending? Or myopic?

IN ADDITION TO using Facebook and Twitter to promote such causes as the Chicago Dyke March (on June 24) and the right for free travel to Cuba (a protest on Friday at the federal building complex), the Black Lives Chicago group had a statement trashing the report, and PETA for feeling the need to praise police.

“F--- Black people huh PETA?,” the activists wrote on Twitter, while then naming a lengthy list of Rekia Boyd and other, now-deceased black people who suffered police abuse.

This is a confusing situation to contemplate, largely because I can comprehend why activists would be upset. Considering the tensions that have arisen between law enforcement and a certain segment of society, some sense of bitterness is understandable.

Although I also can hear in my mind all those people now eager to either defend PETA or criticize the Black Lives Matter movement.

SOME MAY WANT to claim they’re merely being compassionate to another living creature, while some may well believe that a dog’s life is worth more than that of a black person. Of course, many of them will want to believe they’re not being racist and are entitled to such thoughts.

Which really means they don’t want to be called out for their nonsense, and may well be a part of this Age of Trump we’re now in that they want to believe legitimizes their way of thinking.

That ultimately is the problem we face as a society – those who refuse to acknowledge the problem and want to think it is someone else’s hang-ups about life that are improper. Which often comes down to our own ignorance about public affairs.

I had a recent conversation over dinner with someone who passed along an anecdote about encountering some young people who had no clue what the Civil War was in the United States. If we’re really at a stage where we’ve forgotten, then it’s no wonder some of us are spewing stupidity when we contemplate race relations in our society these days.

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Times change and attractions of the past don’t carry the same weight w/ public

The United Center in Chicago may well be the House That Michael Jordan Built, but the reality of the operators of that West Side structure is that the Bulls got kicked out of their home every November to make room for the circus.

Who knew back in November that Ringling Brothers wouldn't be coming back to Chicago?

The Ringling Brother, Barnum & Bailey Circus to be exact. Which is in the news these days because the so-called Greatest Show on Earth that can trace its origins back 146 years is soon to become defunct.

THEY’RE GOING TO finish out their show schedule through mid-May before becoming no more. As things turn out, their last Chicago appearance were the ones back in November when they staged their show at the United Center.

For those of us Chicagoans who feel one more need to go see the circus with the Ringling Brothers brand name, you’ll have to check out one of the performances come March in Cincinnati – which is about as close to the Second City as they will come in the rest of their lives.

Now I know some of us are getting nostalgic while others are expressing anger.

Some are going out of their way to make politically partisan statements against liberals, whom they want to believe are responsible for the circus’ demise.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, circus officials in their statement announcing their closing did say that attendance had declined significantly since changes were made in the program to downplay the elephant displays – whom the animal rights activists had always complained were potentially being mistreated.

Although they also conceded that attendance had been on the decline even before that.

The fact is that it wouldn’t shock me to learn that many young people just don’t feel the same attraction to a show that could trace its origins back so far. It wouldn’t shock me to learn that they’d rather play the latest video game (or perhaps take part in a virtual circus in which they could simulate the participation of an actual event) rather than seeing the real thing in person.

After all, the animals smell, and sometimes they poop right in front of you. Yuck!

PERSONALLY, I CAN remember that being the gut reaction I had the one time I went to a circus – back when I was about 5 years old. It wasn’t something I ever felt compelled to do again. And for those people who will claim that a circus gives people exposure to nature and animals, I’d argue that it shows us animals under very unnatural circumstances.

United Center won't need this configuration any longer

Unless you really want to believe that an elephant wears a tutu and dances, or that horses perform tricks for our amusement.

The baseball fan in me is reminded of when the New York Giants left Gotham to relocate in San Francisco, with then-team owner apologizing to the children of New York, but adding, “We didn’t see many of their parents out there at the Polo Grounds in recent years.”

I suspect many of the people who are complaining the loudest about no more circus are the same people who didn’t bother to buy tickets.

THEN AGAIN, THE idea of no more circus makes the baseball fan me think of those people who complain about World Series games being played at night, because supposedly we’re depriving kids a chance to see the ballgames. If they’re playing late into the night, after all, they can’t listen to the broadcasts of day games on the transistor radios they sneak into school.

Except when was the last time a kid ever listened to a transistor radio? And if they are looking at the Internet on a computer during school time, I suspect a ball game is the last thing they’d care to watch!

Nostalgic image? Or everything that was wrong with the circus?

Besides, I’m sure Chicago Bulls fans will enjoy their team getting control of its home arena back. Although I almost feel the extended road trip of a few weeks long every November is something of a team tradition.

Just what will the Bulls do with themselves with all that extra time they’re going to spend in Chicago come November?

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Alderman wants to stop Chicago from becoming set to a sequel of “The Birds”

What is it about the idea of living creatures other than human beings in urban areas that gets our City Council all worked up?

I always thought the most outrageous fight was the one of many years ago when an alderman seriously tried to push through an ordinance that would have required horses in the city to wear diapers.

HE WAS REFERRING to all those horses that pull those quaint buggies around the Near North Side and Streeterville streets as a tourist attraction (and romantic evening out for couples). Because the horses were dumping their feces in their paths.

Because these are city streets, it means they occasionally get covered in the manure.

And as one who has had accidental moments stepping in the horse poop (from a mounted police officer’s horse, to be specific), I realize how disgusting it can be to deal with.

But the idea of diapers was overkill. It would have looked ridiculous. It definitely reeked of someone who had way too much free time on his hands to even contemplate this measure.

WHICH IS THE same feeling I’m having about 46^th Ward Alderman James Cappleman – who this week said he wants a new ordinance that would make it a municipal violation for people to feed pigeons.

Anybody who does so could get hit with a significant fine, and up to six months in the Cook County Jail if they’re really persistent.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Cappleman said he has residents in his ward (which includes the Uptown neighborhood) who like to bring several pounds of bread with them to feed the fowl.

Cappleman said the end result is that the pigeons now think that Uptown welcomes them, and they’re coming back in greater numbers. And their feces is cluttering up the streets of Uptown even more than the horses dump on North Michigan Avenue.

YES, IT’S DISGUSTING. Yes, it’s stupid. Yes, I think anybody who goes out of their way to encourage pigeons is probably a little bit “off,” to put it politely.

But the idea that police who already struggle to patrol the streets are now going to have to start cracking down on people with nothing better to do than feeding the little birdies (which is probably how they view their actions)?

That’s even more “off.”

This is a measure that can only end in disaster. Here’s hoping the rest of the City Council manages to find a way to make this proposal go away.

THIS WOULD BE one time when the best thing that could happen in the interest of the people is to let this proposed ordinance get stuck in the mechanizations of the political process to the point where it gets lost and becomes forgotten!

By Cappleman’s own admission, he tells the newspaper that he suspects many of the people who are feeding pigeons in his neighborhood are not mentally stable. Just envision the potential for an arrest to blow up into a full-blown confrontation – particularly if police feel threatened enough to use force.

A public relations disaster for the city.

Plus the fact that there are so many other issues of much more significance than the fact that some people are worked up over pigeon poop.

I’D THINK THOSE city officials who have always pushed for stricter gun control measures would want to be focusing on what the city needs to do now that a federal appeals court panel in Chicago has given Illinois state government six months to craft a measure that will allow people to carry pistols in public.

That’s going to be an ugly political brawl, and it’s very likely that the city (for a time, at least) could get a policy it despises imposed upon it.

If that happens, the idea of pigeon poop on the streets up Uptown will seem so petty by comparison.

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