PETA Urges Council to Ban or Limit Practice
www.2theadvocate.com
By PATRICK COURREGES
January 13, 2004, LAFAYETTE, LOUISIANA -- An animal-rights group is calling for banning or restricting the chaining of dogs here. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known for attention-grabbing ads and protests, has sent letters to the Lafayette City-Parish Council calling for action, to either ban chaining or set a limit on how many hours a dog can be chained in a day.
The letters, and a PETA billboard on the subject expected to be erected by the end of the month, come in response to a late-December discovery of 11 dogs -- seven dead and the remainder malnourished -- in a Lafayette man's yard. Many of the dogs, both alive and dead, were chained.
In the letters, PETA makes its case on two fronts: chaining the animals is cruel and doing so creates a public safety hazard because chained dogs get more aggressive, and therefore more dangerous if they break loose.
Since dogs are social animals that want room to roam, keeping them chained up by themselves can make them more likely to attack people, said Daniel Paden, an animal-cruelty caseworker with PETA. "They're going to become territorial and aggressive over the few feces-filled square feet they are allotted in life," he said.
Paden said children are especially vulnerable to attacks from such animals when they break free, or when a child wanders into a chained dog's yard.
Animal-control officials agree with PETA on the point that dogs shouldn't be kept on short chains, but not necessarily on the public-safety point. Troy Venable, acting director of Lafayette's Roicy Duhon Animal Center, said he hasn't seen that chained dogs are more dangerous when they break free.
He said what he and his officers have found with chained dogs is that they are greater flight risks when freed."A lot of times, when we get them off the chain, they're running," Venable said. "When they see freedom, they're gone."
Lafayette has no rules on the length of chains used for dogs or how long owners can chain their dogs. In East Baton Rouge Parish, dog owners have guidelines for chaining.
For most of East Baton Rouge Parish, the rule is the chain must be at least five times the length of the dog, measured from nose to the end of the tail, said Hilton Cole, East Baton Rouge Parish Animal Control Center director.
He said Baker, part of his jurisdiction, recently passed a rule limiting dog owners to one hour a day of keeping animals chained. "That's very profound, very powerful," Coles said.
Cole said that was in response to complaints about people keeping dogs for fighting, a case in which the dogs are often kept chained. "It's kind of sad, in my opinion, that dogs should be chained at all," he said. "Anyone who loves dogs and anyone who understands dogs knows the dog is a companion animal, and generally a running animal."
He said while he would like to see dog-chaining banned, he understands the pinch some people might feel who love dogs, but can't afford to build a fence. Cole said he agrees with the statements that chained dogs are likely to be more aggressive.
The issue is not quite so simple as PETA makes it out to be, said Bonnie Beaver, an animal behaviorist and president of the American Veterinary Medical Association."That's one of the twisted truths," she said. "Part of it is accurate and part of it is not."
Beaver is a professor at the department of small animal medicine and surgery at Texas A&M University. Dogs on short chains can be more aggressive in defending the smaller amount of space they have, Beaver said. "Smaller territories lead to a heightened defense of the territory," she said.That's not the whole picture, though, Beaver said.
The other part is more complex, having to do with the general nature of the breed of dog, whether it is used to dealing with people and whether its experiences with people have been pleasant, she said. In many situations where people keep dogs chained, the dogs haven't had a lot of good experiences with many people, Beaver said. Simply banning or restricting chains is not the answer; treating dogs well is, she said.
