Missoula Notebook

Going to the Dogs in Missoula

By Sutton Stokes, 4-19-08

One of the most noticeable things about Missoula — other than the unfortunate tendency of so many of the male residents to wear sandals during the warmer months — is the dogs. Just about every house has at least one, and I am beginning to suspect that houses with only one are in the minority. My neighbors have two, I can hear a third howling from two houses down even as I type, and all day long there is a steady flow of dog-walkers in and out of the park across the street from my office window. To drive around town with even just one eye open is to spot dozens of the things, panting behind grates in the backs of SUVs or grinning in the wind with their heads sticking out of Outback windows, not to mention being walked or otherwise exercised on any patch of publicly owned grass larger than a postage stamp.

This canine profusion likely arises from a combination of practicality and fashion. Under the former heading, there are Missoula’s many bird hunters, for whom a retriever or two are pretty much indispensable. As for fashion, there are at least two elements to consider, (1) the way dogs seem naturally associated with the idea of Montana as an unspoiled, wild, “last best place” (see “bird hunters,” above, and various other classes of people, most of whom actually live outside of Missoula, who have practical reasons to own not only dogs but also other sexy items like cowboy boots, rifles and snakebite kits), and (2) the way dogs also seem naturally associated with — and figure heavily in the magazine ads aimed at — the organic-foods-eating, outdoors-enjoying eco-hippie lifestyle so prevalent in a place like Missoula (see also Jackson Hole, Telluride, Boulder, et al.).

You can’t have a lot of dogs in one place without also having some controversies, mainly over the use of leashes and the related issue of poop. Missoula is a leash-law town, with only one park inside city limits with a dog run — Jacobs Island Park, at 5th and Van Buren — where it’s okay to let Fido off the leash, although you wouldn’t be able to guess this by touring the rest of the city’s parks. In the park across the street from my office, for example, the proportion of dog walkers who keep their dogs on-leash is so small that it’s always a surprise to catch sight of those who do, and this despite the fact that there is a school playground at one end of the park that is often teeming with biteable little children.

I don’t know why so many dog owners believe that leash laws apply only to someone else, although I guess most of us have at least a law or two we choose to disregard, even if it’s only a speed limit. Arguably one good reason to disobey leash laws is to be able to give your dog more exercise than you’d otherwise have time for, if you don’t live next door to Jacobs Island Park, although another way of looking at this situation would be that, if you don’t have time to drive to Jacobs Island Park or to the various conservation areas where the law requires only “voice control,” maybe you don’t have time to own a dog.

Certainly if you don’t have time to train your dog properly, you’re not doing the dog, yourself or the rest of us any favors, and you could have the decency to keep it on a leash when the rest of us are trying to enjoy the outdoors without having to worry about the intentions of strange hounds loping toward us. I was walking past the Lions Club park down by the California Street foot bridge one morning when I spied a couple playing catch with their off-leash dog. As I watched, a jogger with a dog on a leash came into view on the river path. The first dog — utterly indifferent to its’ owners’ shouted commands — ran over to and started jumping on top of the jogger’s dog, not exactly attacking it but also not exactly behaving politely. It was not until one of its owners ran over and physically wrestled it away from the second dog that the jogger could finally continue on her way.

“I’m sorry,” said the man, though somehow I doubt that his regret was strong enough to inspire him to look up a good dog trainer in the yellow pages on returning home. The jogger replied that it was okay, though of course really it wasn’t.

Sometimes people want to tell you that it’s not natural to leash a dog, apparently forgetting that it’s also not natural to take a dog into your family, feed it Kibbles and Bits twice a day, and occasionally clip its toenails and brush its coat. But I would argue that it’s not always just a matter of concern for the dog that inspires all of this leashlessness. I believe there’s a clue in the way that we refer to a dog’s — but not, say, a cat’s — owner as its “master” or, less often, “mistress”; a dog is something to be mastered, in other words, and you gain some sort of status in the larger pack of dog owners to the extent that you have mastered yours. The deceptive thing is that this mastery — while it results in a relationship between a dog and a human that looks entirely free and easy — can only be the result of some pretty intensive, concerted and sustained effort at training the thing, usually requiring professional assistance.

The human who, before achieving this mastery, lets his dog off the leash in a public place where it can encounter other dogs and humans, is like any other greenhorn show-off. He cares more about how he looks for a few minutes than about how the situation turns out for everyone else involved, including the dog, who is his responsibility and whose safety and health he is risking by letting it run out of control near (1) traffic, (2) children whose parents may have recourse to good lawyers, and (3) other possibly powerful-jawed dogs who might take a dim view of being harassed by uncouth upstarts.

Then there are the people who drive around city streets with dogs in the beds of open pickup trucks, elevating this “see how free and easy I can be with my dog” display into such a wilful disregard for the dog’s safety that it should probably be considered automatic grounds for an animal-neglect citation. It’s one thing to transport a dog this way out on low-traffic, low-speed country roads or across your ranch, which is the fantasy I imagine unspooling in the driver’s mind whenever I see a dog lurching around in the back of a shiny “all hat, no cattle” pickup sailing through Disfunction Junction. But cruising down Brooks at 40 miles per hour (speaking of those laws we choose to disregard) sets your dog up to be shredded into hairy hamburger if a drunk weaves across the yellow line, with not much you can do to prevent it.

If it sounds like I hate dog owners, let me just say I’m not fond of cat owners, either, at least not owners of outside cats. Why is that I am allowed to kill a rat if it’s making a pest of itself around my house, and I can call animal control about a wandering dog, but I’m just supposed to tolerate nightly visits from cats who use my garden as a litter box and send my indoor cat into such a paroxysm of rage as she watches them from her window seat that I fear she’ll have an aneurysm or a heart attack? Feel free to explain in the comments why your right to own outdoor cats extends farther than my right not to have to do my gardening elbow deep in cat shit, with corollaries concerning why I shouldn’t trap the damn things and take them for a long ride out into the country.

That last sentence was for entertainment purposes only. I would never, never do such an awful, awful thing.

Really. I promise.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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