Comment: Should we keep dogs off beaches

2:45pm Monday 25th February 2008

Comments (26)   Have your say »

Brighton and Hove City Council is considering banning dogs from all the city's beaches from May to September and from other public places all year round. Many dog owners are bitterly opposed to the idea and say they are being penalised. They say litter louts leave more mess than dogs.

Louise Poffley reports.

There was a time when dogs were permitted in pubs and allowed to sit by the fire with a bowl of water, waiting for their owners to finish their pints.

It was not uncommon to see dogs in shops. In open spaces dogs were an accepted part of life. You would often see a pet sitting patiently on the touchline of a school football match with its owner, watching the children play.

In the past, dogs were even given their own toilets in some public places, including Hove Recreation Ground.

Now, however, Brighton and Hove City Council is to carry out consultations on proposals to ban dogs from a large number of areas in the city.

As well as the beaches over the summer months, they could be barred throughout the year from children's play areas, some school grounds, small historic city centre squares and cemeteries.

Chris Laurence, veterinary director of the Dogs Trust, which runs a rehoming centre just outside Shoreham, said education was as important as legislation and it should be considered first.

He said: "Local authorities such as Brighton and Hove should be encouraging people to be responsible.

The issue with bans such as this is they are difficult to enforce and usually a complete waste of time. It would surely be better to enforce the picking up of dogs' mess."

Mr Laurence said councils seem ed to overlook the Animal Welfare Act 2007 which placed a duty of care on owners to look after their animals. For dogs, that includes adequate exercise.

He said: "For dogs, exercise means two things. It means going somewhere they can use their nose, which is the way a dog communicates, and somewhere where they can gallop around. A beach is a perfect place for this."

He was adamant that for people to get full benefit from owning a dog their pets have to be allowed to be integrated into everyday life.

He said: "You need to keep the balance right. Twenty four-hour bans for five months of the year are just excessive."

Dog owner Liz Cook, 48, said: "More and more shops say no to dogs. The newer gastro-style pubs don't like dogs in the way the old pubby pubs do. If you walk into one with your dog they look at you as if you've got dog poo on your shoe. It seems the wealthier Brighton gets with things like trendy cafés, the more it adopts city ways and less the old Brighton town ways.

"With a dog you end up talking to people you would never have spoken to before. Once my mum got stopped 32 times on her way to Worthing by people coming up to her because of her dog."

She thinks it is wrong dogs would not be allowed to accompany their owners when they visit loved ones' graves. She used to take her last dog for walks around Woodvale Crematorium cemetery.

She said she believed responsible dog ownership to be the key and wanted to see the issue of owners clearing up dog mess tackled properly.

Angela Hire from Angela's Ark, which provides a dog walking service in the city, said things would be much better if the council provided more dog mess bins which would then encourage more people to pick it up. She said she did not take the dogs in her care for walks in Brighton and Hove because she preferred to take them to "nicer places".

She said: "Look at the rubbish people leave around. That makes much more mess than dog's mess, which disappears eventually."

Celia Barlow, MP for Hove, is strongly opposed to the proposals, which she thinks are badly thought out.

Ms Barlow said: "Dog walking provides community cohesion which we should be looking to promote.

These proposals will penalise dog-owners across the city who already don't have many places to walk their dogs. At the same time, there should be a balance between rights and responsibilities."

Ms Barlow and her office are in the process of organising a mass dog protest for Saturday, March 1, involving many of the dog owners who strongly disapprove of the proposed bans.

Councillor Geoffrey Theobald, chairman of the city council's environment committee, said the council had decided to update the by-laws and replace them with designated dog control orders.

Coun Theobald said: "I don't have a view one way or the other.

We're waiting for the public to speak. It's a wide-ranging review that goes right the way across the board. I'm genuinely interested in what people think."

For a fuller picture of where dogs will and will not be allowed under the new proposals, see the centre spread in Tuesday's The Argus newspaper.

Do you think a ban on dogs is fair?