Saturday, February 18, 2012

Dogs on the Nethermead

We last reported to you that Prospect Park's administration had acknowledged that 311 had incorrect information about when dog hours began and was going to fix this. We subsequently called 311 to check, and indeed 311 now says that dog hours begin in Prospect at 9 P.M. But of course it has made no difference in practice; the information 311 did or did not have was not the reason dogs were, and are, permitted to run loose in Prospect Park at all hours. Prospect Park's administration did not intend to enforce the leash rules during the Tupper Thomas era and nothing has changed, as this correspondence shows:
Alerting the Prospect Park Alliance and Department of Parks & Recreation about all the illegally unleashed dogs on Prospect Park's Nethermead Meadow has had absolutely no effect. Today at 4:24pm, as I walked through the park, I counted 9 unleashed dogs running around the meadow with several more heading there through the Ravine. A few minutes later I walked passed the baseball fields where I counted 5 dogs on the fields. All but one were unleashed, which is irrelevant considering that dogs, leashed or unleashed, aren't permitted on the fields. At the south end of the Long Meadow there were 7 unleashed dogs

I noticed one dog rifling through a bag in someone's stroller that was on the Long Meadow. The owner yelled for the dog, but it ignored her as it obviously had found something tasty in the stranger's bag. The mother of the toddler to whom the stroller belonged was too far away to do anything, although it didn't seem clear that she even knew some dog had its face in her child's things.

Here's a video of the Nethermead Meadow at 4:25pm and I'm certain that the number of unleashed dogs would have doubled by 5pm had I stuck around to watch.

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