Sunday, October 7, 2012

DPR Fined for Failure to Display Leash Rules; Birds and Dogs; Posting Picture of Scofflaw

From the October 2 New York Times:
Dog owners claimed victory over New York City on Tuesday when an appellate panel ordered the parks department to pay $5,000 for ignoring a 2004 court order to post signs regarding leash rules in Riverside Park.=
The court found that the department did not begin to post the required signs until 2010. The signs were meant to alert parkgoers to just where and when they could have their dogs off the leash. Dogs are not allowed to be off leash within a five-block radius of the park’s dog runs at any time.
 . . .
Despite the absence of signs, the leash law was enforced and dog owners were fined without a posted notice, said David F. Dobbins, a lawyer for a group of dog owners who use the park.
Read the whole thing.  It's an odd story given that at least in Prospect Park dog owners routinely rip down these signs.

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 From the August 12 New York Times, this gem.    Bird Talk magazine went out of business, so as in most cases the publisher tried giving subscribers some other, supposedly similar magazine.  The magazine it picked was Dog Fancy:


What has riled up Bird Talk subscribers even more is that the magazine’s publisher plans to send them copies of Dog Fancy in its place.
“People who chose to subscribe to Bird Talk don’t want Dog Fancy,” said Dr. Anthony Pilny, an occasional Bird Talk contributor and a veterinarian at the Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine on the Upper West Side. The magazine is so popular among his clients that bird owners often swiped them from the waiting room.
“We don’t see or treat dogs or cats in the hospital,” he said. “I don’t think we would put a journal of dogs and cats in the waiting room.”
Lisa MacDonald, a spokeswoman for BowTie Inc., which owns Bird Talk and Dog Fancy, said Dog Fancy was being sent because “when looking at past survey and poll information for our subscribers to see what other pets were in the home, dogs were far and away the most common ‘other’ pet.”
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This, from the September 14 New York Times, following up the first report of a 73-year-old woman's rape in Central Park in retaliation for photographing someone masturbating in the park:
She has been an avid bird watcher for years, drawn to the Ramble, as are so many others, by the variety and quantity of birds found there. 

But she also was not afraid to train her camera on people she regarded to be breaking park rules, often snapping photographs of those who let their dogs run off-leash, bicyclists riding on park paths designated for pedestrians, and children in rowboats without parental supervision or life jackets, she said.
 The rapist here was a homeless person, but as we've seen, perhaps she should be worrying about "middle class" upstanding dog owners who let their dogs loose illegally too.

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