My Letter is in today's Chronicle Herald

I find it funny how sometimes they call and ask to confirm whether it's the person who sent in the email, so that you know the letter is going to make it in, and then sometimes you read the paper - and boom - there the letter is. And that's how it was this morning - there the letter was in the letters to the Editor.

Denise was right - I should have toned that thing down. I should have taken that "bigoted" word out. Peter Duffy is guffawing into his Bran Buds right now because of the Zinck's righteous indignation with me. Damn my vituperative vocabulary.

Oh well. The only thing you can take back is your bed linens.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Letters/567208.html

Overblown incident


I feel compelled to respond to the March 24 article about the senior citizen who had the encounter with the off-leash dog at Point Pleasant Park, during hours when dogs aren’t allowed on Sailor’s Memorial Way.

First, the article states that more than 350,000 dogs visit Point Pleasant Park every year – with very few incidents. This one lady is now meeting with the mayor – and she wants to know what measures are going to be put in place to make sure that encounters like hers never happen again. That’s one encounter out of 350,000 – I’d say those are pretty healthy odds that encounters happen pretty rarely.

So what is the city going to do? Ban all dogs to stop one out of 350,000 incidents? I certainly hope not!

Second, the lady’s husband is quoted as saying, "If that had been a pit bull, she would have been torn to pieces … sooner or later, it’s going to happen to someone. It comes a time now that we’ve got to toughen up."

I’d just like to let her husband know that pit bulls are exactly like every other dog on this planet – healthy, well-adjusted dogs that are no more likely to "tear his wife to pieces" than any other dog. Period.

That whole article was so unnecessary, and that couple are doing nothing but furthering the cause of uneducated, bigoted people who don’t own dogs. They don’t need to sit down with the mayor – they need to meet some responsible dog owners of the Halifax Regional Municipality and become properly educated about what it actually is to own a dog here, and they will soon understand their own very misconceived and very wrong ideas.


Joan Sinden, Halifax