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May 9, 2000
Off-leash!
Berkeley's Dog Storm
By Alexander Cockburn
"Every dog has his day.
A good dog might just have two days."
Johnny Copeland
Barbara had that coy,
breathless, somewhat defiant way of coming into the house that
told me the whole story. I knew she was about to tell me she'd
just bought a dog, just found a dog, just caught sight of the
One and Only. Actually Barbara, aka Barbara Yaley, was good about
it. She said she was about to get a dog and that my inevitably
favorable opinion would be duly taken into account. Jasper was
at that point in time on display in the de by the Milo Foundation
of likely dogs rescued from the shelters before they get the
needle. In Berkeley the Milo Foundation musters the dogs on Fourth
St a couple of blocks north of University Avenue every other
weekend.
We headed off to Fourth St, and in short order
headed back with 40 lbs of dog, a stray from up north in Laytonville
where the ranchers dump whole litters of border collies by the
side of the road. By the look of him Jasper was part border,
part lab, plus those self-important whiskers that tell you that
terrier is in the genetic splice. Okay, I think he's a terrific
dog, and well aware that he'd been nose to nose with the Reaper,
Jasper thinks we're terrific too. Who says endless gratitude
becomes cloying?
These days, when we're in Berkeley, we load
up Jasper and head down University, over I-80 and onto what was
once a proud garbage dump, then North Waterfront Park and now
Césár Chávez Park. It's one of the most
beautiful vantage points in the Bay Area. Due west across the
water is the Golden Gate Bridge, then swinging one's gaze south,
the towers of downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge and due
east the Berkeley hills.
Seventeen acres of this pleasing expanse are
available to off-leash dogs, an incredible achievement of Berkeley
dog lovers who spent about seven years of delicate political
maneuvering to secure, last year, "pilot project status"
for the off-leash area. To win it they had to surmount fierce
opposition from the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and the
Citizens for an East Shore State Park, eager to seize the acreage
of Cesdar Chavez Park and add it to their domain. State parks
in California have never yet held off-leash areas.
The whole off-leash
thing cranked up nationally about five years ago. I can't verify
my instinct here, but I think it has been at least in part the
consequence of organizing work of mid-life radicals bringing
the war home, discovering that winning a little leg room for
Fido is one cause whose fruition is something we might see in
our own lifetimes.
Across the country dog lovers are beginning
to flex their political muscles. We're talking big potential
clout here. Claudia Kawczynska edits The Bark, formerly the Berkeley
Bark, now a national quarterly with a circulation of 60,000.
She tells me it's hard to be sure, but somewhere between 20 and
30 per cent of the nation's households have dogs. City after
city has acknowledged their new organizing power. In Seattle
COLA (Citizens for an Offleash Area) trounced UNCOLA and got
their canine-friendly acreage. Portland, Oregon is off-leash
friendly too. Chicago has Wiggly Field. (I know, dogdom has a
terrible tendency to cuteness.) Los Angeles is a nightmare. Last
week San Francisco dog lovers went up against the fearsome might
of the National Park Service and the Audubon Society, challenging
an edict closing a portion of the delightful 300-acre Fort Funston
park in south-west San Francisco because of the nesting bank
swallow. The US District Court judge lent SF DOG a friendly ear
and told the contending parties to come back with fresh briefs.
Claudia Kawczynska's voice softened in admiration
of the organizing prowess of the dog lovers of Brooklyn, victorious
in their cause for off-leash liberty in Prospect Park. Then her
tones became acrid as the hated name of Henry Stern, NYC parks
commissioner and foe of all free creatures, most particularly
in Riverside Park, came under review.
The usual gripes of the anti-offleash forces?
They try to seize the high moral ground by giving us the old
Either/Or. Why should we be seeking playgrounds for dogs when
we aren't giving them to children? Answer: Civilization is not
a zero sum game. Let's have both. Kids and dogs. Dog poop? Dogs
on leashes do it as much as dogs running free, and surveys show
that, once they win their off-leash area, dog lovers self-police
with all the vigilance of a neighborhood committee of public
safety in the Paris of Robespierre and St Just. The off-leash
area in Césár Chávez is probably the cleanest
acreage in the East Bay.
Another ugly slur.
Off-leash dogs are dangerous. Cities would face big liability
exposure. To the contrary. Most dog biting occurs in the home,
and there's never been such a liability suit. A dog that can
run free is a happy dog, uplifter of domestic morale. Owners
are healthier too, dashing along after dogs like Jasper.
In fact, just the other day Jasper and I were
dashing along, pondering the tentative but probably fallacious
guess of Paul Klein, one of Césár Chávez
Park's prime off-leash area organizers, that Jasper might not
be a mere mutt, but a Portuguese water dog. (Later, at Campus
Vet, Dr Charlie Berger disagreed.) But Paul imparted darker news.
Foes of freedom are prowling round our off-leash area, readying
themselves for a deadly pounce.
The trouble really started when Césár Chávez
died. All over California city councils voted to rename streets,
parks, bridges and other features of the landscape after the
great organizer of farm workers. San Francisco got Césár
Chávez instead of Army St. In Berkeley they wanted to
rename University Ave, but the Indian merchants down at the lower
end raised a fuss. It's expensive for storekeepers when a street
gets renamed. So North Waterfront Park was duly converted into
Césár Chávez Park, and all the Hispanic
factions took this as an invitation to adopt a proprietary attitude,
as if the new name meant that the old landfill surfaced with
three feet of topsoil was somehow theirs.
Enter Santiago Casal,
who describes himself as an artist, though I've as yet been unable
to find anyone who has actually seen a work by Casal. Last year,
just when the off-leashers were about to win 20 acres in Césár
Chávez Park, Casal rose up in the city council and said
he wanted to build an "Aztec calendar" on the western
ridge. It was all a plot. As soon as the off-leashers had quit
the council meeting after a favorable vote presumably to
give their dogs a final amble, the Council double=backed at the
eleventh hour and kow-towed to Casal, denying the off-leashers
this exceptionally desirable ridge, and the battle was on.
First Casal wanted a circle thirty feet in
diameter for his project, then fifty feet. His latest model presumes
the city will give him a circle ninety feet in diameter, with
bermed walls eight feet high. In it, on the evidence of some
provisional sticks in the ground I saw earlier this year, will
be sculptural indications of where the sun rises and sets on
the spring and fall equinoxes. Casal wants all off-leash dogs
banned since freely moving canines, even adjacent to his great
work, might discommode "meditation". And, fully aware
that he is addressing the city council of Berkeley, he's been
playing the race card disgracefully and claims that any opposition
to his plans is disrespectful to all people of Hispanic origin
and that the off-leash area "desecrates" the memory
of Césár Chávez (who in fact loved dogs
and whose Berkeley-based nephew, owner of Pinto the dog, supports
the off-leash area.)
For reasons entirely to do with the political
geography of Berkeley, the council has treated the arrogant Casal
and his demented project with respect, and may this week deny
the off-leash area promotion from "pilot project" to
"program", which would be a serious bureacratic set-back
for us off-leashers.
One of the great
things about Césár Chávez Park is that it
lacks pretension. It doesn't have costly monuments or statues
asking to be noticed. It has people and dogs having a good time.
Amidst this communal enjoyment (known in bureaucratese as "multiple
use") of joggers, kite fliers, dog owners, dogs, a Berkeley
Muni Court judge with a Dalmatian called Bonnie, there's plenty
to meditate about. As Paul Klein puts it, "What do meditators
on that ridge see, apart from dogs? A bay so polluted that no
sane person would swim in it, and no sane fisherman would eat
from it. A city where most can't afford to live. Congested freeways
full of commuters trying to keep up with the treadmills of their
lives. An oil refinery that fouls the air and water, catches
on fire intermittently, and portends one of the great disasters
of all time, come the Hayward quake. Amidst all this, dogs are
upsetting? Césár Chávez Park is not Glacier
National Park. That's where meditators need to go if they need
unspoiled quiet. It's an urban park where we all need to get
along."
There are plenty of practical problems with
Casal's vision. He hasn't made any substantive progress, beyond
posturing maneuvers. He hasn't gone through any form of city
agency review or environmental analysis. In short he hasn't done
any of the things the off-leashers did for years. Meantime, the
city of Berkeley has allowed him to stake a private reservation
on a public resource, without a timetable, without a qualification.
This is unprecedented in land management, with the possible exception
of mining claim law dating from the 19th century, not an analogy
that should be appetizing to the Berkeley city council.
And, let us not forget, as Paul Klein points
out, we are talking about a structure to be placed on a four-foot
clay cap over millions of tons of garbage generating methane
with a vengeance.
Six am on a
misty morning. The Golden Gate Bridge is a spectral skeleton
in the distance. Jasper rambles about, oblivious to, ignorant
of the menace to his hours of pleasure. We off-leashers feel
very strongly. I expect all major political candidates across
the country to make their positions clear, for Al Gore, Ralph
Nader and George W. Bush to seek the endorsement of off-leashers
and for Berkeley City Council to do the right thing and give
the off-leash area its much deserved green light.
If you're in the area, try and make it to
the Berkeley city council meeting at 7.30pm Tuesday night at
City Hall on Martin Luther King. Let your bark be heard.
CounterPunch is a pro-dog newsletter, edited
and managed, without exception, by dog owners.
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