Huckleberries Online

Moscow May Put Teeth In Dog Laws

Posted by DFO

Feb. 10, 2009 1:23 p.m. • 5 comments

“Any (dog) within the city limits needs to be on a leash anytime they’re on public property,” Weaver said. “On private property, you would not need to have a leash. But the minute the dog sets foot on the sidewalk, they would.” Fife clarified that dogs may go off leash only on their owner’s private property. “If it’s someone else’s private property, they need to be on a leash.” It’s also illegal, said Fife, for a person to tie their dog and leave, such as some people do when they tether dogs to bike racks downtown or in front of grocery stores while shopping. “There has to be a person on the other end of the leash from the dog,” Fife said/David Johnson, Lewiston Tribune. More here.

Question: Should the owner of a dog that barks be charged with a misdemeanor rather than an infraction?

Five comments on this post so far. Add yours!

Walkabout on February 10 at 2:06 p.m.
DFO, I think you mean bites rather than barks.

As to the question, no, not on a first offense. There should be some distinction between a dog that bites just once and a dog that attacks a person putting them in the hospital.

I also think that cities that have dog leash laws should also have places for dogs to legally run free. CDA has acres of land that is designated for parks and playfields. Land that is used only for a few months each year. But, we still have no place to take our dogs to run off leash legally. Dog owners pay taxes too!
Digger on February 10 at 3:09 p.m.
Its about dang time. I’ve got two hippies who live up the street from me who are always walking their dogs without a leash. One of them (the dogs) takes big craps in my yard and the hippy owner never cleans it up. So I do it for him, scooping it up and placing it on his front step.
moscow_minidoka on February 11 at 7:45 a.m.
Moscow does need to crack down on dogs. All of the walking paths are covered in dog crap because people here don’t pick up after their pets (must be the “frontier” mentality - I never saw this much doo on the Greenbelt in Boise or the trails in Seattle), and I am often walking with my children when an unleashed dog gets right in their face.

Most of these dogs are friendly, but what happens when they go berserk on my three year old?

Sure, Walkabout, dog owners pay taxes. But so do the rest of us who suffer from poorly trained, aggressive dogs chasing us on our bicycles, or those of us who step in dog crap left on public property.

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D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.