This week: dogs in public housing
Last Sunday there was a protest by public housing tenants demanding that the government change its laws and regulations to allow them to keep their pets in their public housing flats.
I noted the photo published along with an article in the Post the next day included a familiar face - it was one of my regular clients who owns a dog with congestive heart failure. It would be a tragedy if she had to give up her beloved pet.
There is a regulation set by the subsidised housing committee of the Housing Authority that bans dogs in public housing estates while allowing tenants to keep small household pets such as guinea pigs and desexed cats. It is their conclusion that these other small household pets do not pose a health hazard nor cause public nuisance. I find the whole regulation discriminatory and self-contradictory. It is discriminatory because it is unreasonable to say all dogs will cause a public nuisance and keeping dogs will definitely result in a public housing hygiene problem. It is akin to racism, grouping people of one ethnicity and generalising about them and then rounding them up and killing them or exiling them.
It is inevitable that there will be some people who live in public housing estates that vehemently dislike dogs and will make their voices heard. I agree that if a fellow tenant is making a nuisance of himself, that these complaints should be heard - and, for example, if the complaint is about a persistently barking dog then the situation needs to be rectified. This is usually not the case with owners of dogs whose neighbours have complained. The neighbour may not like dogs and, knowing the public housing rules, makes a casual complaint to the security guard whose job it is to respond.
There is no room for sympathy here and the complaint is too easily made without thought for the consequences for the neighbour's family and the dog itself. I am not suggesting the complaint is wrong under the regulations, but I am suggesting that often there was no public nuisance caused nor was there a real hygiene problem, just someone with too much time on their hands or a personal dislike of dogs.