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City Going To The Dogs

Jimmy Breslin

September 18, 2002

Six a.m. is my time of day, and I am on Broadway and 68th Street in Manhattan about to go the Village Voice vending machine so I can read the superb city coverage of Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett.

Here is a man in a suit and tie and walking a small dog on a leash. The dog goes right up to the Village Voice machine and urinates on it. The guy holding the leash stares at the sky.

Hey, what do you call this? I said, sharply. I was going to get a paper out of there.

He looked at me as if he could care less.

I said, What about me? Who the hell do you think you are?

He had the dog on the sidewalk in front of him now and he said, Youve made your point. Dont belabor it. This left me beside myself. Belabor.

You ought to get good and belabored, I said. I called him a string of names that they dont let in a newspaper.

He walked on. He was one of the so many thousands who have made dogs such an important part of their lives that everyone else is supposed to understand it and accept it if the dog urinates on your shoe tips.

These people are out there on the sidewalks with dogs urinating or defecating on the sidewalk where you walk, and walk in the mornings with infants and school children.

Nobody would dare mention the parasites that come out of this animal waste. Why, that would be against dogs.

Because of people out there with their dogs, we have the one most revolting and insane sight of a woman dressed for the day out in the morning holding a plastic bag and walking behind a dog and bending down to pick up after him. And a man doing the same thing.

Get on the streets and watch them. Up, down, pick up after dog, walk to the trash can, everywhere you look, up, down, up, down, walk four yards, stop, walk, stop, people reduced to the level of swine doing whatever this grubby meaningless germ-laden dog wants.

There is a blind arrogance to somebody walking a dog until the dog has a spot right in front of you to urinate or otherwise. Then the arrogance suddenly becomes outright groveling: the stooping to clean up after an animal.

These people feel that their dogs have the same right to the sidewalks of the city that a human being does.

Hardly. The dogs have no rights and no souls. They interfere with the rights of others.

I feel sorry for most dogs, having to be closed up in an apartment all day. That is the measure of class of the owner. They have the dog in jail all day.

At the same time, I despise having the dog on the same sidewalk with me.

So far there have been complaints in Battery Park City, where people feel the urinating is discoloring the sidewalks.

And Wednesday, after my anger at the Village Voice box on 68th Street, there was, just a short walk up, a woman who tied her dog to a bench in front of the New World Coffee shop on the corner of 79th and Columbus.

The dog immediately urinated on the wood bench.