Coming from New York City, where we follow the rule “curb your dog,” I never let my puppy pee or poo on sidewalks, on the doorsteps of businesses and homes, or on any area that’s under a roof. She’s only allowed to go on the curb, or the streets off the sidewalks where her pee will just flow into the gutter. If she ever makes it to the park, I let her go there too. And of course, when she poos, I pick up after her. As for the pee, I just leave it there. I don’t feel inclined enough to waste a bottle of water every time my dog pees, especially when there seems to be a water shortage every year.
Obviously, I’m not in New York anymore, and there are plenty of people in this country who don’t agree or won’t settle for this sort of common sense. Since I moved to Kaohsiung, I’ve been letting my dog pee just outside of my apartment. Her usual spot has been off to the side of our garage entrance, more or less in-between two businesses, but on the street where there is a no-parking zone (where of course, it’s really free parking here! But that’s a different issue). I’ve also been getting a lot of grief from the real estate office on the far side of the entrance. The workers there like to spectate from behind their windows, catch my dog in the act of peeing there, and then come over to let me know that my dog is an environmental hazard, that her pee makes the garage smell (god knows how, when we’re about twenty feet away from it!), and gets dragged around by the tires of cars and scooters. They tell me to go to the park to let her pee (what a joke! when the public workers in this city shoo dog owners away from parks as well), and if they catch me at that spot again, they had enough reasons to report me to the police! My girlfriend and I dared them to do just that, but they shut themselves up and didn’t bother us for some time.
Today, my dog was peeing again in the usual spot, and one of the employees, who just happened to walk by me, continued to walk into her office, all the while staring at me and not saying a word. Turns out that she went off squealing to her coworker that I was letting my dog pee by his scooter in that very no-parking zone. He comes out, stands and waits right in front of me way after the fact, and just watches the pee puddle for a bit until it flows (guess where) right towards his scooter tire. That’s when he decides to whine to me that my dog deliberately peed on his scooter. Okay, before they were being ridiculous, and now, they’re just making it personal.
I’m getting really frustrated at this situation. Aside from the passive aggressive complaints that Taiwanese people make, there aren’t really many places where dogs are welcome. So where IS an acceptable place to let dogs go?