Dog Man is back on his land and I’m worried. I don't use that name to be dehumanizing, I just don't know his actual name and it's a quick and easy way to refer to him that my husband and daughter will understand. I call him Dog Man because he usually has about eight dogs at a time, seemingly from the same litter. Often, he breeds them unintentionally. They all look the same—long-legged, orange and black, scrawny mutts. He used to live in a Weather King shack, but it recently burned down. I'll get to that in a bit. First, I want to talk about the dogs.
His house was located on the corner of the main road. His dogs had a fence, but I wouldn't call them fenced in. These untrained packs commonly jumped in front of cars that had to go past his property to leave the neighborhood. They sometimes surrounded the front of a car for a long time barking and not getting out of the way. I assume the inbreeding had made them quite dumb.
In a hurry to get to work but not willing to potentially run over the dogs, I pressed down on my horn hard for extended periods in an attempt to get the dumb dogs to move and Dog Man would not respond at all. He never came out to call his dogs back, not even when they chased cars down the main road, which is a 60-mph road where people drive up to 80 mph. Sometimes people hit these dogs and, feeling terrible, rush them to the vet half an hour away and pay for their care. More likely, they died on the side of the road. But somehow, he always had more.
It was impossible to walk or bike past his house to go from my home to the nearby gorge because of the hordes of fiercely barking dogs. It was bad for me, but it was worse for my friend who lived next door to him. His dogs would run over to her house and cause trouble with her dogs. They were barking at her all the time.
This was overall a huge nuisance to the community. I did call Animal Control once or twice because I was concerned about the welfare of the dogs who looked scrawny and unkempt. I wondered how he could afford to feed them all. Although Animal Control did manage to drive out here to the very outskirts of the county, they said they can only do something if they caught the dogs in the act of terrorizing people and cars. It almost seemed as if Dog Man knew when they were coming because suddenly the dogs disappeared. Even if they did catch the dogs in the act, all they could do was to take them away and put them in the overcrowded and underfunded shelter, which recently had to shut down.
One neighbor suggested that the dogs gave Dog Man a sense of security to which I responded: the dogs took away my sense of security.
Last winter Dog Man’s small shed caught on fire. Dog Man lives on a quarter acre encircled with old pallets. He throws his trash over his fence into a large pile. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon out here. Trash piles litter the neighborhood, including old, dilapidated trailers and junk yards. There are beautifully hand built earthbag homes next door to sprawling debris. This contrast is normal in New Mexico, but more pronounced in my off-grid community where ordinances and permits are laughed at.
Apparently, Dog Man cooked on his front deck on a camping stove. One day, as the story was told to me, he was cooking up some bacon in a pan and when he was done, he forgot to turn the burner off and took a nap. One of the eight dogs must have been playing nearby, flipped the pan and started a grease fire. The fire quickly sparked the wooden shed into flames and a mother dog and her puppy underneath were killed in the event. He survived, fortunately, as did the other dogs. He lost everything though. Of course, this is very sad.
On the other hand, I was happy that he no longer lived there with his eight dogs. He was a bad citizen. A bad citizen is someone who acts in such a way that is destructive to their neighbors and hurts their community. By having more dogs than he could control and not attempting to control them while also living at a busy intersection, he was a bad actor. His dogs were a threat to children and to good citizens. A good citizen is someone who feels responsible for their role in the community. A good citizen acts in such a way that is conscientious and helpful to others.
But there's nothing that we can do about it because we have chosen to live somewhere where freedom is high on the list of values and priorities. We need to respect that our neighbors can do whatever they want so that we can do whatever we want. Some examples of bad citizenry that I have seen in my neighborhood include, loud generators running at all hours of night, houses deteriorating into trash, large arrays of trash littering visible property, lights blaring all night long into neighbors’ windows, feral bands of dogs, loud neighboring squatters, speeding down the washboard gravel road, roofs blowing off trailers and landing in a road and staying there for years until someone finally gets tired of it and figures out how to move it out of the way.
The problem with freedom and living in such a way that people are allowed to do what they want is that some people are really inconsiderate of others. This could be a symptom of poverty, addiction or mental health issues. There are multiple reasons why people might be bad citizens and take advantage of freedom in such a way that hurts the larger community. They might not even be aware that what they're doing is bothering other people.
This is the conundrum of a free country. If we want to be free ourselves then we must allow other people to be free as well. So even though I fence in my dog and I clean up my trash, if my neighbor chooses to not do those things then I need to tolerate that.
Recently, I joined the board of the neighborhood association. At the very first meeting, people complained and insisted we start creating regulations—noise ordinances, speed limits, dog restrictions. I was adamantly against this. Freedom isn’t free, I reminded them. If you want your freedom to build, grow, keep animals, revel as you choose, and so on, then you must pay the price of allowing others to do the same.
My hope is that the neighborhood association can help people instead. Those running their nightly generator may need funding for more solar panels or batteries. Those with trash in their yard may need a truck to haul it away. Those with too many dogs or blaring lights may need a neighborhood call list to help them feel more secure alone at home. Instead of taking things away from people, let’s give more. The only way to fight bad citizenry is with an extra big helping of good citizenry.
Meanwhile, I’m really hoping Dog Man, or as I call him now by his real name, Kevin, doesn’t acquire another pack of unruly canines. I hope he learned his lesson.
How can we become better citizens in our community and in our country? What can our local and national government learn about good citizenship?
This was SO good. Brilliant writing, storytelling & reportage from the sagebrush ocean where freedom isn’t free. I’m also so impressed by your compassion and curiosity towards the bad citizenry to find the root causes. Johanna for Mayor of the Mesa (or Anti-Mayor might be more appropriate).💗