Opinion: Rather Than Penalize Dog Guardians, Support Them

This week, news broke that “the Atlanta City Council halved the amount of time a dog can bark before its owner runs the risk of being cited and paying a $150 fine.” Now if Mayor Andre Dickens signs the legislation, “under the new ordinance, a dog barking for longer than 10 minutes (without a 20-second break between barks) can be considered a nuisance.”

As someone who's nervous system doesn’t love tons of barking and is very interested in animal welfare, I can find ways to generously interpret the intent behind this ordinance (and the many others like it that exist throughout the country). But I think it’s important to talk about the realities of rules like this and what they actually mean for both humans and non-human animals.

Animal control, who is generally charged with enforcing these ordinances, has historically taken a “community policing approach” to “animal welfare,” but is that actually the best way to care for non-human animals and/or humans?

A good friend of ours, Kassidi Jones, who does a lot of antiracist animal advocacy work on her Instagram page (@gingers_naps), recently highlighted a helpful article on this topic: Punishment to Support: The Need to Align Animal Control Enforcement with the Human Social Justice Movement by Sloane M Hawes, Tess Hupe, and Kevin N Morris.

The authors point out that “animal protection ordinances, similar to human criminal justice policies, disproportionately target communities of color with their enforcement interventions.” Beyond that, “punitive approaches to addressing social problems, such as citation and incarceration, often blame the individual while disregarding the structural causes of an issue.”

In this punishment based approach, it’s not just the humans who are likely to suffer. What happens to the welfare of animals whose guardians are trying to avoid citations and fines? Might this set the stage for more people to slap bark collars or shock collars, devices with well documented risks to behavioral health and welfare, on their dogs to try to get them to stop barking quickly?

This ordinance and those like it around the country treat barking as a monolith, but it’s actually a topographically diverse behavior that functions to produce a huge range of outcomes for dogs and it shows up in a wide variety of conditions. Reducing a dog’s barking ethically requires us to understand what is going on with an individual dog and their environment.

Punishment ordained by cities and enforced by animal control is not the answer. I am not saying that actual animal cruelty or neglect should be ignored. But I’d find it hard to believe that the majority of dogs whose barking may violate this ordinance would be doing so due to some mal-intent on behalf of their guardian. Instead, I imagine people don’t know what they don’t know and/or don’t have access to resources they need (information, training, dog sitters, etc.).

What would happen if instead of punishing and criminalizing, we sought to provide people with the resources they needed to care for their animals? What if instead of threats and punishment for barking dogs, we connected people to affordable or free training resources like Kiki Yablon’s “Thanks For Barking 2.0 Protocol” or Logan Buie’s article for Tails of Connection entitled “What to do for a Dog With Separation Anxiety?”

Christie Catan, is the co-founder of Tails of Connection and a certified professional dog trainer, knowledge assessed. She also happened to grow up in Atlanta.