When I moved my Poochon Milo to Brooklyn from the suburbs two years ago, he was afraid of sidewalks, crosswalk patterns, and big friendly dogs as well as small aloof ones. Eventually he realized he could walk around subway grates and learned to cross the street without needing to be tugged along, and the six blocks from our apartment to Prospect Park started to seem less daunting.
But the neighborhood wasn’t thrilled to have him.First came the dirty looks as I walked Milo up to Nostrand Avenue and back. Then the tree wells on the curb with the all-caps “No poop, no pee here” signs. And then there were the side-eyes I got bending over with a waste bag,the man who called me a bitch under his breath when he saw Milo and I waiting outside the deli. In a city where many feel ready to snap, dogs have become easy targets for a bubbling undercurrent ofrage. Now, strangers will just tell my dog he’s an asshole. On three separate occasions, awoman in my building, who doesn’t know I work from home and who doesn’t live on my floor, has come downstairs to stand right in front of my door until Milo starts barking, then yells at him gleefully.Walking to the corner store the other day, Milo made a little woof while crossing the street. “Shut up, dog,” a man told him, staring at me. The woman next to him started laughing. “Yeah, shut up dog!”
Three years after the pandemic puppy boom skyrocketed the city’s estimated dog population of 600,000 to now-unconfirmed heights, New York has had it with dogs and the people who own them. They’re sick of seeing dogs at restaurants, tripping over them in the produce aisle,and stepping in sidewalk shit on their morning commutes. There’s now more than 30,000 fecal bacteria per 12 ounces of city sidewalk puddle. In Prospect Lefferts Gardens, where I live, complaints about dog waste have increased almost nine-fold since 2021. After an outcry from crusaders,the Department of Sanitation started deploying poop patrols to issue $250 fines to offenders, only to hand out a handful of tickets a year.Over on the PLG Facebook group, residents started sharing fantasies about taking Google Nest photos of irresponsible dog owners and sticking them all over the neighborhood in a public-shaming campaign.
Even celebrities are done with us. Last fall, Tony Danza allegedly stepped over an Upper West Side woman’s black Labrador and yelled at her to get out of the way, then denied the kerfuffle ever took place. Rolling Stone recently asked Chloë Sevigny, who once sold her Park Slope co-op for over $2 million, if she agreed that New York was increasingly becoming a city for the rich.“The athleisure and dogs are taking over,” she said. “Everybody’s in Lululemon and has a fucking dog.” Years ago, that might have been an unpopular opinion. Now, you can barely find a place to live in a city overwhelmed with rats, trash, and subway fights. It’s harder than ever just to scrape by, and people need a release. Pointing the finger at a pampered city dog might be the easiest way to get it.
I hear these stories all the time now: A dog-owning friend in Fort Greene says someone pelted the windows ofher vet’s office with dogshit(at least, she hopes it was dog shit). Another PLG resident told me strangers scream “get that black dog away from me” when she walks her leashed Labrador around the neighborhood.A neighbor in my building who has two cats and a thorny friendship with an elderly woman downstairs told me she once knocked on his door and threatened to call 311 on him about noise coming from his apartment. “I know you’ve got dogs on roller skates,” she told him. Online forums are lighting up with similar spats. Over on Reddit, one Brooklynite told me he and his dog were chased down the block after his pet peed on a stoop; anti-dog people downvoted him into oblivion. Apreschool teacher in Bed-Stuy told me a woman threatened to shoot her and her pit bullwhile the two were out on a walk. “Not everyone is a dog person,” the woman told her.
For the record, I pick up after Milo, I disavow dog owners who don’t do the same, and I respect your gardens and your space. I know my dog isn’t your problem to take care of. But as neighborly interactions go sour, I can’t shake the feeling that people simply delight in being rude to my dog — and, by extension, me.
Mia can relate. She and her boyfriend have two terrier mixes and have lived in PLG for eight years. Though there may be more dog owners around post-pandemic, the neighborhood never felt unfriendly to pets, and the proximity to Prospect Park was an added bonus. Around 2020, however, the nascent anti-dog fervor on the community Facebook group started getting to her.Mia — who, like most people in this story, asked to use a pseudonym — recalls a post about dog waste devolving into a battle of “your dog is gentrifying the neighborhood; you’re a bad person for having one.” (“Are they saying that only white people have dogs?” she, a Latina native New Yorker, wonders.)The post got so heated that Mia’s boyfriend left the group and later reapplied to get back in.
Not long after, Mia had her first in-person dog spat outside a brownstone. She was taking the terriers for a morning walk when a woman approached. Mia thought she might tell her the dogs were sweet — “they’re small and people often say silly, cute things to them” — but quickly realized she had another thing coming. “She said something, like, ‘Can you not have your dog pee on the planter?,’ with so much rudeness and aggression.” Mia was taken aback. There weren’t any “curb your dog” or“don’t pee here” signs, which she always abides. “I was like, ‘He’s peeing there because another dog peed there. You can see the new wet spot and the old wet spot.’” In response, the woman told Mia to “just take your dog to the park instead.”
Now Mia was pissed. She told the woman not to put her fucking planter out if she cared so much in the first place. The encounter ended with some back-and-forth screaming; Mia thinks she may have capped it off with a “you fucking bitch!” crescendo. She hasn’t seen the woman since, but then again, she was seeing red. “I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup.”
As neighborly interactions go sour, I can’t shake the feeling that people simply delight in being rude to my dog — and, by extension, me.
Suddenly everyone’s a vigilante.Zoe moved to PLG in the summer of 2022 so she and her bird-hunting dog, Siobhan, could be near Prospect Park, but the off-leash hours — 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. — leave her with limited daylight to actually use them,so she skirts the rules a little bit. Plenty of other dog owners do it, she says, and Siobhandoesn’t bother anyone unless there’s chicken or hot dogs involved. Two summers ago, Zoe took Siobhan off-leash slightly later than usual. A youngwoman running along the path yelled at her to leash her dog. Zoe didn’t listen. The woman came back and started filming her. “She was asking me why I thought I was special, why my dog didn’t need to be leashed. Was it because of my white privilege?” Zoe says (the woman was Asian). “She was trying to get me to say something that would look really bad when actually nothing had happened.” Eventually the woman stopped recording, and Zoe told her to fuck off. For the next few weeks, she was paranoid that a video would appear on the internet.
Pet owners aren’t the only ones who have noticed a shift. A dog walker who has worked in Brooklyn for more than 20 years says his rounds have gotten palpably tense since the pandemic. He’s been screamed at for dogs peeing on the literal curb, but where else are they supposed to go? “It feels like someone having a bad day and needing to take it out on a service worker,” he says.
But some think a little shaming is exactly what dog owners need. “There is no one more entitled than the Brooklyn dog owner,” says Dean, a 40-year-old father of two. Every morning while walking through Prospect Park to take his son to school, Dean wades through a sea of off-leash dogs and their distracted owners. His son has been nipped at, lunged at, and jumped on by large dogs. When Dean reminds owners that dogs are required to be leashed, he says, they usually respond with something like “my dog is friendly,’’ “my dog doesn’t bite,” “we’re right next to the dog field.” Some have cursed him out and yelled at him. One older woman called him a Chad. A few months ago, a woman’s dog ran between Dean and his son and nearly tripped them up. “I said, ‘Ma’am, you know you’re in an on-leash area. Is there something special about your dog? Do the rules not apply to you?’” The woman told him, “Yes, my dog is very special.”
“I do believe there’s a hierarchy,” says Dean, in the furtive tone of an admission. “There are people, and then there are dogs.” He’s tired of people who get that twisted, of those who put the perceived desires of a dog above the safety or needs of humans, particularly children. For instance, while sanitation police hardly ever catch or fine dog-poop offenders, a New York City mom says cops hounded her for letting her 4-year-old son pee in Battery Park during an emergency earlier this month, despite the fact that park bathrooms were closed. She told the New York Post an officer asked to see her ID before handing her a $50 fine and a summons for a July court date. (Meanwhile, at a budget hearing last year, DSNY Commissioner Jessica Tisch said many dog-poop transgressors tell police they don’t have IDs and that she feels it would be inappropriate to escalate the issue further.) On X, a posted photo of a London bar sign reading “Dog-Friendly, Child-Free” went viral this week, fanning the flames of the dog wars all the way across the pond. “Dog people are making me hate dogs,” someone replied. For people fed up with the fact that dogs are often treated with more respect than children, the sign felt like a middle finger. This is how far the adoration of fur babies has gone.
And I’ll admit that some owners have no shame, imposing on the city’s few free leisure spaces without remorse. Residents at the Denizen — a luxury building in Bushwick that advertises amenities including a brewery, a winery, hot tubs, and an art gallery — have come under fire for using the no-dogs-allowed park across the street as a dog run.They’ve deteriorated the space to the point where local youth-baseball leagues don’t want to practice there anymore: Children can’t play without getting ringworm on their hands from dog feces or twisting their ankles in holes the dogs dig, according to Bushwick Community Board members Celestina Leon and Robert Camacho. Dog owners have even resisted efforts to keep them out of the park, they say, breaking locks on the gates and making holes in the fences to get in.
“More and more it seems like dog culture has become synonymous with mainstream culture and the norm is just dogs should be everywhere people are,” one Bushwick resident told me. “It’s really awkward to speak up about that, like you’re ruining someone’s fun.”She’s tired of paying taxes for facilities that end up literally going to the dogs. “It’s time not just for a serious conversation or several strongly worded tweets but action on this.” In the meantime, every time she walks by the Denizen, she tells me, her blood boils.
Last December, tensions in PLG came to a head on — where else? — our neighborhood Facebook page. A concerned citizen posted about a distressing incident outside Lincoln Market.“A big dog attacked a baby no more than 2,”she wrote. The situation, she said, went something like this: A man tied up his pet outside the supermarket when a child and its father walked past. The dog took hold of the child and refused to let it go until nearby police intervened. The comment section spun out of control. Smh! Muzzle it, one person wrote. Another recounted seeing the blood-splattered child in the aftermath. People who hadn’t actually witnessed the scene used the incident to take aim at dog owners who adopted pets in the pandemic and didn’t put enough effort into training them.
No one could agree on exactly what went down.One witness who saw the whole thing told me the toddler was thankfully unharmed; the dog had bitten into their coat, not their skin. Whenthe dog’s owner rushed out of the market, “He didn’t say a word,” the witness said. “He just hung his head in shame and told the police” — who had to beat the dog’s face with a baton— “you could have held the dog’s back feet up and he would have stopped.” While people swarmed the toddler and her father, the owner sat quietly on the corner next to his dog. “He was almost in a corner of shame, like he knew something bad was going to happen, like maybe his dog was going to be put down,”the witness recounted. Bystanders crowded the toddler’s father, asking, “Is the baby okay?,”and calling loudly for help until he asked them for space. Meanwhile, the dog parent and human parent didn’t exchange a word, both too preoccupied with shepherding their wards. The Facebook comments on this interaction were not kind. “Why is your dog everywhere with you??” someone wrote. “Separation anxiety much?”
The vitriol hurts. I do take Milo everywhere I can. I have such a brief amount of time with him, and I want to give him the best and fullest life possible, this creature in my care who makes strange little noises in his sleep and once wagged his tail at the asshole who called him an asshole.I do my best to not be the entitled Brooklyn dog owner you hate. But the rudeness people feel comfortable dishing out at me because I have a dog is turning me rude, and sometimes I’m too tired to resist it. I, too, have become antisocial and mannerless.
Once, while crossing in front of a preschool with Milo, I had a particularly nasty spat with a woman walking her twin dachshunds on extra-long leads. She took up the whole sidewalk without batting an eye while I pulled Milo close to me. When I smiled at her, she barked, “Stay away.” It was my last straw. “We’re not even near you,” I snapped. The woman erupted. She followed me down the block chanting: “Asshole! Asshole!I just asked for a little bit of kindness!”I picked up speed. The person on the other end of my phone asked me what was going on. I turned around and looked squarely at the woman, now no more than two feet from Milo and me. “Just this fucking bitch,” I said. With that she walked away.But to my surprise, I was tearful and fixated on the interaction for days afterward. I couldn’t decide who the nasty one had been.
Maybe it feels good to take out your anger on Labradoodles and the people holding their leashes. Maybe sidewalks free of dog poop would ease at least one minor stress of city life, but the bigger gripes — the exorbitant cost of living, skyrocketing rents — aren’t going anywhere. And we’d probably be just as nasty without dogs around. Maybe even nastier.
In the months since Lincoln Market gate, the neighborhood Facebook page has cooled off. But once in a while things get heated again.Last month, a woman made an angry Facebook post about finding three dog-poop bags that were left behind in her garbage can after her trash was collected.It seemed like she expected solidarity from the anti-dog cohort, and she definitely got some of that. “Ban dogs! I can’t play with my kids outside in fear of stepping on diarrhea and snow!,” someone vented, suggesting all dog owners potty-train their pets to go inside of their apartments or bring their poop bags home. But the majority of comments suggested the hate was veering on the ridiculous. (“Ban dogs? Good luck with that,” someone replied.) Neighbors advised her to simply line her trash and doled out laugh emojis; in the middle of a trash-can desert, they said, thank God dog owners were picking up after their pets at all.
For all the shit talk, they know the dogs are here to stay.My neighbor with the “dogs on roller skates”has lived in our building for eight years; the landlord’s tried to edge him out for a good chunk of them, so the 311 threat from his downstairs neighbor unsettled him. On the days she isn’t threatening to call, they talk for hours and swap desserts. Sometimes she knocks on his door asking for a $20 for Chinese food. In the end, she never made that complaint. Instead, she knocked on his door and apologized. Now she asks him how his dogs, who are actually cats, are doing these days. “It’s their home, too,” she told him.
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