Should Seattle be a dog-eat-anywhere city?

[responsiblek9]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003168225_dogs02.html
Should Seattle be a dog-eat-anywhere city?
By Marc Ramirez

Who lets the dogs in?

(Woof. Woof, woof. Woof-woof.)

Just about everybody, it seems ? especially in Seattle, where from Belltown to Fremont, from West Seattle to Queen Anne to Madison Park, dogs accompany us where we go. They ride shotgun. They go clothes shopping. They rent videos, queue up at banks.


The places we eat and drink, though, are supposed to be another thing entirely, except that ... they're not. No, we're the kind of city where fashionable ladies clutch small dogs like babies as they order their lattes, where pooches and their owners dare to dine together ? never mind what the health codes say.


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Tales of horror abound, of Cujos enjoying unfinished salads on restaurant floors or licking through supermarket meat bins. Public-relations exec Joy Radford recalls a downtown seafood restaurant lounge where a man and his cocker spaniel were seated inside the dining area. "Toward the end of the meal, the guy was turning and feeding [the dog] off his plate."

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But this whole sense of entitlement is starting to get under people's skin. You, awaiting your grande nonfat vanilla with the little white terrier peeking out of your fancypants handbag ? you're getting on people's nerves.

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Business owner Janet Faunce was forced to speak up when she saw one guy's German shepherd tongue-swooshing the meat packages at an Eastside grocery store. When she said something, he told her that dogs' mouths were cleaner than humans'.

"So I went to find the manager, and he said, 'I'd lose so many customers if I didn't let them bring their dogs in.' You give them an inch, they're going to take a mile."


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"What difference is there between my well-trained service dog walking the food aisle and anyone else's well-trained nonservice dog walking the food aisle?" asks Tamara Stanley via e-mail, noting Europeans' tolerance of such things. "Maybe we should ban small children [from restaurants], who don't know enough to wash their hands and not pick their noses."