Pass The Dog Food Bowl

The wonderful little town where I live, Pine Lake, Ga., nestled in the shadow of Stone Mountain, just off Memorial Drive, seems to have a recurring dog problem. Of course, everybody loves dogs. Me included. I have owned a couple of dozen dogs during my lifetime. I even owned two at a time once when I lived on a farm that provided them with 160 acres in which to run. However, most of the houses in Pine Lake are on lots increasingly not much bigger than the buildings themselves. Our current dog problem concerns strays and what to do about them. I do not know how we get so many strays. Some people think they are dumped in Pine Lake. Maybe the dumpers have gotten tickets from the Pine Lake police taking the easy pickings on Rockbridge Rd. Maybe they just think Pine Lake is full of suckers.

Here’s my plan. Pine Lake should expand its Police Department to include a special Animal Control Unit. We can staff this 24x7 for about $250,000. Then we could convert the Club House into a facility which we can call the Pine Lake Humane Society. The Club House is only used on voting days and for public meetings and the occasional birthday party. We could probably keep the renovations of the Club House to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, not counting the special equipment. Oh, and I guess we will need to staff the Pine Lake Humane Society facility, unless we can get enough volunteers to take the animals for walks. Then there is the cost of leashes and feeding the strays. I think we could do this for little more than a half a million dollars. Say about $1,000 per resident of Pine Lake. I am personally not in favor of paying any taxes of any kind to any government. So, somebody get a hat and pass it around. Or maybe we should use the dog food bowl.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter