Why You Should Not Have a Dog!

By Robert Appel

An in-depth study on the mood swings that many affected people show today because of the overwhelming number of dogs that live near their homes. Through a large number of testimonial cases and real events, the author tries to show the world the serious problem that is arising with the invasion of these pets occupying homes and apartments without any control or protection on those who have to live among these animals daily. 
The quality of life of many millions of people has deteriorated enormously because of their constant barking or crying when left alone. And this epidemic grows because of various factors listed in the book, which would be of great interest to be studied by local authorities who must protect their citizens according to the Constitutional rights.
Sleeping is a right that has been lost, so Robert Appel proposes a list of  stricter regulations and dog ordinances that would serve to stop this serious widespread. The mental and physical damage these animals are causing in residents of all cities worldwide is huge, affecting their work, their intimate life, and even their peaceful walks in the city, where dogs are also complicating the use of public spaces and recreation areas. People buying dogs today are contributing to the deterioration of their own society, without them really knowing how badly their pet or pets are destroying so many lives around them.
Dogs today are a public health problem, contaminating our waters, attacking and killing innocent human beings and increasing exponentially the levels of noise pollution at any unexpected moment of our day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Appel
• Release date: Jan 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393008408

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In the last decades, the Western world has been coping with an overwhelming number of cats and dogs brought by people into their homes. They are infiltrating every corner of public life, and things have gotten out of hands. Large cities have been growing fast but not with enough space to accommodate comfortably so many residents coming from rural areas or other countries in search of a better life.

Such cities end up building very tall apartments to solve the problem of overpopulation and demand for a living place.

A great percentage of families in Europe, Latin America and some big cities of the United States like New York, Chicago or San Francisco live in small or medium-sized apartments, where loud music is played late at night by unrespectful neighbors.  Many apartment buildings today are so badly insulated that we have residents complaining about the  snoring of their neighbour going through a common wall.

Additionally, car alarms going off at the least expected time of the day can destroy not only our sleep but also our mental health.

But the most annoying noise inside neighborhoods is that generated by dogs. There is no escape from them. Wherever we move there will still be 6 families with a dog for every 10 homeowners!

Anxiety is a state of intense uneasiness or restlessness caused especially by something unpleasant, by the threat of a misfortune or a danger. Living surrounded by these animals causes daily anguish, hence the title of the book. Not only their barking affects our tranquility, but also their howling or their cries when they are left in solitude for several hours of the day.

The majority of neighborhood disputes are related to noise.

More than 50% of the complaints for annoying noises are by dog ​​barking, and increasing. Despite the millions of complaints all around the world, dog owners are hardly penalized for violating a city’sordinance against allowing an animal to disturb the peace.

In the United States alone a census of 2017 showed an extraordinary figure of 90 million dogs living in homes. Meaning, there’s a dog every 4.5 inhabitants.

Today it’s also more and more common to see families not with just one but with 2 or 3 dogs in one same property, duplicating the noise problem and other disturbances to its neighbours.

There’s almost no possibility of sleeping peacefully, concentrate on reading, working, meditating or even enjoying moments of personal intimacy with your loved one. The barking goes easily through windows into our ears, no matter how thick the glass is.

If a dog barks for a long time and then ceases, there will usually be a second dog in some other sector of the neighborhood starting to bark as well. And there could even be a third and a fourth that prolong the discomfort during the whole day. Weekends turn into a disaster, preventing us from recovering of our stress at work.

Unfortunately, what constitutes barking that’s too much or too loud also is very subjective, so not many dog owners are ticketed nor issued citations against them. That’s why they abuse the system.

When you search today on Google for an apartment complex in the United States that doesn’t accept dogs, you probably won’t find any. Even hotels are accepting them, affecting our stay or vacation.

We have to sadly admit we are now the new minority, the 4 out of  10 people not owning a dog. Therefore, no builder or property owner will rent all the apartment units unless they make them pet friendly.

The number of dog-friendly workspaces have increased from 8% to 11% since 2014, which Bloomberg magazine attributes it to the money made off the humanization of pets. And Forbes magazine reports that he workplace isn’t the only territory where dog owners are at war.

The increasing number of uncertified emotional support dogs on airplanes has become a point of heated disagreement, and no airline can really identify the real ones from those who cheat with fake ones.

The same situation is happening now at restaurants and cafeterias.

Too many places are becoming dog places, and counting.

Those of us who don’t have a dog, truly love them and admire them as much as any dog owner. It’s not a matter of rejection towards dogs, but just a matter of responsibility and respect to the community we live at. We all want to be surrounded by adorable things, but we should always consult our consciousness first. 

Rest is a fundamental right that should be protected by every government in the world, but because we became a minority we have less rights than dog owners, something very unfortunate because the problem became an epidemic, requiring much more municipal and state resources and duties to turn around the situation.

The World Health Organization (WHO), defines Quality of Life as an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns. It is a broad ranging concept affected in a complex way by the person's physical health, psychological state, personal beliefs, social relationships and their relationship to salient features of their environment.

The term applies to all individuals, regardless of whether they are sick or disabled, at work, at home or at leisure activities.

But 60% or more of those who make up our societies are willing to obstruct any concept of quality of life without being aware of it, in some cases. And in others, they are conscious of their acts but just don’t care about the wellness of other people.

Dog barking is considered the third most annoying noise to a human ear, and an intense and constant barking will hurt our lives so badly that many of us will end up selling our property to recover permanent sleep and tranquility, back to our lives.

It was assumed that with the acquisition of a house we would gain a peaceful and private space for ourselves and our family, but it ends up being an unprotected space that we would like to abandon as quickly as we possibly can, or else we could go crazy.

Their barks are like loud cryings, if we equate them to the sound emitted by a human being. In such a case, if a man shouted madly from his balcony or backyard for a long period of time  during the day he would be detained and fined, checking also on his mental health.

Since dog owners treat them like real human beings, why don’t local authorities consider dog barking as disturbing as any human scream?

Today dogs have the right to shout as much as they want, but not humans.

There are millions of neighbors today who are at war and with legal disputes because of these uncontrolled animals.

The problem has reached such an extreme that neighbors affected by annoying barking have even murdered their owners who were uncooperative  in resolving the coexistence problem.

And vice versa, that is, they’re killing each other. One desperate man in U.S.A even paid $40 dollars to his neighbor in exchange to remove his dog from their backyard at night so he could get some sleep, as seen on a video he posted online.

For when a dog barks loudly and constantly all day or all night, it causes such stress and mental fury that a person will do anything to hush the noisy source.

In Chile for example, a man tired of the barking of the neighbor's dog abducted it when there was no one in the house, took him to a veterinary surgeon, paid him to cut his vocal cords and then returned it to the neighbor's garden! So radical can neighbors act when they are desperate to stop a dog from barking.

Neither courts, municipalities nor local law enforcement agencies have the will to defend or side with the good citizens deeply harmed by one of the worst acoustic contamination for the human ear. Defenseless, some affected keep playing the game of allowing things to remain the same, but at a certain day it won’t end well.

Dogs have been the worst headache for those who have bought a new expensive house or apartment. The invasion of dogs has reached every habitable corner of neighborhoods.

The freedom and rights of people end where the neighbor's begins, but this doesn’t seem to be the case with dog owners.

Today dogs are not our best friends, at least not to many of us, besides our great admiration for their physical beauty and other virtues. Every day more unscrupulous neighbors add millions of these animals into large cities in an uncontrolled and overflowing manner, either because of the fashion of having them, of rescuing them, of needing company or simply as a means of protection against the rise of home invasions. Just as the smoker thinks he does not bother the non-smoker with tobacco smoke, so the dog owners believe that complaints about barking are exaggerated and unfounded.

They have become accustomed to the noise of the animal just like a smoker who no longer smells his own unpleasant cigarette smoke.

And it’s probably the reason why they can’t understand their neighbor’s claims and pleads.

When a problem affecting our quality of life expands around the world like an amoeba, it becomes a pandemic almost impossible to eradicate. Not only their barks are devastating our lives, but also their waste (urine and feces) and their fatal bites.

They are ruining and increasingly spoiling the attractiveness of all communal areas and public places where we live, while no perpetrator is caught or accused.

Certain dog breeds have taken the lives of thousands of innocent people, especially children and the elderly with not enough strength to defend themselves against their deadly attacks.

Many countries still allow these dangerous dogs to coexist with us. How many more attacks are necessary to strictly ban them forever?

In the meantime, some dogs will force us to keep a good distance from these potentially dangerous animals, many taken by off leash strollers, affecting our joyful morning walks. It’s always hard to identify a calm dog from a mean one, so we can’t anymore walk where we want to, limiting and conditioning us in the use of public spaces. 

Since their snouts can smell more than 10,000 times higher than the nose of human beings, it’s not surprising why they bark at any person or dog that passes through their territory, a space they believe belongs to them and to which they were programmed to protect.

Thus, many houses paired or very close to each other tend to make the dog believe they are a single property, so they bark at the alleged invader who is nothing more than the owner himself (his neighbor). We then end up being usurpers of our own enclosure, so we can’t enjoy our backyard patio that borders on that of the dog owner, preventing us from watering the plants peacefully or enjoying

some fresh air outdoors. We are driven out by these pets, and with their barking some are telling us to leave their territory, while their passive owner does nothing about it.

The only moments we enjoy our property is when it rains and the dog is getting shelter inside. The same happens in apartment buildings: With the downpour they are no longer present in their balconies to bark at every dog ​​or passer by.

I wonder how many people today, with so many cultural changes that have pushed back our values ​​of coexistence, are really in psychological conditions of having a dog as a pet. Certainly not many.

No State or municipality conducts a psychiatric examination to measure the mental conditions of their owners. Political correctness still rules in the United States and several european countries.

It is clear that a significant number of people don’t have enough awareness and responsibility to have these pets in their homes, because when you confront them in regard to the noisy barking many react irritated and even insult us, showing a senseless personality.

Dog owners always seek the mercy of law enforcing authorities, arguing that their dog is another member of their family, therefore inseparable. Thus they put a barrier to any separation attempt.

And they manage to sensitize them, without caring for the harm inflicted on their neighbor’s mental health.

Only when it’s their turn to be victims of a source of noise pollution, they themselves react by calling local authorities to discipline their neighbor. It shows the moral poverty that exists in their personalities. The coherence, the good manners, the reasoning, the elemental, the objective analysis and the sense of responsibility are not part of their personality. Not to mention those owners of aggressive dogs that can bite and kill whenever they don’t like someone, and that includes us living next to them.

My book has several purposes: One is to alert dog owners on how seriously their pets impact badly our daily lives. To emphasize it enough, I include many testimonies and real cases of people affected, as well as cases that ended in tragedy.

We don’t want to end like Paris, where their citizens had created a no-go zone App warning people not to enter certain areas of the city or else confront imminent danger, due to terrible immigration policies and lack of hard-line policies against those who want to live in anarchy. If things keep going the way it’s going, we will end up recurring to no-go dog zones, alerting of dog owners taking over

massively certain areas of our cities, and making them unlivable.

A second purpose of my book is to dissuade people who are unfit and unprepared to own a dog, to meditate more lucidly before making an impulsive purchase of dogs in small homes. For such reason, I warn about the inconveniences, obstacles, personal, legal and financial responsibilities that takes to have this pet for more than 10 years.

The events, tragic episodes and personal experiences compiled in this book illustrate the gravity that is presented today with the overwhelming number of dogs that generate a nightmare in our good living.

Having a dog carries with it too many responsibilities, and whoever

is unwilling to assume them should not have it because of the undesirable consequences that may occur during their possession.

The part of society that is on the side of dog activists continue to force us to get used to them and just ignore them and stop complaining.

Consequently, their nuisance barking and deadly bites must become part of our lives and any social claim will be unfounded because the rest of society accepted the terms of coexistence, according to them.

It’s that world upside down in terms of values, ​​and once our rights get out of hands we end up solving the issue with politically uncorrect measures, unfortunately.

A third purpose is to open the conscience of politicians who decree the laws and regulations of coexistence, expert lawyers, municipal representatives and mayors of the world, police officers and animal control officials to take action on the matter, because this avalanche of dogs around us has to be stopped, and all of them should start enforcing a new set of rules for all of us to live harmoniously.

In such respect, I propose a new set of dog regulations and much tougher city pet ordinances that limit and solve this epidemic that affects us wherever we are trying to live at.

I also detail the several sources promoting and increasing the number of dogs inside residential areas. Something has to be done against them too, for tougher dog laws by itself is not sufficient.

We are living in a very different world from was it was half a century ago. It’s the world of shame, of contradictions, of relative truth, of the borderless world where today the media imposes their liberal ideologies to secure an audience that doesn’t want to be governed by civil rules of any types, nor have to be responsible for anything.

And where authorities cannot displease or obstruct them from their new cultural beliefs on how extreme they want to live their lives.

The danger of these new civil liberties is when they are later transformed into cultural norms. We end up wrongly confusing  them with our civil rights written in our constitutions.

Finally, the distancing and social enmity between neighbors today is a reality originated by these animals meant to be their companions.

It's great to have neighbors as friends and a nightmare to have them as enemies,

but dogs getting in the way block any possibility of friendship. Not only they don’t allow us to sleep, to enjoy our own house but also generate disputes with our own neighbors.

This book is also for those who don’t have a voice but wants someone to represent them in their everyday agony. I’m sure they will enjoy reading of some similar own dreadful cases for the world to understand their claims and complaints. After all,

we all want to live in a clean and quiet place where there’s no danger either.

1  

RELEVANT CHARACTERISTICS OF DOGS

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Brief historical data

The dog was probably the first animal to be domesticated more than 14,000 years ago. The wolves, direct descendants of the dog, were used by humans in tasks such as hunting, home custody or herding, lending their services in exchange for food.

Because wolves operate in packs, humans easily took the place of the highest rankingwolf. So the animals quickly learned obedience.

As tamer wolves were more likely to stick around humans, evolution naturally (or humans intentionally) bred tamer and tamer wolves, until eventually, we got the dog. Sometime during this process, man and tamed wolf realized they made for a dynamic duo on the hunting scene.

At the end of the Middle Ages having a hunting dog in their home gave prestige or status to those who could afford them. Since then, they raised dogs by appearance, behavior and even ability to give caresses, because over time humans began to demand more things from the dog. They were raised by physical appearance and domesticated to make it more docile and affectionate. This was the starting point by which this animal began to live inside homes and no longer so much in the grasslands or outside.

Today men have crossed hundreds of breeds of domestic dogs, some of which could never survive in freedom.

For some reason our ancestors thought that the more they barked, the more protection from their land or home. So for thousands of years, dog crosses have been selected to create the excessive barking dimensions of our modern society. You can see that the bark we hear now is not a natural sound. The voice of the modern dog is the result of more than 10,000 years of crosses selected to produce the super barker we have now. 

The Siberian dog, the closest to the wolf, is one of the oldest breeds in the world and is believed to have emerged in the 10th century, since evidence was found that at that time they were used to pull the sleds of nomadic tribes near the Arctic pole, which required them to move faster during the hunting seasons. It is also known as Huskie, which derives from the word esky, a term used by explorers to call the Eskimos of the time. Their furry coat always protected them from the intense cold where they originated.

The Boxer for example was first seen in 1895 in Munich, Germany, in the Munich Boxer Club, raised by a German couple. During the First World War they used the Boxer as a military dog ​​and messenger for the benefit of German troops, employing only fit champions who could withstand harsh tasks such as aiding in the search for dangerous snipers.

The beautiful Collie, and famous for the American series Lassie of the 1950s was a dog that could drive up to 500 sheep in herds of Scotland, where it comes from. Shakespeare even wrote about this breed, in 1790. Today in South Africa, this dog is still used as a shepherd, to even drive ostriches flocks.

It is interesting to know the position of other cultures regarding dogs.

For instance, many Muslims claim that their prophet Muhammad didn’t like dogs, and recommended not to have them near. They have the belief that harmful germs reside in the snout of dogs and when they touch them they contract diseases. If a dog invades your home, God can no longer appear. Therefore, they have to purify their house, both physically and spiritually, in order to receive God back into it.

This might explain why in countries like Iran they don’t allow their citizens to have dogs in their homes, and impose severe fines or punishments. Dogs are also confiscated over there because they promote Western culture. Saudi Arabia's religious police issued a decree a long time ago banning the sale of the pets, seen too as a sign of Western influence.

In China, dogs were one of the first domesticated animals together with pigs, some 5,000 years before Christ. They also used them for hunting and herd. Only since then, they also eat them as a protein source.

The same practice is carried out today by several other Asian countries such as Vietnam, South Korea and Thailand. In certain parts of India, Ghana and Nigeria dog meat is also consumed.

A few breeds of dogs were mixed for the fight in the 19th century, producing a stronger specimen that could withstand pain longer.

An example of this was the birth of the breed Bull Terrier. It comes from the old Bulldog and the Black and Tan Terrier, crossed with breeds in which the white color was a dominant gene, like the Dalmatian or the English White Terrier that is already extinct.

In 1835, dog fights with bets had been banned in England, but the illegal money kept moving, without being able to control them so easily. Today in China dog fights prevail for money despite being banned, as corruption and popularity keeps them alive.

And in the United States, illegal dog fights continue to be a constant problem despite having been illegal for more than a century.

Experts say that Michigan is one of the states where there are more hotbeds of organized dog fights, especially in Detroit, its capital, where it costs a lot to eliminate them due to its juicy profits.

The Chihuahuas, the smallest breed in terms of size, were taken to the United States in the late 19th century by Americans who had been captivated during their stay in northern Mexico.

Although its origin seemed to originate in this Central American country, some historians claim that it was brought here from China, where they were reared many centuries ago. It emigrated from Asia to the American continent through the Bering Strait and it is believed that the Chinese Crested race originating in China was the one that affected the tiny size of the Chihuahua.

The Labrador Retriever, one of the most popular breeds in the world, has its origin in Canada, and it’s believed that everything happened in the 16th century when some colonists raised and mixed them with other English, Portuguese and Irish breeds. As you will see the vast majority of dogs that we see today in the world had their origin in the last few centuries only.

Without a doubt there was a great marketing involved on these animals to accompany men both at work and at home. New breeds were created to increase sales according to the taste and need of people, to become tremendously popular and fashionable thanks to more intense domestication and with dogs more adapted and accustomed to living in human homes.

With the arrival of vaccines and other discoveries to keep the animal healthy, more buyers purchased them as companions.

Especially the ease that people now have of being able to feed them with processed food bags at an affordable cost, purchasing them in any supermarket or pet store near their neighborhood.

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Specimen of an American Collie

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Overwhelming Amount of Pets

According to the Pet Owners National Survey of the American Pet Products Association (APPA), 68% of American households own a pet. There are about 90 million dogs in the United States (2018), where more than 329 million people live.

And in the United Kingdom there are 9 million dogs, in a country with 65 million inhabitants. 44.5% have at least one pet in their home.

In Spain during 2017 more than 40% of its citizens had at least one pet. Today there are more than 6.4 million canines in that country, with a population of 46.5 million inhabitants. The number of dogs in Spain has doubled in the last decade! These animals have practically become a plague there. Also, Spain has 20 million pets living among them.

Germany has the astounding amount of 8.6 million dogs, according to Statista data. While its inhabitants are estimated at 82.5 million.

In just 4 years, dogs probably increased in number by 3 million (there were about 5 million dogs in 2014).

In Australia it’s estimated that there are 4.2 million domestic dogs, meaning: 19 dogs per 100 residents. Argentina is the country with the highest number of dogs in Latin America: some 9 million dogs, and 63% of its inhabitants own one. Second place belongs to Ecuador.

Japan is one of the only countries in the world were the number of dogs dropped! From almost 12 million in 2010 to around 9 million in 2017. Citizens there have a more collective conscience, that is, they think and act according to the damage or inconvenience they can cause in the rest of society. People who have dogs are in general residents with a very good income who have a lot of space in their homes. They are responsible towards them and their neighbors, and they carry them with a small bottle of water to dilute the urine outdoors, just like in Switzerland. Japanese people respect animals very much and take it very serious not to mistreat them. If they don’t have time or money to take good care of them, they will not buy a dog as a pet.

Fines are high if someone leaves a dog crying at home when departing for work. Irresponsible owners can even be imprisoned. Instead, japanese are more fond of cats, of which they love their healing energy they have on humans (through cat purring). By 2017, cats in Japan even outnumbered dogs.

The numbers of dogs that I list in only some of the more than 190 countries worldwide is not at all insignificant considering that in the year 1500 the population of the whole world was not greater than 100 million. That is, today there would be more dogs than people if we were in the Middle Ages. Austria for example, had only about 2.5 million inhabitants in 1700.

In addition, there are millions and millions of dogs without a home.

In the United States alone there are at least 1.5 million of them.

The shelters in this country are filled with about 3.3 million dogs per year, half of which will be adopted by people or families who will take them into their homes. Every year, millions of cats and dogs are euthanized in animal shelters of the U.S because there are more pets than there are responsible homes for them.

Russia, with a population of 144 million people, has about

3 million stray dogs wandering in their cities, aggravated by the fact that the Russians are reluctant to sterilize these animals.

This means there are 3 fronts to combat: Millions of dogs living in neighborhoods, millions of dogs abandoned in the streets and millions of dogs on a waiting adoption list ready to keep overpopulating our residential areas, altering our peace of mind.

I wonder why in cities like London or New York they limit the number of taxis but don’t limit the number of dog owners? Of course too many taxis would increase traffic congestion substantially and reduce the income of the existent taxi drivers because of more competition.

But the same happens to us with the excessive quantity of dogs:

The more there are living next to us, the more chances we have to reduce our income due to a reduction in our productivity when they start barking and never stop, affecting badly our mental health and impacting negatively on our creativity and competitiveness.

I know that the overwhelming number of dogs in the world is comparable to the many millions of other existent species of mammals such as goats, sheep, wild dogs, horses, and so on. But all these animals live in extensive meadows and not inside our cities like dogs.

Dog owners wrongly believe that because we don’t possess a dog at home, we don’t know how wonderful these animals are in all aspects.

Nothing further from the truth, and besides they’re really covering their responsibilities as residents of a community.

The reason some people don’t have dogs is in many cases is because of the problems in having them, described in detail in Chapter 9.

And above all, probably only 1% of people in the world don’t like dogs at all. We all love them and admire their beauty and intelligence.

Many parents today surprise their kids with a small puppy they bring home, seeking their happiness and getting them a new friend to play with. But they don’t consider their loud barking once they grow up because they don’t make any noise when their are 3 months old.

And they also don’t consider other complications on having them.

There are various reasons for the increase of dogs in homes around the world, including the loneliness problem that many people needing a company are suffering. Both dogs and cats may cover that problem.

Today there’s a tremendous social breakdown in the U.S, with too many divorced people, isolated in sectors of the city where they arrive from work without having anyone near