Kim and I were having breakfast last Sunday at Helena Avenue Bakery in Santa Barbara. In the hour or so that we were in the bakery, four people came in with their dogs — large and small — ordered food, sat at tables, and ate — with their dog either on their lap so it could grab table scraps or on the floor under the table so it could lap up fallen table scraps. None of these dogs was a service animal.
This was just our latest of many encounters with dogs in restaurants, coffee shops, and grocery stores — most often in California but in other states as well.
There are federal, state, and local laws in the U.S. — in California, the Public Health and Safety Code covers it — which prohibit dogs — or any other animals like cats or birds — from being in any business where food is stored, prepared, served, and/or sold. These laws have been on the books longer than any of us has been alive. There’s a well-founded reason: The presence of an animal poses a sanitation risk. Your dog can make others sick. Those intestinal parasites in your dog’s butt that he left in the grocery cart you put him in are now making their way to food I put in that cart that I’m using after you. The only live animal allowed in a grocery store or restaurant is a lobster in a tank before it’s cooked.
What’s going on?
Decades ago, when we traveled to Belgium, we saw dogs in restaurants there, and we mocked the Belgians for being barbarians. In those times, no American would have thought or dared to bring a dog into a restaurant or a grocery store. Americans without exception knew to leave their dogs outside in a hot car. But we’re now turning into a country of barbarians — or worse, Belgians. And while we see this most often in California, it goes on all across the country. Americans everywhere are guilty.
Of course, the United States is not the same country that it was in the 1980s, and the American people are very different as well. People’s open defiance of the law, common sense, and courtesy to the grocery store customer who will next use the grocery cart you put your dog in while shopping, is just another sign of the coarsening of our culture and our ever-expanding belief that we’re each entitled to do as we please — that we can defy any law that inconveniences us — whether it be the “phony emoluments clause” or that sign outside of Whole Foods which reads: No dogs.
Kim and I love dogs as much as anyone, and we spend our lives caring for other people’s dogs. We love the dogs and we love what we do. But we can’t imagine any circumstance under which we would for a dog’s sake take him/her into a restaurant or grocery store. There’s no dog-centered reason for them to be there. We see dogs in restaurants and grocery stores because of people — people are lazy, thoughtless, and selfish — and only getting more so. You know, things were going pretty well for the Roman Empire until citizens started taking their dogs into restaurants. A hundred years from now when historians look back on the decline of the United States from its status as a great civilization, they’ll be pointing to dogs in restaurants and grocery stores as early indicators that we became a nation going to the dogs.
Stop doing this. Leave your dogs at home. Don’t contribute the downward spiral this great country.
Mr. Beerbelly, Beerbelly
Get these dogs away from me
I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore
Paul Simon
