Dogs Have Their Day, but Beach-Rights Stink Lingers

For the record, the lifeguards say the matter is on the beach and that they would rather not step on it, or smell it, and that they doubt that anyone else wants to either. This is why they complained to the Huntington Beach City Council that something should be done about the dogs, especially with summer coming up.

The matter we are talking about here is that kind of matter, you understand. From dogs, it is presumed.

OK, the canines do tend to hang out on “Dog Beach,” that heretofore officially unnamed strip of sand and surf between Golden West Street and Bolsa Chica State Beach, but who can blame them? Here, dogs have legal rights, which the naysayers now want to abridge .

The city’s Community Services Department, for one, wants to ban dogs from Dog Beach during the summer, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The department says this would allow lifeguards to concentrate on guarding lives, the human kind, instead of dogs.

Well. You know how dog owners are. They think this is a pretty flimsy excuse.

“Let them go to a different beach!” says Kellie Hanson of those who would deny Rebecca, her golden retriever, of her day of slopping at the shore. “I mean, look at her! How could you not love her?”

In fact, 26 dog owners, bearing signatures from more than 400 people, got huffy, weepy, angry, nice , whatever it took, to convince officialdom last week that discriminating against dogs is a flat-out dumb idea.

And . . . it worked. The council--several of them admitted dog lovers--sided with the dogs by a vote of 7-zip.

But, alas, the stink over Dog Beach lives.

There is, for example, the latest evidence, a videotape delivered Monday to Community Service Director Ron Hagen’s desk, as an anonymous “tip.” Presumably it was the cameraman who titled it “Dog and Pony Show.” Shot over the weekend, the tape shows lots of dogs frolicking unleashed, in blatant violation of the law (a potential $80 fine).

“Then the guy started shooting dog poop, counting each one as he went,” Hagen says. “I lasted seven minutes and then I fast-forwarded, so I don’t know what the final count was. I said to myself, ‘What am I doing watching this tape of a guy walking down the street counting dog piles?’ ”

Exactly. And, plus, who can really say that they were dog piles after all?

That’s what several dog owners pointed out to me on Dog Beach. Huntington Beach, they note, attracts all kinds and the better behaved are usually of the canine sort.

“ Dogs don’t leave cigarette butts and spray paint cans, and people pee all over the beach,” says Linda Besanceney, a nurse who works the night shift, thank goodness, because otherwise she wouldn’t have time to take Brandy, a St. Bernard-shepherd mix, and Tequila, a yellow Lab, to the beach.

Besanceney carries a brown sack for any matter that either Brandy or Tequila might feel inclined to deposit during their stay.

“If they poop, I pick it up,” she says.

Which, incidentally, was a statement repeated often the other night at the City Council meeting, to which Don Hagen responds, in essence, by saying “Yeah, right.” (Failing to clean up after your dog: a potential $80 fine).

“At the meeting everyone was saying that they have never seen any problems and that they, personally, always clean up after their dogs,” Hagen says.

He says that poop on Dog Beach--Orange County’s only beach that allows dogs year round, with no restriction on hours--is the biggest problem but that dog fights and dog bites are also on the list.

“We hate to be the bad guys on this,” says Hagen, currently a cat owner. Still, he adds, it is the attorneys who have gotten the city into this mess.

“If all the attorneys in the world didn’t spend their time thinking up ways to sue everybody for liability, we could have more doggie beaches,” he says.

“Blame the lawyers for everything!”

But, of course, even Hagen admits that such does not address the immediate matter at hand, or as is often the case, under foot.

Says surfer Todd Zalkins, who acknowledges illegally taking his three sheep dogs on the beach at Belmont Shore in Long Beach before the lifeguards arrive: “It’s kind of a bummer when you’re walking along with your surfboard and you step in it, you know.”

This is, in fact, a bummer experience of which responsible dog owners are aware.

“There was a poop problem, there was a trash problem,” says Carol Keener, a Buena Park housewife and mother of Mandy, a gentle but overly portly golden retriever.

Keener, instrumental in the petition drive to save the beach for the dogs, was stopping dog owners to invite them back here Saturday, April 25, for a meeting about adopting Dog Beach. The idea, endorsed by the City Council, is that dog owners should police themselves.

And Hagen, who plans on sending a representative to that meeting, thinks that would be a swell idea. Especially since the city isn’t sure what it is going to do now that the City Council has pooh-poohed his department’s idea of keeping the dogs out.

So do they enforce the beach ordinances strictly or not at all? The city types had a meeting on that just the other day, and there will be more.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do, to tell you the truth,” Hagen says. “By summer, I hope we have this figured out.”