A Little Help for Best Friends

The first annual “Take Your Dog To Work Day” turned out to be a bit of a flop. Its organizers blamed poor marketing for the fact that more workers did not bring their pooches to the office last week, transforming the dog-eat-dog business environment into a friendlier, friskier place. Employers understandably were not all that eager, either.

“Operation Dog Pack,” held the day before, fared better--for a day, anyway. A special unit of Los Angeles Animal Services officers and city police officers cast a dragnet across the northeast San Fernando Valley. In four hours, they picked up 20 stray dogs and, better still, slapped five owners with hefty leash violation citations.

Talk about two worlds: pampered pets heading off to the office versus “stray hoodlums,” as the officers called them, heading off to the pound.

Now, the dogcatcher may be the villain in cartoons--and to some animal lovers. But the problem of stray dogs in the northeast Valley is no laughing matter. Pacoima is second only to South-Central Los Angeles in the number of feral dogs roaming the neighborhoods, biting and attacking people and other dogs. They are a fraction of the 44,000 dogs Animal Services estimates roam Los Angeles streets every day.

The agency has about 50 officers, so obviously even a much-publicized one-day operation is not going to make much of a dent in the problem--except to send a message to the real villains, the irresponsible owners who neglect their dogs.

As with most problems, prevention is better than a dog pound, and Animal Services would like to send other messages besides stern warnings. It hands out vouchers for discounts on spaying and neutering. And it has asked the city for a five-year bilingual education program to preach the gospel of responsibility.

But the understaffed, underfunded agency is largely dependent on humane societies and other volunteers to do outreach. These groups talk to schoolchildren about animal care and provide mobile, low-cost spay and neuter clinics. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Los Angeles will offer a clinic Aug. 14 at the Pacoima Recreation Center from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

So dog enthusiasts shouldn’t stop with the workplace. Or, more to the point, they shouldn’t start there. There are many places where the message that dogs make good companions is urgently needed--and that the relationship works both ways.