Last month, Lynchburg Animal Control handed out a ticket for a dog left outside in freezing weather. A year earlier, there would have been no ticket . . . and no law to protect the animal. This first ticket is evidence of how a community can come together to change ordinances and to improve the lives of local animals.
–by Bunny Goodjohn
Here’s how it happened:
In 2018, a group of concerned dog people, including a few members of Central Virginia Regional Rescue, gathered at Givens Bookstore on Lakeside to discuss solutions to the problem of tethered dogs in Lynchburg. These were residents with first-hand experiences: they lived next door to animals chained 24/7; they had rescued individual dogs; they were still sickened by the news of the animal that froze to death a year earlier. They were committed to the promotion of humane and rewarding relationships between humans and their animals.
The group went on to do what many community groups do today: it shifted to an online platform and launched on Facebook as Lynchburg Action on Tethering (LAT). In early 2019, after months of planning and letter-writing, the group met at City Hall to discuss the issue and potential solutions with key players including Lynchburg Police Department, the city manager, and councilman-at-large, Beau Wright. The president of Central Virginia Regional Rescue attended as LAT’s authority on the challenges faced by tethered dogs. A few weeks later, LAT presented a proposed tethering ordinance at the monthly City Hall meeting. After discussion–both for and against–the City voted in favor of a restricted tethering ordinance, and “7-42 Tethering Restrictions” and “7-43 Leaving a Dog Outside in Extreme Weather Conditions” were written into law. The ordinances make it a class 4 misdemeanor to tether overnight or to leave an unattended dog outside for 30 minutes or longer in temperatures below 32 degrees or above 95 degrees.
Lynchburg Animal Control spent March to October educating the public on the new code. During this period, dispatchers logged twenty-eight violation calls. However, Chief Warden Ryan Ball thinks the true number of violations was probably closer to seventy-five: dispatchers were still learning how to categorize the incoming calls, and some were logged as “injured animal” or “miscellaneous – animal.”
Officers attended each call, handed out copies of the new ordinance, and advised on the ramifications of future violations. Lynchburg Animal Control issued its first ticket for a tethering violation in late October and its first extreme weather ticket in November.
As the weather turns cold, Central Virginia Regional Rescue has been in touch with Animal Control with an offer to provide straw and dog houses to anyone who needs help providing their family pets with a safe and comfortable environment. Everyone involved with the new ordinances is hoping that the 2019 holiday season will be a happier one for many of Lynchburg’s dogs.
Photo credit: Barkpost
