On my way home from work last night, as the MAX train passed Pioneer Courthouse Square, I saw a guy with a beautiful German Shepherd walking beside him, and it took me a minute to realize that the dog was not on a leash. Actually, it was probably when the dude kept walking while his dog stopped to sniff something that got my attention.

Look, I don’t care how well trained your dog is (and this one was pretty good — besides the one stop-and-sniff, it walked next to him down the next block), downtown post-rush hour is not the place to be walking your dog off-leash. Like all those folks who say “oh, but I’m a great driver”, it’s not you or your dog that I’m necessarily worried about, but everyone and everything else around you. You never know when someone might be afraid of your dog or a little kid might reach out and grab a tail, causing your dog to snap at it, or when you might encounter another (even leashed) unfriendly dog coming around a corner that will affect your animal. There’s just too many unknown, out-of-your-control factors for anyone not to have as much control as they can, and that means leashing your dog, if only for its own sake.

I’m sure that there’s a law on the books of some sort in regards to this, though a quick search at Portland Online ^[1] only brings up the on/off leash rules at parks. It’d be nice to think that people would use common sense in non-park areas, but we know how well that usually works out, eh?