![]() Yet dogs, the world’s most abundant carnivores, exert immense impacts in their own right. Read: There’s something odd about the dogs living at Chernobyl Dogs, however, would vanish alongside their people, unable to survive without their twice-daily bowl of kibble. (Does a shih tzu really strike terror in any animal?) In his book The World Without Us, the author Alan Weisman postulated that, should humankind abruptly disappear, cats would fare just fine. Dogs, by contrast, seem more goofy than lethal, hilariously distant from their wolfish origins. Whether feral or free range, cats are swift, silent assassins a 2013 estimate found that they are responsible for the death of up to 4 billion birds and 22 billion mammals each year in the United States alone. When we think about destructive pets, cats come first to mind. The dogs, of course, are just being dogs. They’re us-and our mastiff-size blind spots around our furry family members. But although our pets are the nominal causes of these conflicts, the real culprits aren’t Akitas or Airedales. ![]() After politicians enacted a partial dog ban on one Australian beach, aggrieved pet owners claimed that they’d become “criminals in own backyards.” Other people gripe that even strict laws are rarely enforced: In San Diego, where beach dogs are subject to a passel of regulations, vigilantes seem to take perverse pleasure in videotaping scofflaws. But limiting when and where our mutts can move invites controversy. In response to these harms, coastal managers have implemented leash laws, seasonal restrictions, and even outright dog bans. They save some of their worst harms for shorebirds, killing chicks, crushing eggs, and forcing migrating birds to burn more calories than they can spare. Dogs have been known to maul seal pups, outcompete native scavengers for dead fish, and dig up turtle nests. A growing body of literature suggests that Canis lupus familiaris has become a significant force of disturbance along the world’s shorelines-not just the packs of feral dogs that roam some less regulated shores but also the domestic pooches whose well-meaning owners, like me, turn them loose for a romp in the sand. In that, Kit wasn’t alone-many dogs love the beach. She looked happy she looked free she looked right. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead, washed-up thing. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. ![]() I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. Our brief time in California, we realized, might be Kit’s first and last chance to lay her protuberant eyes upon the sea. Now we were moving to another inland environment-Colorado-via a circuitous road trip that took us through San Francisco. For most of that time, we’d cohabited with Kit, an affectionate piebald mutt we’d adopted from a local shelter. My wife and I had spent the past three years in eastern Washington State, a region landlocked by hundreds of kilometers of forests, sagebrush, and wheat fields. Kit saw the ocean for the first time on an iron-skied February afternoon. This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine.
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