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Out of the dog house
Dogs are banned from housing estates all over Hong Kong. But pet lovers are biting back, says Alex Frew McMillan
Hong Kong is far from a friendly city for dog owners. You would be hard-pressed to find a park that allows you to walk your dog, one of the simple pleasures of life in big cities such as London, Sydney or New York. At the majority of Hong Kong’s beaches, officious lifeguards will chase you and your canine companion off. And people who live in public housing, as well as quite a number of private estates, are prohibited from even owning a dog at all.
“In my view, keeping a pet in one’s premises is within the right and privilege of the owner/occupant in enjoying his premises,” Deputy Judge Charles Wong stated in late 2008. He also awarded HK$8,000 in damages to dog owner Tsang Chi-ming, after finding that security guards in the complex had harassed the flat owner because he and his family kept a golden retriever, trying to get him to ditch the dog.
The case raises some interesting issues about what housing estates can bar, and how they go about it. Mei Foo’s house rules stated that ‘Dogs, cats or fowls are not allowed to be kept on any part of the estate’.
Or at least part of the estate had those rules. In fact, Mei Foo has eight incorporated owners groups for different parts of the estate, each with slightly different rules. Then the company that manages the estate, Broadway-Nassau Investments, issued guidelines on the rules – and posted a notice advising tenants that they weren’t allowed to keep dogs.
But the Deed of Mutual Covenant (DMC), which trumps any house rules, didn’t say anything about the issue. When the two sets of rules are in conflict, the DMC wins. So the anti-dog rules were overturned.
The judge in the case also decided that problems with a handful of dogs didn’t warrant a blanket ban on keeping a pet for all 50,000 residents in the complex.
“The fact that some dogs may cause nuisance to other residents is no justification for adopting a broad-brush approach in disallowing all owners to keep dogs,” Judge Wong found. The golden retriever in question was a hefty beast, weighing in at 27 kilograms, and had been the subject of a complaint from two residents. But the judge noted that one of the people who lodged a complaint, a Mrs Wong, had also complained about construction workers on the complex and had refused to ride in the lift with them.
“The dog played no part in the quarrel,” Judge Wong wrote. “I find that had there been any disorder or breach of the peace in this occasion, it was solely caused by the homo sapiens. The limited number of complaints suggests that the dog was not much of a nuisance.”
One can only hope such sentiments become more widespread in the city. All too often, the general public suffers at the hands of the few. You sprained your ankle on a country path? We’ll pave it over. A baby shark was spotted near a beach? All public water-sport facilities in Hong Kong are to be shut down. You are scared that dogs will foul your walkway or bite you? We’ll ban them.
It’s not clear where the anti-pet sentiment comes from. There are already laws on the books to punish people who don’t clean up after their dogs, as well as noise restrictions and public-safety controls if barking or biting gets out of hand. Enforcing those rules properly would solve most problems. If these are indeed issues – and it seems complaining is enough to confirm they are, without any investigation into the petty personal feuds that may be behind a complaint. The solution could be to increase the number of police or public-safety staff issuing citations for these ‘crimes’.
Instead, we ban dogs in public housing, outright. Not for actual problems, but for the mere threat of problems.
Are the complaints of a handful of people who are scared of or don’t like dogs good enough grounds to rob the dog-owning population of a simple pleasure? What if I don’t like your hobby or pastime? If enough tenants complain that children are playing too noisily or dropping ice cream around an apartment complex, should kids be banned from public housing, too?
The government has made small concessions. In 2003, it permitted tenants already living in certain public estates who already own dogs under 20 kilograms to keep their pets until they die, as long as they registered them. But the concession didn’t apply to all public-housing tenants.
There have been periodic public protests to the Housing Authority, urging it to revoke the dog ban. But it has so far refused to budge. A survey conducted last October by My Pet magazine – hardly an unbiased source, it’s true – showed that 70 percent of the respondents wanted lawmakers to review their ban on dogs in public housing estates. They also advocated access to more parks and public spaces for pets.
Private estates are normally more relaxed about pets. But not 4 always. The Mei Foo case demonstrated that you shouldn’t always believe what you read posted on the walls of private estates – you need to check the DMC to make sure whether or not you really can have pets. The victory in that case for the golden lab, Mr Tsang and his family suggests pet owners might be able to seek support from the courts in their battles to keep their pets.
Sadly, the case was settled too late to help the Tsangs – they had already left the Mei Foo apartment, where they had lived for 20 years, before they won their case. The various owner’s groups were also still considering appealing against the ruling, but decided it wasn’t worth the expense in the end.
But dog owners in Hong Kong still complain that they are harassed or shouted at in the street for walking their dogs around housing estates, even if the dogs are on the leash and the owners are ready to clean up after them. They report being told they could be fined HK$1,200 for walking their dog in an estate, or that they have to walk the dog on the bike path rather than the footpath, neither of which are true.
If they were petty, the dog owners would lodge a few letters of complaint about their antisocial neighbours. But that’s hardly the point. It’s better to let that sleeping dog lie. Ada Wong, a former chairwoman of the Wanchai District Council who supports allowing dogs in public housing, said recently that she thinks the government should show some respect to dogs and their owners.
“A harmonious society is supposed to have tolerance,” she says.
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