Alison Wrabel at the Daily Progress reports
Dogs are now prohibited from running at large — not on a leash or lead — in Albemarle County.
You know, like on the Crozet Trails System.
Keep your Dogs on Leash. It’s Nice, and the Law
Crozet's community blog
Long overdue. Enforcement will be difficult.
I was trying to research the law for dogs with regards to electric fences in a compact neighborhoods in Crozet, and came across this. Seems like a good enough place to vent about the non-containment situation in our neighborhood. There is a neighbor who has their whole yard encompassed by an electric fence. The issue is, they are a corner yard, so two sides of the yard have sidewalk around it and their fence appears to go ALL the way up to the sidewalk (either that or their dogs ignore it and go all the way up to the sidewalk anyway). It ends up meaning that literally every time I walk by their yard, with or without my dog (who is always on a leash) – I have to try to look ahead and see if their dogs are out so I can then cross the street, twice, to go out of my way around that house. However, the dogs are usually hidden on the porch behind bushes blocking view of the dogs, so what ends up happening is that the dogs just come charging out towards the sidewalk while barking aggressively. In which case, I then need to jump out of the sidewalk into the road, if I’m with my dog. Even if I’m not with my dog, it scares me every time (which isn’t great since I have heart issues). Some municipalities have laws that state that electric fences do not constitute dog containment (as they are not actually a fence) and I’m trying to figure out if that’s the case in Crozet. The people are never out there with their dogs, so the dogs are always unsupervised… I’m just waiting for those dogs to 1. Bite someone, 2. Get hurt by another dog who’s on the public sidewalk but bites due to the fact that they were charged at aggressively, or 3. The charging dogs knock someone into the road while a car is coming…
Electric fences are not fences – any dog, given the right context, will run through them, they do not keep your dogs protected either. At minimum these people should not have put the fence all the way up to sidewalks on two roads in a neighborhood… they could have been set back a few feet to avoid people needing to go out into the road to avoid those dogs.
Even their package deliveries are left at the foot of their walkway that intersects with the sidewalk because the folks making deliveries cannot even get to the porch because of the dogs. It’s just blatantly ignoring the fact that they don’t live out in the country. They live in a neighborhood…. With neighbors, who would sometimes like to use the sidewalks…