Police last week responded to a complaint about a dog that had been tied with a rope to a car in a parking lot off of Elm Street.
At about 12:20 p.m. on July 9, a New Canaan woman who had nearly struck the animal with her own car on entering the lot phoned police to report the illegal tethering.
Animal Control Officer Maryann Kleinschmitt said that on arriving at the scene, a local business, she noted that it was raining out (though warm) and that two cats were stretched comfortably inside the Mini Cooper to which the dog was tethered. The dog, a female Welsh terrier, had been tied with a length of rope to the rear driver’s side door of the car, Kleinschmitt said. The town resident who had first noticed it while reporting the tethering shortened the length of the rope to make it less dangerous for the animal.
When the dog’s owner, a Pound Ridge, N.Y. woman, emerged from a nearby business, Kleinschmitt explained that the animal could not be tied up that way. Asked what she was thinking, the woman responded that the animal “likes it,” Kleinschmitt recalled.
On the contrary, the dog had appeared to be extremely fearful every time a large truck rolled past on Elm Street, Kleinschmitt said.
“If that dog got out of its collar, it would be dead because it would have run into the street,” she said.
The woman promised to halt the practice of tying her dog up outside. Unlike Connecticut—whose statute specifically prohibits tethering a dog outside during inclement weather or dangerously close to a public roadway, among other places and conditions—Westchester County, N.Y. has no such law.
Kleinschmitt said she took down the woman’s information and contacted Pound Ridge Animal Control to check whether the woman’s dog was licensed. It wasn’t, and officials in Pound Ridge told Kleinschmitt they’d follow up, she said.