My children have always been brave and fearless. They wouldn’t think twice about climbing the tallest tree in any park. The only problem is they would stay up there indefinitely if so much as a shih-tzu started snuffling at the base. The fact that my kids are scared of the many dogs we encounter when we play outdoors is a small pain. But it raises interesting questions about who has priority in a public space – a dog or a child?
This debate has suddenly gone into overdrive in Tower Hamlets, east London, where we live. A consultation by the local council about imposing stricter controls on dog owners has sparked a visible rise in pro-dog activism over the past few weeks.
The consultation – which ended this month and is now under consideration – asked whether a public spaces protection order (PSPO) needs to be implemented to stop dog-related antisocial behaviour. In the consultation’s own words, it stemmed from “a recent spate of high-profile incidents involving out of control nuisance dogs and their owners”. Council data shows that 108 dog attack offences occurred in 2023-24, almost double the number in 2019-20. Under the PSPO, owners would need to keep their dogs on leads in all public spaces, there would be stricter penalties for fouling and dogs would be banned from gated play parks and sports areas – in other words, places intended for children.
Tower Hamlets council is run by a popular Muslim mayor, Lutfur Rahman, and his Aspire party. Much of the opposition to the PSPO you hear on the streets sounds a lot like, well, dog whistle. A close friend who is a dog-walker said they heard the council was proposing the order to keep dog poo away from the Whitechapel mosque. Several people I’ve chatted to in various playgrounds have riffed matter-of-factly around the idea that “Muslim people famously don’t like dogs”. After right-leaning outlets picked up the story (“Dog walkers go to war,” reported the Daily Mail thunderously), Rachel Johnson called the plans a “fatwa” – a word not often used in the context of local government.
Yet all this predictable culture-warring shamelessly ignores the fact that far too many innocent people are being attacked, hurt and killed by other people’s pets. Police reported a 21% rise in dog attacks across England and Wales in 2023, with attacks in Devon and Cornwall increasing by 51%. American XL bullies have proved to be so lethal that even the slow-to-legislate Sunak government banned them. Perhaps most galling of all, NHS figures from 2022-23 for hospital admissions after dog attacks show that children aged four or below are the most likely victims.
Dog activists tend to coalesce around the folksy and avoidant mantra: “There’s no such thing as a bad dog, only a bad owner.” A spokesperson for one of the major campaigns in Tower Hamlets, East London Dog Community, even suggested children from “cultures that may have an element of fear of dogs” should receive free school education on “how to behave” around them. Yet being scared of dogs is a perfectly legitimate feeling for a child to have. And in the worst possible extremes, no owner can stop a good dog suddenly behaving out of character, maybe because of a health complaint or a small incursion from a child.
A few days ago, an inquest at Coventry coroner’s court heard how seven-month-old baby Elle Doherty died after being attacked by her family’s dog. The “sudden and unanticipated” attack happened in less than a second – enough to cause skull fractures and a fatal cardiac arrest. There was no hint during the inquest that the family had been anything but responsible dog owners.
We know more children will die from dog attacks in 2025, but we’re not exactly clamouring for a solution. Instead of neighbourhoods campaigning for kids to be given a rare sense of priority and to establish areas that provide freedom from dogs, I live in a borough where the opposite is happening: adults are leafleting, protesting and petitioning to let dogs in effect dominate the precious green spaces we have. After a protest and a 2,500-strong petition was handed to a council meeting last week, Tower Hamlets agreed a motion to reject or significantly reduce the PSPO.
As a society, we don’t know how to talk critically about our pets. But when children become your focus, and as you try to make sense of their world, you wonder why dog owners can’t see the kids who tense up and eerily freeze whenever a dog walks into their space – like the patrons in a saloon bar when a sheriff walks in in an old western movie. Politicians have a duty of care to children in this matter. So far, all they seem to be doing is hoping that kids can hide up a tree indefinitely.
Oliver Keens is a writer, author and columnist, as well as a DJ
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