Editor,

People love their dogs. That’s fine. Love them all you want — eat with them, sleep with them, bathe with them, bark with them, chase rabbits with them, sniff each other. I don’t care.

Please just don’t disobey the law.

My wife and I enjoy the trails on South Whidbey. One fact is clear. People with dogs all too often disobey laws regarding leashes and cleaning up their poop.

There are off-leash places on Whidbey Island. Dogs have to be under “voice control” though this often goes, it seems, something like, “Come here, Fang, Fang! Come here! Fang! Fang! Come here darn it! … I’m sorry.”

For the remaining areas, it doesn’t mean you can remove the leash after you leave the parking lot. Not even if you say to yourself, “Oh heck, nobody is going to know … or care, and besides everybody likes my dog because, heck, I do.”

Please don’t think that just because when he runs up to me and you say, “He is friendly,” that I care. The law does not state that dogs can be off leash as long as the owner says in a chipper way, “He’s friendly.”

I was attacked by two big German Shepherds last year whose owner let them loose after he left the trailhead. Fortunately, I had bear spray with me. Sadly, I had to use it on the dogs and not on the owner. These dogs would have killed a child who would have run from them.

Recently, at Saratoga Woods, a dog on a leash wouldn’t pass us. Instead, it stood there growling. Why if I go for a walk in a public park should I be subjected to a frightening growling dog?

I’m glad my young grandson wasn’t with us. He would have been terrified. Then, later, a huge German Shepherd ran up to us with the owner behind, smiling.

Keep your dogs on a leash. That’s the law. If they growl at people, then keep them at home.

And I am tired of cleaning your dog’s poop off of my shoes and seeing the bright blue poop bags left in the woods. Your mother is not going to clean up after you.

DAN GRAYBILL

Langley