Introduction

It is commonly accepted that dog owners are responsible for their pet’s behaviour in public spaces (Dog Trust 2016). Most dog owners (itself a phrase that may be objectionable to those who seek to assign rights to non-human animals) take this responsibility seriously; some do not. This paper describes and evaluates the curious phenomenon of epistemic and ethical denial among a sub-section of dog owners via a series of case studies and systematic ethical analysis. Specifically, in seeking to deny responsibility for their dogs’ misbehaviour, some owners engage in denial of facts that they know to be true; if that strategy fails, they fall back on misrepresentation of the ethical landscape of the situation, which can even extend to victim blaming where the person harmed or inconvenienced by the dog (and its inattentive owner) is held responsible for anything untoward that has occurred.

This paper uses six main examples (and two minor ones) that take their names from parks around Glasgow where the incidents occurred. Three of the cases primarily concern epistemic denial and three denial of moral responsibility, though the former cases all also feature the latter (see Table 1 for summary). All of the data used in the following analysis was obtained first-hand or second-hand from close family members who consented to their descriptions being shared. An important initial caveat is that when the facts are contested, there is a possibility of bias, and it remains possible that the representation of these cases may be coloured by my ethical assessment of them. However, the reader will have to take it on trust that I have endeavoured to be as impartial as possible in describing these situations, as should be clear from the objective and self-questioning nature of the case descriptions.

Table 1 Epistemic and ethical denial in the eight cases
Full size table

Epistemic Denial

The first time I encountered a dog owner engaging in seemingly indefensible epistemic denial was almost a decade ago, but I remember it very clearly as I had never before (or since) seen someone so blatantly ignore facts that should have been utterly incontestable. I was with my son, who was a toddler of about eighteen months. He was toddling up a hill in the park when a small dog ran over and stopped in front of him. My son was a little anxious but I told him to stay still. It then jumped up and placed both its paws on his chest until he stepped away. The dog looked like it was about to jump up again, so I asked the owner to keep the dog away as it had jumped up at my son, and he replied, very angrily: “it never touched him.” This was despite the fact that all of this had happened when he was at most twenty feet away and was looking at us with an unobstructed view. I replied that it clearly had done so, but he repeated the denial quite violently, despite being accompanied by his wife and small child. So I picked up my son and walked away, as the dog owner muttered to himself behind us.

This was not a serious incident by any means—my son was not injured and the dog was small—but it was still rather disturbing. I hadn’t accused the owner of anything, though his dog should have been on a lead or under close control according to local council park rules; I had merely asked him to keep his dog away from a very young child who was afraid of it. The park rules in question (for both this and the following cases) state that “the owner or person in charge of such animal shall keep it under close control or on a short lead … All animals brought in to a Public Park must not be permitted to annoy other users of a Public Park” (South Lanarkshire 2017, ¶5.1) (Of course, even if a dog is under control to some extent, barking can still scare children. And if it’s not on a lead, shouting—often very loud shouting if the dog is far away—is required to keep them under control, further harming the park environment for others. In such cases it is difficult to argue that the dog is indeed under “close” control.)

Of course, this owner could have said “it’s only playing” or “it wouldn’t harm anyone,” but that is a different conversation (see below) and in any case he didn’t; he simply baldly denied the facts of the matter, turning my simple request into an argument about what had actually occurred and effectively saying I was crying wolf (no pun intended). One remote possibility is that from his angle it looked as if his dog never made any contact with my son, but given his clear line of sight and the fact that it leaned against my son for several seconds this seems very unlikely (and it would be extremely hypocritical to engage in epistemic denial if he didn’t get a good look.) Furthermore, even if he was right and I wrong about the facts of the matter, the key point was that I was asking him to keep his dog under control and away from us. I consider other potential reasons for his response in the following sections.

At the time I thought that this type of odd occurrence would never happen again, but I was wrong. At the start of the first coronavirus lockdown in Spring 2020, we had gone to our local park for a play, and within ten minutes, three different dogs that were out of control came running over and jumped up at our children. Two of the owners immediately apologized and put them back on the leads; the third didn’t. His dog had run over to my four-year-old daughter, tried to jump at her, and when she cried out and stepped back started running in rings around her until I chased it off. By this point she was crying. I said to the owner; “please keep your dog under control” and he said (missing the point in at least two senses) “the dog isn’t upsetting anyone.” Amazed at this blatant misrepresentation of reality, I replied “it upset her, she’s crying.”

His argument then shifted to “there’s no need for her to be upset, he was just playing.” Here, it appeared that the disagreement was not about physical facts but emotional ones. Faced with a child who was clearly crying, the owner’s claim rapidly (and perhaps immediately) shifted from “no one’s upset” to “no one needs to be upset because of my dog.” In other words, when his attempt to claim no failure to fulfil an ethical responsibility via epistemic denial of physical facts failed, he immediately shifted it (unless that was what he meant from the outset) to epistemic denial of emotional facts; my daughter was not upset by his dog because it wasn’t doing anything wrong, so any upset was her own fault. As well as aiming at deflection of ethical responsibility, this also edges his response into gaslighting; even though his dog should have been on a lead or under close control, it is my daughter’s fault for not realising that the dog posed no threat. Of course, she didn’t know the dog, and even if she did it seems rather epistemically optimistic to claim that the dog would never hurt anyone; after all, no dog that hurts anyone has ever done so before they do. Perhaps realizing the weakness of his arguments, he withdrew with his dog to some distance, pausing only to advise another dog owner not to put her dog on its lead when it was hassling our kids. A similar case occurred when my father-in-law had my nephew in Newlands Park and a dog bounded over towards him, making him fall in fright; when challenged, the owner replied “the dog was only playing and wouldn’t have hurt him,” and when told that they child couldn’t have known that remained unapologetic.

Ethical Denial

While epistemic denial is a particularly striking phenomenon, it is really just one strategy for avoiding attribution of responsibility for harming or inconveniencing others. If successful, denying the facts shuts down all further conversation by changing the nature of the complaint and making the complainer seem like a liar. But if, as was not the case in the first example, the first epistemic gambit fails, other options are available. We have already seen that disputing the nature of the moral facts of the matter, frequently in order to victim-blame, is the next strategy; the dog meant no harm and children should know that and thus it is the child’s fault—or the adult’s. But often children are not involved and it is purely a matter for grown-ups, even if it can be handled rather childishly. Here is an eyewitness—or rather, a victim—account of what occurred recently in the same park as the previous case.

A dog ran up to me, I sort of reversed but it kept coming then jumped up on me. I was more concerned about its muddy paws on my coat! So of course I was telling the dog to go as was John. The dog owner was chatting with a group of people when she heard us and turned and called the dog off. I was looking down at my muddy coat and she made a jokey comment about those are the hazards of walking in the park. I said that walking in the park shouldn’t be a hazard for me. She then asked if I wanted her to do something about the coat. When I said no just to keep the dog from jumping up on people! She was a bit annoyed and said she didn’t see that it was doing that as she was chatting to friends. And that was that! Not very dramatic but a bit of ill feeling.

Here there was no initial attempt at epistemic denial; the only knowledge claim made was in fact that it was not the owner’s fault that the dog dirtied my mother-in-law’s jacket because she was not paying attention. Why the owner thought that ignorance of one’s dog’s actions might constitute an excuse for its annoying others remains unclear; again, dogs are meant to be on a lead or under close control, so admitting that one had no idea what the dog was doing is the opposite of an excuse. In effect, this owner was saying “I didn’t know that my dog wasn’t under control!”

The other attempt at deflection from responsibility in this example was the semi-joking remark that anyone walking in a park runs the risk of being muddied by a mutt. Here we have yet another attempt at victim-blaming; it’s your fault for erroneously saying this is wrong, in fact what happened to you is appropriate to the setting. Of course, in this case this quasi-excuse was rather undermined both by the fact that the rules for the park setting specifically rule out such muddying and by the following implication that had she seen what her dog was doing she would have called it off. Although it is rather too anecdotal, being third-hand, my mother-in-law also relayed another tale of false claims about the anticipated risks of leisure environments:

Our friends were walking up Gleniffer Braes last year when a large dog ran over to them and was bounding round them which made them feel uncomfortable so when the dog owner appeared they asked him to call the dog off. The dog owner said that this was a place where dog owners walked their dogs and if they didn’t like dogs they shouldn’t be walking there. They were astounded, thought he was completely arrogant—spoiled their walk.

Here there was no attempt at humour: the walkers were told that if they didn’t like dogs then they shouldn’t be walking in the countryside. This is a quite different sort of false claim. While it is true that many country parks differ from city parks in that dogs may not be required to be on a lead or under close control, owners should (presumably) still stop their dogs from annoying other people, particularly if those people make a specific request.

This particular case also highlights another important point about people being bothered by dogs; it’s not merely the annoyance of the bothersome dog itself but also the fact that a presumably otherwise peaceful walk in a natural setting is disrupted and spoiled. In this sense, the harm of the bothersome dog is not limited to the encounter itself; it also lingers afterwards and indeed can also precede the encounter if the person involved is worried that something like this is about to happen.

Lurking in the background of all the cases so far is the possibility that a dog might actually go further than scaring a child or muddying clothing; dogs sometimes, if rarely, attack people, and children often find them scary (indeed, it has been suggested to me that it’s my fault that my kids don’t like dogs; even though they actually do). But even if they do not intend to harm a human, dogs can pause a threat, as a third case in the same local park shows. This case was described on a local group page on Facebook. A mother and her child, who was eating a snack, were walking past the top gate of the park when a dog bolted out of the park and jumped up trying to get the food, nearly knocking the boy into the busy road. When the owner was confronted, he resorted immediately to victim blaming, with perhaps the most ludicrous claim yet: “if he’s eating he should be sitting at a table.” This is a completely inappropriate response to a potentially deadly incident involving a dog that was out of control in (and then outside) a park where it should have been on a lead.

It is perhaps the conscious and unconscious fear that a dog might hurt or distress my children that motivated me to explore this topic; being a responsible parent obviously involves protecting your children from harm, and when poor reasons are offered in justification of bad owner/dog behaviour, it makes that behaviour all the more annoying. Perhaps the worst example of gaslighting occurred in the next case, when my kids and I were walking in Calder Glen, a country (rather than city) park. The boys, who are bigger, were a few feet ahead of me; my daughter, who is the smallest, was perhaps ten feet behind me when I heard her scream. I turned, already assuming a dog was involved; two large dogs had indeed run right past her on the narrow path, almost forcing her off it. Their owner came running past a few seconds later; when I suggested that the dogs should be under closer control, he shouted back over his shoulder (he hadn’t stopped running or removed his earphones): “you should be a responsible parent.” Now, it is true that I could perhaps have been standing closer to my daughter. But had the dogs run past me they would have been passing her before I had any chance to warn her. Or perhaps he meant what another owner suggested in the second case; a responsible parent would teach his kids not to get a fright when two large animals appear from nowhere and push past them. But that’s clearly nonsense: it makes sense to be concerned if something like that happens. More to the point, a runner who is wearing earphones and is out of sight of his dogs cannot have them under any sort of control, is putting other people at risk, and given that he was out of sight seems in no position to lecture me in responsible behaviour. That, at least, is what I tell myself, though there is always the possibility that I may be mistaken.

Finally, a similar case of gaslighting occurred recently on the school run. Walking home over the pedestrian railway bridge, a father was escorting his daughter home by walking two feet in front of her and dragging a dog on a lead even further behind him. We were a few feet behind it. The father and daughter turned the corner at the bottom of the bridge; we kept walking but I began to slow down as the dog raised its leg against the wall on the right. It proceeded to urinate against the wall and I barely managed to stop my daughter before she walked into the wet zone. I asked the owner to please not let his dog pee on my daughter. His response, angrily delivered, was “it’s a dog, what do you want me to do?” This is perhaps the perfect example of gaslighting by a dog owner; there can be no moral responsibility as dogs can do no wrong. Somewhat stunned by this utter abdication of responsibility—itself compounded by the fact that he wouldn’t know what his dog had done if I hadn’t told him—I decided to pretend that it wasn’t an attempt at a rhetorical question and replied “not take it on the school run.” Now, it is true that dogs are known for peeing against walls, but letting one’s dog do that—indeed, not even letting it but also remaining unaware that it is happening—on the school run when there are lots of little children around scarcely seems reasonable. (Prior to the pee incident the dog had already been barking loudly outside the school gates and on the bridge I had noticed that the lead was dragging on the ground, posing a potential trip hazard.)

Potential Explanations

Why do some dog owners deny what their dog has done, claim that what they did was not harmful, and engage in victim blaming and gaslighting? It might be thought that it’s because of the way I talk to them, but I always try to be polite even though the situation often involves an upset child. One explanation is that they feel defensive and the easiest defence is to deny that anything in need of a defence occurred. Yet parents whose children hurt someone else’s only rarely resort to sheer denial of the facts or victim blaming, so why should it be different for dog owners? Perhaps the reason they feel defensive is because they have some degree of paranoia about being accused of having a dangerous dog.

More likely is the explanation that they want to relax with their dogs and don’t care about the inconvenience or distress doing so can cause others—even if it’s against the rules. Special pleading can also occur; in another case in Calder Glen, when a dog annoyed the kids and I said it should be on a lead the owners said “it’s a puppy and has to be off the lead”—a claim that the rules don’t apply to them. Of course, it is possible that many dog owners are unaware that they are required to keep their dogs on a lead or under close control, but they must be aware of the general requirement to stop dogs annoying others.

In fact, the requirement to keep dogs on a lead or under close control may be central to dog owners’ epistemic and ethical denial. By claiming that the dog did not touch anyone, or that the child should have known it was safe, then the owner was not at fault, goes the argument; by implication, that means that the dog was under close control, and the owner could and would have stopped the dog if, for example, the owner had known that the child was one of those silly ones who don’t realize that all dogs are safe without exception. By denying that the dog did anything wrong, or that the child and associated adult should have known that the dog was safe, the owner—consciously or unconsciously—is implying that he was in fact conforming with the close control rule.

Of course, this interpretation may be too charitable; it is perfectly reasonable for children and adults to prefer not to have a dog jumping up at them, and also perfectly reasonable to suggest that any such dog is not under close control. In a sense, this attempted defence of dog owners relies upon them being spectacularly optimistic that their dog will not annoy anyone, and that if it does then the people being potentially annoyed or scared will either “know” that all dogs are safe (itself potentially fatally optimistic) or intuitively recognize that this particular dog is one of the good guys (possibly until it bites them). Indeed, some dog owners seem to think that any dog that does not kill or at least bite anyone is by definition under close control. And of course, the implied claim that the owner would have used his mastery of close control to stop the dog doing what it had done if only he had known more facts about the peculiarities of other park users is also rather optimistic and can of course not be tested after the fact.

Another important point to mention is that the dogs in these examples were not being aggressive; they generally seemed friendly or disinterested. Thus, my description of the cases described in this paper should not be affected by the bias identified by Meyer et al. (2014) whereby people who have not owned a dog or have lower levels of empathy with animals perceive them as being more aggressive than people who have (and in any case I empathize with animals quite highly). However, it is also worth noting that some evidence suggests that dog owners are actually less reliable at identifying the emotional states of dogs than non-owners, perhaps suggesting that some level of bias affects their interpretations of dog behaviour, leading to over-defensiveness (Demirbas et al. 2016). Ultimately, dog owner’s attempts at ethical and epistemic denial may themselves be rooted in denial of key empirical facts about dogs; they prefer to rely on the anecdotal experience of their own dog and of dog-adoring children and adults to the actual evidence that many dogs are dangerous or badly behaved and that many children are terrified of them.

Finally, another potential explanation may lie in the advice given by insurers to dog owners. Generally, those taking out third party liability dog insurance are advised by insurance companies not to admit any wrongdoing. This may be motivated by the fact that insurers only need to pay out if legal liability is established, which is much more likely if there is an admission of guilt. Such insurance is normally taken out in case of injury caused by a dog, but this encouragement to deny responsibility in serious cases may also spill over into more innocuous cases where dogs have annoyed other users of public spaces. One provider states that “Owners are usually considered legally liable for accidents and injuries if their pet has shown the same kind of behaviour before, but they have not taken steps to prevent it happening again” (Petplan 2022, ¶4). This means that denying lower level behaviour can also be helpful in the event of a future claim; helpful to dog owners, at least, even if it is extremely unhelpful to those affected by such denials.

Conclusion

In the context of public health ethics, relational autonomy holds that “persons are inherently social and politically and economically situated beings, raised in social settings, who learn to develop their interests and values in conversation with other social and politically and economically situated beings” (Baylis et al. 2008, 22; see also Donchin 2001). The blinkered behaviour of some dog owners in public spaces can be seen as violating the relational autonomy of other people who seek to use the park and countryside.

Responsible dog owners keep their dogs on a lead, clean up their mess and don’t let them annoy others. Irresponsible owners leave their pets’ excrement behind for people to stand in, let their dogs off the lead, and if challenged that their dog is annoying someone deny they’ve done anything or if epistemic denial fails switch to ethical denial, claiming that they might have done something but not anything wrong. This amounts to an attempt to dominate the public space in a way that is incompatible with relational autonomy.

This paper has offered an initial exploration of this epistemic indefensibility and ethical irresponsibility. Epistemic denial involves obviation of responsibility by refusal to admit commonly perceived facts of the situation; victim blaming and denial of responsibility rely on false epistemic claims about ethical facts. Whether one’s dog is under control in a public space cannot be determined by biased subjective interpretation of the physical and ethical facts of the matter, and only if they recognize this will this problematic subset of dog owners begin to treat other park users with the respect that they deserve.