What an incredibly boneheaded comment. The kind that makes me worry about the future of HN.

Not only are you asking someone to literally kill an animal, something many people are de-facto not going to be comfortable with, you're knowingly recommending something I'm almost certain you know deep down isn't reasonable because it'd be a heinous overreaction, and it'd result in a mountain of paperwork and legal troubles for the commenter you replied to.

Ridiculous.

There is a dangerous animal on the loose, threatening people. The owner is failing. Public authorities are failing. Community pressure doesn't work. Killing the animal is a legal and possible option that remains. Care to point out another one instead of baseless criticism?

I get it. But this is the antithesis of Duty.

That wasn’t the point. The point is people’s illegal enjoyment of the park is actually impeding the legal enjoyment of the park by others.

Some sense of duty along the lines of “I’ll follow the rules in the park even if it inconveniences me” seems to be missing.

Maybe that and the sense of duty of the city police.

I can imagine a few reasons why a leash ordinance isn't being enforced, ranging from the relatively benign "no one has actually made a formal complaint to animal control", through the scandalous "one of the scofflaws happens to be a prominent local citizen, city official, or member of law enforcement" or " the park in question is in a poor or minority-dominated neighborhood", up to and including the entirely tragic "local law enforcement is preoccupied with a rampant violent- and property-crime wave". Most of these imagined scenarios are not mutually exclusive.

I'd bet on some combination of the above like "nobody has even made a complaint in 20 years because 'everybody knows' such complaints are ignored, but the Good Old Boys responsible for stonewalling back then have since retired".