It feels like something is going wrong here in your connecting a dog being off a leash with somehow empathy for the dog.

I read your impulse to act here as your mind being hijacked by the sign-maker to conscript you into their preferred system of rules.

Evaluate all signs, rules, commands in just the same way you evaluate the most average sort of person reading these things out in front of you. Who are you? Why? What do you want? and so on

For this reason using a leash is not only a recommendation on a sign but the law in many locales.

I've no objection to the rule. My issue is with how the rule is being interpreted. If someone were to ask, 'please keep a leash on' i'd expect people to be polite enough to do so.

But that's the gravity of the situation here. In almost no universe is the guy we're talking about one of these fringe youtube dog owners you're having some fantasy about.

This is the problem with these abstractions: they invite people to have fantasies of catastrophe rather than engage with the reality in front of them

And what are these fantasy scenarios but just another mechanism by which a brutal system of values comes to be imposed?

Consider the police coming out here and enforcing such a value on this guy walking his dog. Concretely, which is worse: police discipline or a dog in a park ?

- Hospital episode data for England also reveal an upward trend in the number of attendances for dog related injuries in the past 15 years. There has been an 88% increase in attendances, from 4699 in 2007 to 8819 in 2021-22.

- BBC News - Dog attacks: 34% increase recorded by police in England and Wales (2023). Last year, there were nearly 22,000 cases of out-of-control dogs causing injury. In 2018, there were just over 16,000.

But hey, you weren't a witness to any of this, so I'm sure it never happens. If you are trolling well played. You might as well argue we don't need seatbelt laws since you've never been in a crash.

My point is about the role of such signs and rules in policing people's behaviour in the abstract.

If, in the situation so-described, the owner and their dog were in any way an actual danger, then they should be reprimanded. If they werent, then let's observe that they werent.

56 fatal dog attacks in a decade is perhaps lower than what i would have guessed anyway. I would have bet higher.

I just dont see why when invited to imagine that on some sunny day in a park, a person walking their dog without a leash, is precipitating the 57th death. This is absurd.

Removing all the information from the situation and reducing down to a fantasy of possible violence is the pretence here for 'preventing harm'. This prevents no harm in the particular situation involved.

I have no doubt dogs are dangerous, as is almost everything. I have extreme levels of doubt that some random guy in a park with a dog off a leash has anything to do with any marginal changes to the safety of people in that park.

My concern is how this snowballs in people's imaginations away from the concrete reality into some abstraction where there are victims involved.

But it’s irrelevant. Because you’re just thinking about people being in danger and not the dog being in danger or not if it is disturb the other animals that also have at the park like the squirrels in the birds.

You’re only seeing the dog owner as the victim in the circumstance.

And all that doesn’t matter either, because we as a community created this rule, this law, that your dog needs to be on a leash went in this park. If you don’t like the law, you could push to overturn the law. Or if you don’t like the law, you can move to a place that doesn’t have these laws.

We have decided that the risk of even a slight chance of a dog hurting someone is more important than the slight inconvenience of someone having a dog on a leash. Of all people you in data science should understand risk benefit. What is the harm of a dog being on a leash?

It's about people who deputise themselves in the service of these rules, and who imagine risk, and appoint themselves enforces of a social order of values that is insensitive to particulars.

There are many things I dislike, take littering. I would find it very obnoxious for a person to litter in a park, and to ignore the signs against it.

But I feel no compulsion to go discipline them, or involve myself in their disciplining, or deputise myself as a member of some social police force. Were they to be murdering someone, that would be different.

I am not a person who 'thinks of the children', quite the opposite. I think of a world designed for children, and would then go out of my way to destroy it.

I am unsympathetic with these 'daily oppressions' which constrain people's lived freedom, in the service of radical abstractions with marginal effects; the service of imagined dangers, and the like.

I would much prefer a society in which people occasionally littered to one in which no one dead out of fear of some reprisal.

The problem with "what's the harm" thinking is its aggregation. When you have disciplined people's daily lives to that degree where all these "what's the harm"-level rules are in operation -- then you're living in a nightmare.

It is for this reason I took against ever living in america. Where 'neighbourly policing' seems everywhere; and 'city bylaws' run amok

There is no magical effect of some cadre of people trying to enforce some silliness onto the general public, there's a reason behind these laws.

I'd prefer to visit a park with unleashed dogs than one where busy-bodies were constantly on the look out for rule violations.

The second one feels more unsafe to me; more repulsive; more invasive.

A busy-body is a much worse creature than a dog

She turns and says "please get away from me" in a way that made it obvious she was irrationally fearful, no idea why but I can guess. Most people would not have reacted in that manner.

My point is this: Go tell the victims of dog attacks they're being busy-bodies by wanting dogs leashed in the park.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, this is about unleashed animals in the park. It's not about trees, it's not about weapons (although most parks also have prohibitions against weapons), or teenagers. It's about dogs and why people want them to be leashed.

Joel Spoelsky coined a term years ago, architecture astronaut.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

> These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts.

It's kind of like those people who didn't believe covid existed until their family members started dying of it. It's really easy to hold such views when the idea of a dog attacking is an abstract idea. When there isn't a real understanding of the level of danger an attacking dog has.

What I'm saying is that you're holding this opinion due to your ignorance.

Some people clearly want to walk their dogs without leashes. Some people want all dogs leashed. Now, what's the moral standard at work? How do you determine the level of danger?

If you want to constrain people, limit their ability to lives their lives as they wish, you need to have an answer you can defend without bias or prejudice. That you don't like unleashed dogs cannot be grounds for limiting another; there has to be more than your mere preference.

To separate out people disguising their irrational fear from a genuine moral position, one needs to establish that moral position. 'Whatabout' here applies exactly, in moral philosophy its called casuistry: arguing from cases.

So if your moral position is that at a certain level of risk, one must put up signs and start socially policing people -- then ok, let's hear it: what level of risk? what's the principle at work here? (Or does your mind leap to imagined danger in one case, but not another: are you a bigot?).

My view is that I want to live in a society much more tolerant to risk for the sake of avoiding social policing. I dont want to go to parks where people are 'watching out for rule breakers'.

You, presumably, want to live in that society? This is the question.

If you do, so be it. I am not taking a stand against leash laws one way or another. I'm taking issue with a particular mechanism of enforcement of social rules by which emotional busy-bodies go around clutching their pearls and calling the police.

The issue of dog leashes is just one trivial example of this general phenomenon -- and it is this that I am talking about. I have no care whatsoever about what the law should be in the matters of dog leashing.

I gather people in this thread are unable or unwilling to engage in the argument I am making which is at one level of abstraction above the issue around dog leads.

> Was babysitting a family members Pit Bull mix. Her family believes the fatal attack occurred while attempting to stop a fight between the Pit Bull and her 2 Chihuahuas.

...

> Bitten by the family dog while playing outside with adult supervision, later died in hospital.

...

> Was at home to check on his daughters dogs when they attacked him.

...

> A 6-year-old boy was killed by the family dog, a pit bull mix; the boy was severely injured and died in hospital the next day.

---

this isn't abstract or theoretical, this is reality. These are dogs that killed _family members_ in 2023, the list of dogs that injured _people_ is much larger.

The signs aren't abstract and the people who put them up aren't doing them for abstract reasons, but for some reason you want this to be an abstract debate while at the same time complaining that the signs were put up.

That's not how it works.

The question is whether a particular person, in a particular park, on a particular day, with a particular dog is causing that situation. It is an absurd level of paranoia to suppose they are.

Dogs kill people. People kill people. Everything is harmful to someone at somepoint.

The question is whether we should go around replaying 6olds dying by dogs in our heads when we're wandering around in a park.

I think we shouldnt. And it is a moral and psychological sickness to do so.

That you're still only able to evaluate my position in terms of the saftey of dogs tells me you have not understood it and are making no efforts to.

It seems like you're arguing in bad faith, perhaps because you usually deal with people you can brow-beat into losing arguments by appealing to extreme cases.

You can point to all the murdered children you want; that isn't going to work with me. I'm not an idiot.

At that on one particular 4-way with that one particular car with that one particular driver, they successfully ran a red light without causing an accident, therefore, we should all just ignore stop lights because they're an authoritarian construct designed to cow us into submission.

Or perhaps it's those authoritarian posters telling young people to use condoms. Because in that one particular bed in that one particular house with that one particular young couple they had unprotected sex without transmitting any STDs or getting pregnant, therefore we can conclude that signage telling people to use condoms is purely a social construct with no long term real world consequences.

But by all means Don Quixote, you keep fighting the good fight.

Perhaps it's my inclination against speciesism, and my seeing people much closer to dogs than not -- but I think the regulation of the behaviour of animals, against their natures, is a moral matter.

A convention around how to drive isnt.

As far as STDs go, again: no idiotic blanket rules, indeed. Morality occurs in the negotiation between people in particular circumstances.

Sometimes not wearing a condom is exactly what one should do -- if one wishes, one's partner wishes, and one thinks that this sort of intimate sex is more interesting -- and a core part of a life worth living.

I fear greatly the life painted by how regulated people "ought" be in these trivial matters: how they walk their dogs, how they have sex, and so on. This is very far away from a life which any human animal ought live. It's a life full of petty regulations on behaviour to create the illusion of a safe world.

An illusion which comes at an extremely heavy price: that of enjoying life. A cost I do not want to pay.

That has life-changing consequences, and yet here you are waxing on about the morality of placing a leash on a dog.

Are you sure the issue isn't that you dislike people?

Imagine for a moment a person like you, with your impulse to constrain and regulate, was in charge of you

Imagine they did not agree with how you should live your life

What then, would you say to them?

For any issue they wil have their data about marginal changes to safety

You want to do X? why, 0.y% of times X happens, bad things happen!

this is a universal feature of life, and so any idiot can appeal to it

now what do you say to this overbearing regulator of your enjoyment? this person who denies you what you wish to do?

i cannot imagine you are so naive to suppose that what you enjoy is unimpeachably safe

i don't think you have anything to say

rather i read this line of thinking as just moral hypocrisy: you allow yourself to enjoy whatever it is you enjoy, despite these marginal risks -- but when you get no enjoyment from it --- Ah! well then it can be banned

It's about whether the appropriate response to rare events of danger, imagined in abstract circumstances, should be met with 'fantasy compassion' where people go around policing each other.

An unleashed dog in a park is safe as people in the park, indeed, much more so. More people are attacked by other people in parks than by dogs.

If we're going to police society to this level, it'll be a nightmare.

If there's a dangerous person in the park: call the police. Likewise if there's a dangerous dog.

I find it a certain moral sickness to go around in a fantasy that people are all dangerous, or likewise dogs are, or anything else. This is just some internal emotional licence to appoint yourself a police officer.

In the comment i replied to above: why was that woman afraid? Because of a dog? No. She reacted to another person. Another person hurt her.

People are dangerous. I guess we should have a sign 'no people in the park' -- then we can really enjoy it

It was about dogs.

As far as the topic goes, the topic is about how emotional disregulation in autistic people can lead to feelings of injustice and concequentially hostile behaviour.

Dogs and their owners are just an illustrative case.

I classify it into three tribes, using neutral language: the organisers, the dreamers and the demystifies.

Organising autistic people are highly conscientious, motivated by (often disregulated) compassion, rule-imposing, morality is quite personal and imposing, etc. -- board games, civil service, etc. They feel controlled by others having too much freedom, their unexpected behaviour makes them feel unsafe.

The dreamers do not follow any rules, create rich fantasy worlds, like fiction, like high moral principles -- morality is monkish, self-imposing, sacrificial. They feel controlled by too much detail, too many tasks -- they want to live in a removed space.

The demystifiers are ultra pragmatists in many areas (but not all), like non-fiction, are suspicious of 'moral formulas', are suspicious of fantasy, and so on. They feel controlled by others trying to define the bounds of acceptable behaviour. They want to live in a space where everyone is maximally accepted for their invidual preferences.

We're all mixtures, but I find I cannot abide people of the first tribe -- and my friends belong to the other two. That I also have ADHD means I tend to sit across the latter two, depending on the area.

But in general, i'm ruthelessly sceptical of the imaginary worlds people create to make meaning in the world; very sceptical of abstraction in morality; very sceptical of lack of abstraction in philosophy; and so on.

In otherwords, i'm very sceptical of certain emotions (compassion, wonder, ...) and very fond of others (irony, say, esp.).

I think having ADHD also makes you more likely to be in the latter two tribes -- i think the classical popular presentation of autistic personalities lie much more in the first category.

I’m not sure the reason behind the rise, but my anecdotal experience is that people are more likely now to keep their dog on a lead than they were in the past.

We have seen a rise in poorly bred and poorly socialised large breed dogs over the past few decades, the latest being the XL Bully. My guess is they are contributing significantly to the rise in attacks.

Also speaking as someone who always keeps their dog on a lead in parks, the lead is really more of a suggestion for a big dog. If a Bully, Doberman or even a Husky wants to attack, a lead won’t stop it.

That is how the country is run.

You can, if you so wish, steal from peoples houses with impunity. The crime will very rarely be investigated, you're unlikely to be caught, etc.

This system of black/white rules that you perceive exists, does not. This misperception lies at the origin of what's trigged your impulse to imagine some threat (which then triggers compassion).

Rather social reality comprises a series of negotiations whose moral content lies in how that delicate interaction takes place. Reducing this down to a chessboard-like system with presumed violent enforcement is itself immoral. It deprives people from living in this negotiated space where morality can take place.

In general, someone breaking into a house is a present dangerous and serious threat. On that basis I would call the police, etc.

If someone opened the door, saw a mobile, grabbed it and ran off -- then i'd maybe leave a note with the neighbor

You know what also doesn't care about the rules of ordered society and the potentially deadly consequences of breaking them? Animals.

Disagree? Only a fool spitting into the wind would permit me to unleash my seemingly subservient Dobermann into the "reality" of instinct for just a minute while we had that hot debate in a public park. I care about its life---and the lives of peaceful strangers there to also enjoy the public space, and the lives of birds making a pitstop on a long migratory journey, and the lives of squirrels that call a resident tree home, and even your life when you decide to raise your voice in a way that may or may not be perceived as threatening---to recognize the unabashed arrogance of doing so.

That's the empathy perspective you're missing.

The leash in public areas is to be able to control your dog. If you want your dog off of the leash go to private property or a dog park where a gated leashless area exists for those willing to assume the risk.

I've seen military trained dogs with training worth tens of thousands of dollars disobey orders. I simply do not care how well trained people think their dogs are.

Most adult dogs are not OK with being approached by other dogs they don't know. This is absolutely fine so long as all dogs are leashed, and so long as unleashed dogs are limited to private property and to dog parks (you can just not take your dog there if it doesn't like other dogs).

But then some jackass lets their dog loose in a place when you walking your dog on a leash ("It's OK! My dog is good with other dogs!" they shout while running after their dog making a beeline for yours). It gets in your dog's face, your dog warns it to back off, and then you have a dog fight on your hands -- a fight which your dog has the lower hand in because it's leashed.

It's not uncommon for leashed dogs to be mauled or even killed by loose-leash dogs. This is probably one of the most common scenarios where one dog kills another. Sometimes the leashed dog's owner is mauled or killed trying to protect their dog.

Responsible dog owners are extremely familiar with the hazards posed by off-leash dogs in on-leash-only spaces. Only thoughtless owners think otherwise and should be harshly denounced, but please don't paint ALL dog owners with the same brush when most of them would agree with you.

Just because you think your dog is OK doesn't mean that other dogs are OK with your dog; they don't know your dog, and I don't know your dog.

I hug my friends, but if a strangers runs up and hugs me, I will interpret that as assault and respond accordingly -- so don't ever let your dog do the canine equivalent of that, because any consequences (and they may be severe) fall entirely on your shoulders.

Most people who let their dog off-leash in on-leash areas do not have that kind of control (even when they think they do), and for that reason, I am in favor of the law coming down very hard on this.

(At the same time, I am strongly in favor of more designated off-leash parks. As much as I hate off-leash dogs running around, a fair percentage of this is due to a lack of dog-friendly spaces, and fines can only do so much to mitigate it. I would be in favor of all earnings from off-leash fines having to go toward building and maintaining local dog parks.)

The rule, in the abstract, can be given some plausible 'social good' defense -- many rules can, even the most insidious. No doubt, on extreme averages, dogs being on leashes marginally improves the on-average saftey.

But this 'on-average' is a radical abstraction. What it says is that the dog's freedom, enjoyment, and that of their owner must be Brought Into Order to fit with a system of values which discounts that entirely.

The sign is a symptom of this system of disciplining people; it conscripts them into a value system which may routinely be against their benefit and that of many others.

The sign doesnt tell you this; the sign gives you no critical autonomy to engage with its system of values --- in the way a conversation would.

That is how I diagnose this commenter's issue: his critical faculties are not being triggered. Rather the sign is seen transparently as a command to be followed.

There are no Commands to be Followed. There are only people commanding, and following them is advised only if it is advised.

What you’re saying is, we should have no laws and do whatever we want. We should have no rules and do whatever we want. I’m an anarchist and I don’t even agree with that.

I would feel the same about the dog off the lease whether the sign was there or not. Dogs can be dangerous animals and if I don’t know them, I should be afraid.

If a sign is seen as a 'strong suggestion', as 'advisable' or a 'please do this' then there's no issue -- that's what signs are.

But you didnt see the sign that way; and that's what i'm responding to. Your impulse was to bring the disciplinary arm of the state to bare to enforce someone's opinion of how a park should be run.

This is quite the opposite of being critically engaged with the nature of signs

Your assumption is that my “wanting to bring the disciplinary arm of the state“ is based on the rules, and not on my compassion. That’s where you’re wrong. I was using the rules of the state to enforce my compassion, not to enforce the rules. in this case, the rules aligned with my compassion.

And in fact, I would not call police if I saw someone shoplifting. And that’s what people don’t understand about those of us with Asperger‘s. It is a sense of right and wrong not based on rules, but based on right and wrong.

The sign couldve been a poster of a dog off a leach running around with another dog, having a good time. That, I imagine, would likewise trigger a positive emotion in you.

What i'm advocating for is more of a gap between the sign and the emotion. I dont think the sign would be as effective if it were a command read out by 'some average looking person'

the sign here has a special quality in triggering an emotional response, because the usual moderating triggers are absent: those of the falibility of a person

A Sign does not trigger an emotional response in me. My emotions were triggered by the action of the person walking their dog without a leash design told me that other people were compassionate, just like I am.

To conduct a genocide, one needs compassion. In the way people are here having fantasies of dangerous dogs biting children, likewise similar fantasies of danger abound -- compassion for imagined victims driving overwhelming oppression.

I dont consider this morality, quite the opposite. Morality is deliberative, it takes into account the particular, it is a response to the concrete reality not the imagined.

You see the germans imagined the jews a threat (and of course some were, as some of all people are -- just as some dogs are dangerous). Now all you need to do is make headlines of all the times a jewish person murdered someone and the like. Indeed, imagine it on youtube: all these videos of jewish criminals. Now you have waves of compassion for the victims of these criminals. It's trivial.

I take it in this case people here are making an identical argument that were made by those racists who imagined so much danger.

Of course when looking at the actual stats the german jews were no less or more violent than anyone, indeed, often a little less -- and often a little more patroitic in fact.

How here do we imagine dogs? Well 56 deaths from dog attacks in a decade -- far less than from people in that same time, of course.

Dogs, it seems, are incredibly well-behaved compared to people. Perhaps we should leash young men, or ban them from parks. That would have a much more dramatic impact

Fear has no place in compassion.

When you have compassion for victims, that makes you intolerant of their attackers. And if you imagine victimhood, then the anger and intolerance is just the same.

Compassion is an incredibly dangerous emotion for this reason; and is at the heart of a great amount of war and conflict. If people were afraid of an enemy, the won't attack them. But if they have compassion for their (possibly imagined) victims, then my god: they'll punish them to the ends of the earth.

Emotions are not moral things. Actions are. Any given emotion leads to both moral and immoral outcomes: anger is moral when it enables self-defence; fear is moral when it enables protection; compassion is moral when it enables protection to the needly.

But as with all the others, compassion becomes a profoundly immoral force when it motivates a desire to protect non-victims from their non-attackers. This "protection" is a form of self-righteous oppression -- and vastly more common than sociopaths pulling strings.

It is trivial to form a mob to lynch whomever you like if they feel it would protect some innocent -- it is compassion which drives the excess of all mobs

Water is good for you yet too much water will kill you. This is what the poster meant.

If that dog bites someone it dies, how is that not empathetic?

dogs are typically required to be on leashes in parks and public areas for a reason.

I think laws (the kind we're talking about, anyway) are best seen as a tool for maintaining public order. If police encounter something dangerous or immediately disorderly, they can express their reasons for intervening in terms of laws. If you run open headers on your car and cause an actual disturbance, you can be cited. When that relationship between order and law is inverted, the result is cops nickle-and-diming the populace when there was no actual underlying problem.

The real application of law requires, you know ... nuance, discretion and situational awareness. That's the standard we should hold police to, not throwing every single page of the book at people all the time.

How does that make sense?

This is an excellent example of 'ridiculous government overreach' that actually makes perfect sense and some people just don't like.

In a word: discernment. If it's a miniature poodle, you can probably chill. If it's a big dog, it's probably worthwhile to enforce the law.

It actually is a pretty good example of overreach insofar as you're advocating the removal of any judgement call from the equation. That is the surest way to build a relentless bureaucratic machine that makes everyone miserable without actually protecting anyone.

The human in the loop is a feature, not a bug.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2021/may/...

Now consider why it is you didn't know this?

You respond with a strawman.

>Maybe take a step back and realize that it's perfectly ok when people disagree with you about stuff on the internet.

Exactly what of what I said implies that I have a problem with disagreeing with people? All I said was "if you do these two things, your behavior is incongruous". That's as politely as I can disagree with someone. Maybe your problem is that I said anything at all, in which case I think you're the one who has a problem with disagreement.

That risk lessens significantly if dogs are mandated to be leashed.

unleashed dogs are regularly picked up by the city and if they're not claimed by someone w/i a specific amount of time, they're euthanised.

This isn't actually helping your case.

We shouldn't outlaw murder because some people will murder anyway. We shouldn't outlaw rape because some people will rape anyway.

You have no leg to stand on here, you're grasping at straws.

He eventually explained that he grew up in the poor neighborhood, where people keep large, poorly trained "guard dogs" that occasionally escape and roam the streets. As a child he had to evade roaming dogs several times, including one occasion where he genuinely believes he was running for his life. Apparently it fucked him up pretty badly. Poorly trained dogs (especially those that are bread for aggression) are no joke, even to full grown adults.

If not, I'd be careful with how loudly you proclaim ignorant opinions without consideration for people who might have a wider experience than you. Wisdom is knowing when to shut up and listen, sometimes.

This is like saying it is okay for good drivers to drive through stop signs, because they’re there for the bad drivers. Just moronic.

If you want to be somewhere where you can behave however you want, move away from other people. Pretty straightforward.

> In a word: discernment. If it's a miniature poodle, you can probably chill. If it's a big dog, it's probably worthwhile to enforce the law.

Your whole argument is “judgement is an important component of the law” but what that leads to is differing judgements on what we can do. What individual is so far above reproach that they should have the right to discern whether the situation calls for applicability of a black and white law?

raping a 5 year old should be illegal and there is no grey there.

Go on, explain to me why I'm wrong.

I said that we should not empower people to decide when laws are and aren’t applicable, because what they judge as applicable may not be the same as what others judge as applicable. That’s the whole point.

Black and white laws are black and white, you can’t just decide stop signs don’t apply to you because you are a safe driver. You can’t just decide your dog is safe to be off leash in a place where the law requires it. Not sure why this is hard.

I don't have to be "beyond reproach" to conclude this.

your problem is trying to apply one to the other, it's an equivalency issue.

jaywalking is not equivalent to murder, and it never will be.

I don’t know why you are latching on to this scenario when it aligns with my point. It is illegal to rape a child, you are agreeing with me. This is black and white.

Now, there is some person out there who thinks this is okay, are they allowed to judge this is okay, break the law, and do it because in they judged the child is mature? No. Okay. We agree.

That same exact reasoning applies to other laws that we, as a society, have deemed necessary for public life. Because you don’t get to judge those laws as inapplicable. If you do not like them you can try and have them changed or you can leave to a place that has different laws.

Where I live it is illegal to have a dog off leash in public places, this law exists for a reason. People should not decide the law doesn’t apply to them because they “discern” their dog is not a threat. If someone cant accept that law, they need to move somewhere where they can have the lifestyle with their pet that they want.

It’s wrong for someone to walk around with an animal that could be dangerous or could harm other people or itself. In this case, the rules aligned with my moral understanding.

Ashan sense of right and wrong is not based on outside rules, but it are internal perception. This is why many of us have anti-authoritarian tendencies.

https://neuroclastic.com/autism-and-responding-to-authority/...

> Autistic children in school are somewhat notorious for finding it hard to adapt to the authority of teachers– some teachers more than others. This is not because they’re evil little ragamuffins, as some teachers would have it, but because their natural state is to assume equanimity. Autistic students (and I speak from long experience) will not bow to authority for authority’s sake.

Great! The reverse speaks to the problem that I think is common place - people going along with behaviour that they know to be wrong/immoral. Eg coding software that will restrict and restrain others for money. The last few years gave so many examples too.

In all honesty, if this really is the common case, perhaps autistic people might be the best of us - there is no governance structure in their heads, just reasoning.

If that's it, I hope that some autistic folk also do not settle very easily, but continue to research the state of play, refuse to trust 'authority' or conventional knowledge, investigate what their philosophical outlook is, work out what they really know personally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38072756

cheers

I don't read other people's feelings so well. But I still care a hell of a lot how I make them feel. At least the ones I care about which is the default for people I meet. Though once someone is a dick to me they can die in a fire and I wouldn't help them, there is that side too which is not as pretty.

However most people respond with kindness to kindness so I end up caring about most people as a result.

The lack of reading them drives my behaviour a lot because I start pre-empting how my actions could make people feel. And usually going from the worst outcome option so I tend to be a bit withdrawn, going for the safest option.

So my social withdrawal tends to stem from caring. It's weird.

Ps another thing I notice is that autistic people generally tend to be really open-minded and non-discriminating. Because not really feeling part of a group also means not really feeling the need to set your group apart from other groups. We're all just individuals on a journey through life. It doesn't matter what colour, sexual orientation, etc people have, they're just other people <3

Sometimes I wonder if this is why silicon valley is driving diversity so much.

If it's true it kind of says more about non-autistic people than autistic people.

Consider that narc'ing people for victimless crimes is something that can be done to you as well, and you definitely will make enemies and earn a reputation by casually reporting people to the police... so maybe just "leave people alone" is a good default policy.

For example, I nearly gotten murdered on an Amtrak train once, because a man was talking loudly, and I asked him if he could please be quiet because he was clearly disrupting everyone and no one else was speaking up. I spoke up, and he followed me off the train and I had to run into the station to get help.

He didn’t seem to like that.

However I saw him on the trail with the same dog a few days later on the leash

So I’m not sure why this is a problem other than if people are worried that people won’t like them.

Just because something likes to do something does not mean we should let it do it.

(coming back to this I realize that laws and rules are what put people on leashes.)

And this would mean the owner who don’t put their dogs on leashes are also the problem.

Also

“More than 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States”

That’s a lot…

https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/pet-owners/dog-bite-pre...

This is not what people mean when they talk about people getting bitten by dogs.

It's really irresponsible to walk a dog unleashed, especially in populated areas.

This has been universally unconvincing to those dog owners who walk their dogs off leash. They don’t—in my experience—actually care if it puts their dog at risk, any more than they care about putting anyone else at risk. Anecdata still, but my experience tells me that whether a dog is leashed or not is mostly an indicator of whether the dog’s human is more concerned with the dog’s safety, or with their own selfish convenience.

It's not because they don't trust their dog. It's because they don't trust OTHER people's dogs -- especially because a good 80-90% of people with off-leash dogs don't actually have control of their dogs. They just really like the aesthetic of an off-leash dog and, by golly, they're going to do it--even if they haven't put in the gruelling training it requires, and even if it means their dog is endangered by other dogs. They don't care or think about it because they don't actually have a deep bond with their dog and value it; it's an accessory.

In my experience dogs are less stressed without a leash. The primary reason for using a leash is that I feel compassionate about people who are afraid of dogs or don't like them. Seeing a leashed dog makes them feel more secure.

It's very annoying how people anthropomorphize and refuse to take responsibility for their animals.

Guess what, your dog isn't a person and if it gets agitated and attacks someone, that's your fault. If it decides to chase a squirrel he sees across the street and gets hit by a passing car in the process, that's your fault.

Barring all the worst case scenarios, consider that other people don't like your dog jumping up on them nor do they want it pissing and shitting on their property, which is what most dogs do if left to their own devices.

Often people who won't leash their dogs claim that the animal is trained well enough to not need it, but this is rarely true. In reality, such dog owners usually just don't care about others and will readily blame anybody but themselves when their unleashed dog gets into trouble.

It's a safety issue for the dog. I recently saw an off-leash dog get freaked out and run out into a busy road. (The dog didn't get hurt luckily, but it was a horrifying experience for all involved.)

Sure, your dog might be "better" than that. But it's not a risk I'm willing to take with my dog.

But using a leash is part of the domestication process. I can tell you I was at a national park this year, and two off leash pitbulls and a Labrador charged at me. If it wasn’t for my knowledge about dogs, I probably would’ve been bitten.

So yes, having a dog on a leash makes me feel less stressed.

I fully agree. Yet animal shelters are crammed after the pandemic. Adopting an animal can improve their live.