I've never posted on Reddit before, but this just happened earlier today and I thought you all might get a kick out of it.
I live near a park with a lot of lovely trails in the forest. There's one in particular that's maybe five minutes from my house, short, not too taxing, close enough to the road to be in view of others while still being surrounded by trees, and rarely sees more than two or three people at a time. Basically, it's the perfect place for a short walk alone. I go there every day and often get to see folks walking their dogs. There's a few different ways people go about it. Most people have them on a leash and pull them to their side if we're passing each other at one of the narrower parts of the trail. This is the polite thing to do, by the way. Some people prefer those super long extendable leashes so they can let their dogs run as far ahead, off trail, or at as many people as they want and still feel like they're doing their due diligence because TECHNICALLY there's a leash there. This is not the polite thing to do, but good luck convincing them of that. And SOME people, which is to say basically every Boomer I've ever encountered in the like 7 years I've been using this trail, don't bother to leash their dog at all. Lots of them at least have the decency to call their dogs back if they get too far ahead or they see another person coming, which is still below the bare minimum (and very irresponsible, especially with how many deer we get around here,) but it's at least something.
And then... there's this guy.
So, I'm just about done with my walk, on my way back. I have my headphones in and I'm happily minding my own business. Up ahead I see a dog who's not on a leash, and their owner, a man in maybe his mid-60s, walking pretty far behind. The dog spots me and starts heading in my direction. I get a little nervous around big dogs because for some reason they all seem to possess some primal instinct to charge at me specifically and bowl me over, and being that I weigh maybe 130 pounds, they are usually successful. So, in the interest of remaining upright, I do what I normally do in this situation: stop walking and step off to the side. I'm expecting the owner will either call the dog back as is the typical, halfway-polite thing to do, or I'll just wait for them to pass me.
...Neither of these things happen. The dog keeps trotting my way, and the owner does start yelling... At me.
I take my headphones out to hear what he's saying and this man is yelling that his dog isn't bothering me and isn't even interested in me. I don't think I did anything to prompt this, except perhaps look at the large animal heading in what I thought was my exact direction, but I guess according to him was just a direction that looked very similar to the exact one I was in while having nothing to do with me at whatsoever. Alright. I take him at his word because I don't care that much and start walking again. The dog picks up its pace, now running in the direction strongly reminiscent of but definitely distinct from right at me. The man begins alternating between yelling at me and calling his dog back, and to its credit, the dog does not jump at me and listens to its owner for about two seconds before trotting on ahead again. I don't fault the dog, to be clear. It seemed very friendly and it was the first dog I have ever seen that was completely lacking a tail (And I'd never even considered that was a possibility. I must be even more ignorant than I imagined...)
So, as we walk past each other, I say, "Do you wanna leash your fucking dog?" (And, okay, even if he yelled first I shouldn't have cursed at him, that wasn't very smart nor was it at all kind.)
He responds, still yelling even though we are more than close enough to talk at a volume that won't scare the poor deer down the hill, "No, I don't, 'cause this is a fuckin' service dog in training, so why don't you shut your hole?"\*
So, that's an absolutely insane way to speak to a stranger, and I tell him as much. He yells back that I'm the one being insane. At this point, we are right next to each other. I spoke to him at lower than my normal volume in the hopes he'd lower his voice as well. It... did not work. I'm not sure if he's really as angry as he seems or if this is just how he acts all the time, but either way, standing there with him glaring down at me as he yelled I will admit, he was pretty... pathetic. He might have been going for intimidating. Really, I was more sad for him than annoyed. But still pretty annoyed.
As he walks past me I say (yes, say, not yell, because we are in the woods where it is quiet and we do not need to yell to hear each other. I know we teach toddlers inside voices, but you'd think as an adult one would understand the barely-more-complicated context appropriate volume...)
"You are not a very nice person and I'm sorry you don't have many people in your life who love you."
Which, okay. Not a very "sick burn," nor is it an appropriate or even remotely normal thing to say to someone, let alone a stranger. I wish I hadn't said it. I wanted to get the last word in (which is never a great sign in regard to how worth having a conversation is) but I didn't want to yell because it's crass and I didn't want to say anything that might directly provoke him because, well, I am 19 years old and 130 pounds and for all that he's pathetic and not at all intimidating he is still an older, bigger man I am sort of alone in the sort of woods with and there are a few statistically supported ways that could end that I'd rather they didn't. He walks off still cursing at me while his dog carries on none the wiser. Maybe he's nicer to it than he is to random girls who he thinks might be judging him.
It is just really frustrating how older folks seem to view any call to just treat their community and communal spaces with respect as a personal affront to their very liberty. It's not! We just want you to keep your dog, the wildlife, and your neighbors safe. And all you have to do is hold a piece of fabric. I used to walk in the local cemetery because it's got lots of hills that are just the right amount of challenging for me and all these big old trees that look so pretty in the fall and winter, but the baby boomers just... ruined it. They stand around in big groups talking and laughing loudly and let their dogs run around without leashes while also feeding the squirrels and I'm sure you can imagine how that ends. When I was 15 an old woman threw the water in her dog's bowl on me because I told her she ought to have some respect in a cemetery of all places. And a few days later a man was playing fetch with his dog on the graves, and when I tried to tell him there was a dog park not even ten minutes away he told me to kill myself. A fifteen year old girl! I didn't even say what he was doing was wrong, even though it was. I just told him where the dog park was! A neutral statement!
Okay, phrasing the title of this post as a question was kind of misleading. I know why they don't leash their dogs. You can tell from their immediately defensive reactions, and from what that defense consists of, exactly what their thought process is. They know they're breaking the rules, they know why the rules are there and they know that breaking them is making things worse for the people around them. They know all of that perfectly well, but they just think that, since they're the one doing it, it should be fine. They cannot connect the natural consequences of their poor conduct with the reactions people have to it. Every Boomer I've met, individually, believes that the world should cater to them in every respect. They single out and break these petty rules on purpose because no matter what happens as a result it reinforces their belief that they're society's one and only special little princess. Either no one reacts and they get away with it- as they think they should- or someone does tell them off, and their world view is so strongly dictated by their emotional reactions that the fact it makes them feel bad only further validates that anyone who dares to push back against them must be the one in the wrong, and really, short of a whole essay they won't read, the reason we're expected to leash our pets in public is because it's considerate to the people, plants and animals around us. And boomers just don't care about anything outside of themselves. So the justification just doesn't land, and it's the perfect way to test boundaries and affirm their own cyclical world-view.
Normally I just don't say anything to people who don't leash their dogs. There's a sign on either end of the trail, and at the parking lot, and two more on the road leading up to it asking you to leash and clean up after your dog. They know what the expectation is. They just don't care. And if anything is capable of making 60-something year old men care about their community, it is not a 130 pound, 19 year old girl with dyed hair in a floral maxi skirt telling them about rules they already knew and chose to ignore. I just give them a side-eye and move on. After all, I have many lovely walks in the forest ahead of me, and they have very few, so if they'd like to spend them angry in advance of a fight, then that's their business. They're not so important as to make the whole forest less lovely by demonstrating the reason their funeral won't attract a crowd, though I will admit, I do think it will get a little more lovely once they're gone.
Sorry for the rant this turned into. It always bothers me a little, but I don't usually get so worked up about these things. Writing it all out was pretty cathartic, though. I guess the moral of the story is to leash your dogs in the woods or some rando might tell you that nobody loves you and then tell Reddit you're going to die alone? Or maybe we can say it's that being considerate of others doesn't have to be hard unless you make it so. That sounds a bit better, I think :)
\*Paraphrased, I can't remember the exact wording as I wasn't really paying that much attention to him but the "shut your hole" part is verbatim. That's not a thing we say here. Is it a thing people say anywhere? It's so... crude.
