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Why has there been a coordinated push over the last few years to get people to stop using fireworks because it’s supposedly bad for veterans and dogs? I smell a psy-op.
It's just yet another step in the direction of forcing American society to restructure for the benefit of dog owners. I've posted before about my utter disdain for modern dog culture and the strong correlation between selfishness/narcissism with dog ownership. They have already turned my city into their personal open-air toilet and have made nearly every space "dog-friendly" despite signs politely requesting otherwise. The difference here is that this isn't just some rule or norm they can repeatedly violate without asking until society throws its hands up at the futility of enforcement. For once, they are on the side opposed to the social norm defectors and need top-down enforcement, but have their heads too far up their dogs' asses to see the irony.
I can agree that the continued fireworks past midnight does get mildly annoying, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the year-round barking these dog owners inflict.
This is a crazy take. Fireworks (the mortar kind, which is what people around here do despite them being illegal) are an order of magnitude louder than dogs. Even if your neighbor's dog is barking a lot, barking utterly pales in comparison to fireworks in terms of how disruptive it is due to the massive difference in volume. It's made even worse by the fact that people choose to set off fireworks. At least a dog is an independent creature you can't control, but the fireworks people are deliberately choosing to be assholes disrupting their neighbors. Here people were setting off fireworks until 2 am! Fucking 2 am! Not only that, but people here start setting off fireworks 3-4 weeks before July 4, and continue for 3-4 weeks after, so it's not like it is just one night of this nonsense.
I would've had some sympathy for your argument if you just claimed that the two were equivalently disruptive. But claiming that fireworks are "absolutely nothing" in comparison to dogs barking is not the remotest bit reasonable. And it's not like most people have dogs that bark all the time anyways - I have had one neighbor, in my 40 years on this earth, that had such a dog. And yeah it's annoying. Perhaps one might even say those people are irresponsible and shouldn't own a dog. But they are the minority. Are you really trying to argue that fireworks are just desserts when they punish not only the irresponsible, but also the responsible owners and those who don't even have dogs? Because that would be completely disproportionate.
I don't know where you live, but I hear barking on a daily basis much louder than any of the firecrackers that went off this weekend (at least accounting for distance; how loud a mortar is from equivalent distance is frankly irrelevant to me unless my neighbor is literally setting them off from his porch). At least with fireworks, it's one or two nights per year and confined to a predictable 6 hour span. The barking occurs on a daily basis, at random, and extends indefinitely. Here, people's dogs bark at any hour. I've been woken up by howling at 3-4 am on a work day multiple times. You could ask me to choose fireworks every Friday if it meant dogs were banned from residential areas and I'd take that in a heartbeat. Over the span of a full year, there really is no comparison when it comes to which is more disruptive to my life.
People choose to own dogs. They choose to ignore properly training them. They choose to continue to keep them even when they are a persistent nuisance to their neighbors. This attitude that you can't just get rid of your personal vanity project is common among dog owners. If your neighbor has a car horn that goes off at random times for random durations, I think you would be right to say it should either be fixed or trashed.
Nowhere in my post did I support the use of fireworks past a certain hour. I explicitly said I find them annoying as well. I've found many dog owners and their allies have a tendency to get extremely defensive and treat the slightest pushback on even a subset of behaviors as an attack. I never said that I want fireworks in order to punish dog owners, but somehow by simply saying that my personal frustration with dog barking is greater than my frustration with fireworks you jumped to that conclusion.
just wanted to say, extremely here for the anti-dog content. I love dogs, but like 5-10% of people max who own them should own them, and you should have to have a kid or be a single male (saying this somewhat sarcastically, but not completely).
This is one of my favorite blog articles on the subject: https://mattlakeman.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/
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