Should dogs be allowed in stores?
The Home Depot is considering banning the animals after a store greeter was rushed to hospital when a customer’s dog bit off the end of her nose.
The building-supply chain allows dogs into stores so long as they are under their owners’ control. But that policy may be changed to allow only service animals.
“You have to weigh keeping those customers happy with the overall safety [of employees and shoppers],” a Home Depot spokeswoman told the Ottawa Citizen. “All it takes is one instance of this to make you evaluate what the priorities are.”
Anne Riel, 39, says she was greeting customers at a Home Depot store in Gloucester, east of Ottawa, on Friday when she bent down to pet a Shih Tzu in a woman’s shopping cart. The dog jumped up and bit her nose, she says. Ms. Riel had to undergo emergency surgery to reattach her left nostril.
“My nose will never be the same again,” she told the Canadian Press.
Pet owners must be responsible for their animals, and if they’re not, bans such as the one being considered by Home Depot may become more popular, Bernhard Pukay, a veterinarian and pet columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, told the newspaper.
“If you get more and more of these stories where dogs bite people in public places or they soil the area and the owner doesn’t clean it up, the more likely you’re going to end up with people calling for legislation to not allow that any more and we don’t want that,” he said.
What do you think? Should pets be allowed in stores?
