In that, Kit wasn’t alone: most dogs love the beach. She looked happy she looked free she looked right. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. Our brief time in California, we realized, might be Kit’s first and last chance to lay her protuberant eyes upon the sea. Now we were moving to another inland environment-Colorado-via a circuitous road trip that took us through San Francisco.

For most of that time, we’d cohabited with Kit, an affectionate piebald mutt we’d adopted from a local shelter. My wife and I had spent the last three years in eastern Washington State, a region landlocked by 600 kilometers of forests, sagebrush, and wheat fields. Kit saw the ocean for the first time on an iron-skied February afternoon. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format. Stream or download audio For this article What will it take to control beach dogs-and, more importantly, their owners? Authored byĪp| 2,400 words, about 12 minutes Share this article Photo by FLPA/Alamy Stock Photo Gone to the Dogs Man’s best friend is a shorebird’s worst enemy. Off-leash dogs on beaches cause problems for all kinds of life, perhaps most noticeably, shorebirds.

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