NEWS FEATURE: Dogs in a Cemetery Prompt Dispute

c. 2000 Religion News Service PORTLAND, Maine _ As the sky’s rusty hue says another short winter day is almost gone, dozens of Portlanders gather in a burial ground to perform a daily ritual. To some, the ritual is sacred. To others, it’s downright obscene and should be outlawed. The ritual is leashless dog walking […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Maine _ As the sky’s rusty hue says another short winter day is almost gone, dozens of Portlanders gather in a burial ground to perform a daily ritual. To some, the ritual is sacred. To others, it’s downright obscene and should be outlawed.

The ritual is leashless dog walking _ a regular social event for dogs and humans alike in urban parks across the country. Here, however, the setting is a historic graveyard where some visitors have been appalled to see as many as 250 dogs each day urinating on headstones and defecating on graves.


Having heard the cries of outraged Irish Catholics whose ancestors rest where dogs romp, an advisory panel urged the Portland City Council earlier in December to ban dogs from the premises.

Now Portland dog owners find themselves with an unusual burden, one their counterparts in crowded cities may face if their quests for more dog parks lead them into inactive cemeteries. In Portland, they’re trying to justify dog running as a way of honoring hallowed ground.

“It’s a competition for what’s considered sacred,” said the Rev. Martha Englert, an Episcopal priest who runs her dog, Bob, at Western Cemetery every day. “There are conversations that happen here that are very sacred, like one I had with a woman who has melanoma. … When I’m dead, I would love to have dogs tap-dancing on my grave.”

Maybe so, but you’d better keep them away from our ancestors. That’s the message from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish group that erected a headstone last year to mark “The Catholic Ground” where many who fled the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s are buried.

“I think it’s pretty obvious why we put a fence around it,” said Paul O’Neil, president of the Hibernians’ local chapter. “This is desecration. It doesn’t matter if you pick up after your dog. The damage is already done.”

Finding space for dogs to run leashless in congested cities is a growing national problem, according to Victor Walker, a Boston consultant who has urged Portland to restrict dogs in the cemetery. Portsmouth, N.H., for example, recently designated a special dog park to accommodate the need.

Some cities, however, lack either the space or the money to set up fenced-in parks where dogs can run and that makes unused cemeteries a temptation to dog owners.


Portland has tolerated dogs in Western Cemetery since the early 1980s and made the policy official by an act of the City Council in 1993. Before the dogs arrived, the neglected 12-acre plot was notorious for drug deals, vandalism and homosexual encounters between strangers, according to the Rev. Stephen W. Foote, dean of St. Luke’s Cathedral in Portland.

In his view, dogs and their owners have restored the site’s sanctity.

“The dogs brought something of a wholesome community, albeit with a little bit of (excrement) involved,” Foote said. “The community consecrates the space by its good intent.”

In Ireland, as in most of America, laws prohibit dogs from entering a graveyard. Such codes are among many on the books to protect against disturbance of places where people believe their family members rest eternally.

Foote, who lives beside the cemetery and walks his two dogs there every day, has argued at public hearings and elsewhere that desecration occurs only when the perpetrator intends defilement, and dogs intend no harm.

But that argument passes no muster with Cheryl Ruminski, a 54-year-old South Casco, Maine, mother who helped start the protest movement with a public letter a year ago.

“I resent that people let their dogs do that on my ancestors, even if it’s been 150 years since they were buried,” Ruminski said, gesturing at dogs nearby on a December morning at the cemetery. “People had to pay to be buried here. They didn’t think it was going to be used as a doggie bathroom, which is what it is.”


Shortly before sundown, men and women ages 20 to 80 file through a cemetery gate, unleash dogs of all sizes and tear plastic scooping bags from a city-sponsored dispenser. Dogs sprint in all directions, cruising past Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s grave among others.

A pack forms to tussle on a central patch that’s become dry and dusty with traffic. They play atop unmarked graves: fewer than 2,000 of the original 6,000 headstones remain.

Dog owners say they care for the grounds by soliciting donations through their group, Friends of Western Cemetery, and admonishing those who don’t pick up after their dogs. What’s more, though they might not speak to strangers anywhere else, they chat openly here about the spiritual bonds they’ve made in this place.

“This is the only community I have in Portland, except for the ones at the bars I frequent,” said 20-something dog owner Scott Hudson. He strolled the grounds with a friend he’d met there, Jessica Matzkin. She has moved to Connecticut in the meantime but returned for a reunion with dogs and their owners.

“This place brings so much joy to people,” Matzkin said. “Graveyards are a place where people are buried so people can come and gather. It’s a fun place to come, almost.” Why “almost”? “Because you don’t want to offend somebody who thinks graveyards aren’t supposed to be fun.”

At the crux of the controversy is not whether the grounds are sacred but how the sacred is properly honored.


For Foote, it’s by injecting “life, joy, celebration and humor” _ just as he tries to do during Sunday worship by planting light-hearted announcements halfway through the sacred liturgy.

But for others, such as Ireland-born Patrick Murphy, it’s by setting the sacred space apart from routine life, even if that means a bit of inconvenience.

“The purpose is to bury and respect our dead,” Murphy said. “I think people who practice whatever religion _ Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu _ are appalled” by dogs in cemeteries.

Walker, the consultant, expects to join the advisory committee in giving the Portland City Council a final recommendation on dogs in January as part of a $1.8 million cemetery restoration proposal. He expects the council to adopt a plan soon thereafter.

But if dogs aren’t banned before Memorial Day, the Hibernians intend to step up the fight. They say they’ll abide by a new Maine law that requires a flag next to every veteran’s gravesite.

“Then it won’t be only grave desecration,” said O’Neil, the local Hibernian president. “Then it’ll be flag desecration too.”


DEA END MACDONALD

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