Barking is just complaining. Biting is sinking your teeth into a problem to fix or solve once and for all.
So, where are problems most likely to occur and where occasionally conflict breaks out in residential communities, even in the nicest, most palatial and expensive ones?
Where else, but in elevators!
Ah those often friendly but sometimes irritable tight spaces! Nothing brings out the most ebullient chatter and broadest smiles among friends or downright bitterness between enemies more than confinement in that small compartment for just a few floors up or down. Ahh those ever on the move condominium elevators!
Such a brief time spent in one can not only be uplifting and enlightening at times, but suddenly uncomfortable and inciting, even painful for some pet owners riding with residents suffering from an acute case of animal enmity or dog dislike.
“I was continuously harassed by residents because of our service animal,” a condo resident wrote recently to a condo commander in Florida.
This harassment occurs from residents either allergic to or apprehensive of pets, especially large ones with unfriendly-looking sagging jowls. This occurs particularly in elevators regardless of how quiet, well-behaved, expertly groomed and medically comforting pets are to their owners standing proudly alongside their doctor prescribed four-legged medicine. That treatment has now become not just a soothing companion but a best friend.
But sometimes tension can suddenly erupt into snarling agitation and meanness, not from the dog but from a resident who hates even living in the same building with so-called comfort animals they find so discomforting, especially when confined in such crowded space even for just a few fraught floors.
You find this obnoxiously prevalent in the most placid, upscale edifices where incidents occasionally erupt causing turmoil between pet lovers and animal haters requiring management to step in albeit just with a placating response in place of an amicable solution. Responses tend to be efforts to calm the beleaguered dog owner and comfort the adversary suffering from episodes of pet petulance on those conveyors that for many do the opposite of elevating.
It’s a challenge sometimes on a four-paw footing with Republicans in The White House doing their damnedest to keep Democrats in the doghouse.
Often a condo president preferring to withdraw from the line of fire will obfuscate by informing both aggrieved antagonists how the condo is “a pet free building” yet its rules sometimes are violated by those using inappropriate emotional support forms downloaded from the internet, which is not the condo’s responsibility to investigate.
Condo rulers also claim they cannot enforce pet rule because of ADA, The Americans with Disabilities Act, a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in everyday activities, including major depression disorder for which pets are an accepted antidote.
Yet once upon a time, a respected Roman cleric responded to Julius Caesar in 45 BC with this famous line: “If it’s pet free de jure, it’s not pet free de facto while many pet owners deeply need dogs and their emotional support.”
For years the emperor’s silence in this matter has lent assent at best, and sly neglect at worst to summarily assert that pets in public places is an infraction of Roman rules that would invite civil disobedience and make a mockery of the emperor’s otherwise well thought out regulations.
“Enforce it as it stands with Pharaonic cruelty,” said the cleric “and the Tiber River just may part for an exodus of disaffected citizens. Is this what Caesar wanteth?”
In today’s condo rules there is seldom any mention of emotional support as an exception for having pets. A scholarly condo resident recently informed his condo president that “at least one person dear to me did not download a form from the Internet but obtained a professional opinion and endorsement. That tender person’s need for emotional support does not deserve such a cynical characterization.”
He went on to state that the condo’s pet rule is arbitrarily devoid of subtlety, barren of detail, and therefore risible. “Are you just banning pythons, and allowing birds in gilded cages? I hereby voice my objection to the rule as stated,” said the arbiter on behalf of a populous requiring medical comfort from pets.
Tom Madden’s wife Rita wants him to admit he’s allergic to fury pets but just won’t pet them on elevators. He’s also a Roman virtuoso with words not only in the countless blogs he creates but in books, articles and news releases he writes. Madden is founder and CEO of his august PR firm TransMedia Group whose president is his resourceful daughter, Adrienne Mazzone. Madden launched TransMedia when he left NBC where he was vice president and special assistant to then CEO Fred Silverman, the emperor of TV sitcoms that ruled the airwaves and Internet in the 1970s and 80s. Silverman and Madden also worked together at ABC in NYC. Now here’s the bottom line on pets-in-condos story. If you live in a condo with pets riding up and down on elevators, keep in mind what Edward R. Murrow said:
