Get well soon Terry !
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First ride of the year without full tights. Sunshine, blue skies, green hills and the fresh smell of dung. 
View looking upriver from the M5 Avon Bridge
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Mmmm…muddy…
That’s a thread on its own
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No ladders, yay!
Five minutes walk and I am in the South Downs National park…
Some of the signposts could do with some attention from Dave @octh and his crew. This one is supposed to denote a bridleway.
The eagle eyed among you might spot a couple of horses exercising in the background
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I’ve seen one or two as bad as that round here. But mostly they’re the local authority approved ones and those are pretty durable. Sometimes they’ve become completely overgrown by a bush or hedge though.
VB
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That will be council responsibility. They maintain (or should maintain) public access footpaths and bridleways, including signage.
Submitting questions in advance to my local district council, ahead of appearing at their overview & scrutiny committee meeting on Thursday to challenge their use of public money to enact and enforce a PSPO scheme to limit people walking more than 3 dogs on public land.
Should be a tasty session a la Handforth parish council but on a grander scale of chaotic bitterness!
The council’s move wouldn’t be popular down here. One of my regular routes up to the Ridgeway starts as a single track road, narrows down to an unsurfaced chalk track and then widens out just before becoming a footpath. The widened bit routinely has one or two dog-walking company’s vans in it and on one occasion I’ve passed three parked there. An ex-neighbour of mine (Claire) runs this one Outward Hounds.
VB
Yep the local dog walking and training businesses, as well as rescue centres are very unhappy about this and the tin pot way the council appears to have gone about justifying a method of victimising very small numbers of households who have more than 3 dogs.
I’m allowed two questions and so the first is to point out that this doesn’t appear in or contribute to any agreed local strategy/ objective of the council’s, and so what is their rationale and mandate for seeking to punish a tiny minority of law abiding citizens (probably less than 50 households in a pop’n of 100k in Wyre Forest.
The second is that given that the council is in dire financial disarray, why are they frittering away taxpayers money on things like this, running expensive and flawed public consultations, on something that is neither a stated priority for the council nor the local community. Plus I’m going to ask them outright to say how much this has cost (which they won’t know, but having had to do this in health sector I have a pretty good idea).
I imagine there are some healthcare workers who work long shifts who rely on dog walking companies to ensure their dogs are healthy. Could be some really ill people as well, who can’t exercise their dogs enough themselves. What exactly is the problem with dog walking companies that means that they merit such treatment?
Yep, I know a number of local nurses and primary care workers who have been penalised directly and indirectly by this.
I have a pretty good idea that this all goes back to dog fouling. The existing PSPO already covers this and I don’t know any responsible dog owner who doesn’t clear up after their dog, or who could object to the fining and punishment of irresponsible owners who don’t.
The move to try to also limit the number of dogs you are able to walk in the 75 square miles of the Wyre Forest district I understand to be triggered by a local councillor who observed dogs being released in numbers from the car park of Hartlebury Common and then immediately defecating on/ near to the car park. In recent years the common has become ever popular and even more so since lockdown with people travelling miles to exercise their dogs. The bins adjacent to the car park which are the responsibility of the council are atrocious and not emptied anywhere near frequently enough to take account of this upsurge in demand and so poo bags pile up in what is an unsightly and likely unhealthy way.
So rather than fix the problem, the council set out on a deliberately skewed local consultation which delivered the resuly that they wanted and used this to evidence the justification for this, without any more evidence or impact assessment on people or local businesses.
We’ll see on Thursday if they are going to reconsider this or try to tough it out. I’ve already got a local journalist lined up to cover the committe session and report questions raised and the response from councillors so it won’t be easy to just brush it off.
Might be worth chucking in the local fox… er… trail-hunts into this equation - those horrible cunts usually have more influence with local councils than the entire remaining local population of the district IME…
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It’s there a zoom meeting we can all dial into. I’ll pop one of my hounds on camera👌
Good shot. If trail hunting, or hunting as I like to call it is allowed, then all dog walkers have to do is say they are trail hunting.