Dogs barking

I just spent half an hour stomping around in the little park, building up the steam needed to write an article complaining about dog owners. And you could say that I ended up with a full cylinder.

The problem is that the sugar transporting layer in a tree is just under the bark. If you remove the bark it damages that area, and if you remove the bark all the way around a tree it will kill the tree. In fact, ring barking, as it is known, is a forester's trick for killing unwanted trees.

One of the reasons why squirrels are generally disliked is that they chew off bark from the branches of trees, to get at the sweet sugar carrying layer beneath. That layer, called the phloem, is vital in allowing the tree to transport sugars, both up the branch or tree in spring and down later in the year. If a branch gets no sugar in spring, it will die. If the squirrels kill enough branches or ring bark the trunk of the tree, the tree effectively starves to death.

In the last few years one of the most common fashions for the younger people of this area has been to have a dog. Some of the more ferocious fighting dog breeds have been banned, so a Staffordshire terrier is the favourite. To strengthen the dog's teeth and jaws, their owners will often encourage them to hang from ropes from trees. In the event that all of the ropes have broken, they will use the trees themselves. So trees with low hanging branches soon end up with no or dead low branches, or pitiful splintered stubs.

A couple of times I have walked through the park and intervened when I've seen a dog doing this. I'm not sure if it was the same guy each time, but the reaction was, pretty much. It amounted to mind your own business, but in slightly less pleasant terms. I said, "Let's see what the police say about that," took out my phone, and feigned dialling the police. That seemed to have the desired effect.

In any case, between the two of them the dogs and the squirrels have killed several trees in the park. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was the squirrels, as the dogs weren't really around in order to have been responsible. I remember noticing that there were several standing dead trees and in retrospect, I remember that there were the telltale signs of ring barking around many of the upper branches. (Incidentally, when tree surgeons came and removed those trees from the park, I managed to persuade them to give me a lot of the wood, which I occasionally burn downstairs in the fireplace.)

Partly I'm sure that the problem is just ignorance on the part of the owners of the dogs. In fact I think a lot of people suffer from the delusion that trees are a solid and permanent part of the landscape. And certainly don't think that they could be responsible for major injury or death to a tree. I hope that it is ignorance alone which explains the fact that a beautiful, medium sized lime tree has been almost completely ring barked. I'm sure that this is not squirrels, because it is at ground level and I think that the bark is too thick for their small teeth anyway.

I expect that that tree will die. But it may take some time, and the dog owner responsible may never be aware of the destruction that they have caused.