By Dolores Blake

I wanted to thank members of the Davis Chamber of Commerce for the wonderful Celebrate Davis! event that they have been sponsoring for the past few years. Every year it gets bigger and better and it appears that the community enjoys the festivities.

I live just north of Community Park. On Celebrate Davis! night and on the Fourth of July, my house shakes and lights up from the fireworks. I feel like I am in a war zone.

I own dogs that are not comfortable around the sound of fireworks, so I pack them in my car on Celebrate Davis! night and the Fourth of July and just drive outside the city as far away from the sound of fireworks as I can get.

This year, I pulled back in my driveway thinking I had stayed away long enough, only to hear the first bang go off. I just started my car back up and headed out north on F Street. I no sooner turned onto F Street when I saw a dog running as fast as it could in the oncoming lane.

This dog was running in a panic but he was lucky no cars were coming. I actually had to speed up trying to catch up with him. I thought if I could get up to it I could get it into my car. The dog turned on Sycamore and then turned toward the greenbelt so I could no longer follow it in my vehicle.

After the fireworks, I came back home, and as I was unloading my dogs, a voice from a few doors down asked if I had a cell phone he could borrow. He said he had chased his neighbor’s dog all the way from Northstar and he had him cornered in the fenced yard a few doors down from me.

I gave him my phone and went over to help him. The dog was under a bush, shaking and panting. It turned out it wasn’t his neighbor’s dog, but we were able to leash the terrified dog and call the number on its collar. The owner came to pick the dog up and said he didn’t know that fireworks were going to be happening that night.

I know these are not the only two dogs in Davis that were terrorized and lost that night.

The Fourth of July is bad enough with fireworks, but everyone expects them on that day. Not everyone reads The Davis Enterprise to know that there also will be fireworks in May.

Are fireworks really necessary? Is terrorizing our neighbors’ pets and those people who want to stay home a way to celebrate community? The dogs, the cats, the birds in our homes and the wildlife around us really cannot understand what is happening and the fear it strikes in them has an element of cruelty to it. Why do we need to do this?

Also, in these tough economic times, wouldn’t it be better to celebrate our community by donating the money that is burned up with firework to the local food bank or to our schools or parks or any one of the many community programs in our city that are hurting for funds?

I ask the Chamber to think about this and for next year consider another way to celebrate Davis.

— Dolores Blake is a Davis resident.

Comments

comments