Forsyth County Commissioners struck down a proposed change to dog tethering rules in a 6 to 2 vote Thursday, with some commissioners deliberating about whether the change might have caused more animal abuse.
The ordinance change, which was brought up by the county's animal advisory board, would have allowed dog owners to leave their pets tethered outside if they were still within a line of eyesight of the animal.
But commissioners decided to reject that allowance and keep the original wording of the rules, which state dog owners have to be physically outside with their dog if it is tethered.
George Francisco, the chair of the county's animal advisory board, explained the rationale behind the rejected rule change at a county briefing last week.
“It was overly restrictive,” Francisco told commissioners. For more than a year, there were a number of board members who did not agree with the original tethering restrictions and had wanted to loosen the rules.
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Forsyth board chair Don Martin supported the rule change in both the briefing meeting and the final vote Thursday, saying that he believed the amendment would help older folks who sometimes couldn't be outside with their dogs for long periods of time.
“There's no reason to believe that the animal is any more abused if you're looking at them from in the house, or you're outside,” Martin said at the briefing.
At the briefing, Francisco clarified to Martin that responding sheriff's deputies could issue citations to owners who were ignoring other parts of the county code that had temperature requirements for keeping an animal outside.
Martin ended up finding a representative from the county sheriff's office at an earlier meeting Thursday who he asked to explain the data that deputies had collected on enforcement of the tethering ordinance over the years.
Because the sheriff's office has only dedicated deputies to animal services since 2019, the department only had data from 2023 and 2024.
In 2023, out of the 11,980 calls for animal services, only 250 were with regard to tethering.
In 2024, the sheriff's office received 206 tethering calls out of 9,557 total calls for animal services.
Deputies ended up issuing 27 citations for violation of the tethering ordinance in 2022, 17 in 2023 and 22 in 2024. Most of the citations ended up being a call where no animal owner was present and the dog was tethered, said Maj. Van Loveland.
Loveland said that because the ordinary citizen generally doesn't know about animal ordinances, they spend a lot of time educating them about the rules, which aren't taught in school as people grow up in Forsyth County.
“A lot of times we go out and we educate people on the ordinances,” Loveland said. “And we try to assist them by putting them in touch with welfare groups, things of that nature.”
“We don't always just immediately violate them, or try to punish them, we try to educate them and a lot of times that helps with our rate as far as getting them into compliance,” Loveland added.
Jennifer Tierney, who was involved in drafting the language for the county ordinances, told the Journal in a Friday interview she was shocked by the proposed rule change and that it seemed the advisory board wanted to go decades back in time.
“It's been extremely concerning that the county and the people that are on this advisory board that should be there to protect animals are wanting to take us backwards,” Tierney said.
Tierney, who also founded the animal cruelty prevention non-profit organization Fur-Ever-Friends, said the change would have been “useless”, unless a deputy came out to the property and caught the animal owner right when they weren't looking at the dog.
“There's absolutely no way to enforce a law like that,” Tierney said.
During Thursday's meeting, Commissioners Tonya McDaniel and Richard Linville also questioned whether or not the proposed rule change made any practical sense.
McDaniel held up a printed photo of a dog that had hung itself on its tether.
“How do you believe someone can be in the house, the phone's ringing, you're attending to a child, how long does it take for a dog or an animal to die being tethered like this?” McDaniel asked Loveland. “But you're supposed to be in eyesight. How long?”
Linville said that the ordinance amendment wouldn't be a practical thing to try to enforce and agreed with McDaniel that a person might forget about the dog while they were on the phone or doing something else within their house.
“You've got to be watching it all the time,” Linville said.
Commissioners Gray Wilson and Dan Besse voted to keep the original ordinance at the conclusion of the matter, with Besse saying that “there's no such thing as perfect language.”
Wilson said the rule change would only increase the burden of enforcement on sheriff's deputies and added that he had a personal concern about dogs being tethered outside in cold temperatures while their owners were inside, staying warm.
“I just think that would be tantamount to abuse,” Wilson said.
