Health & Fitness
Lake Forest Pet Tales - Part 1
Lake Forest is home to some of the pet friendliest people in the U.S.
The people in Lake Forest are among the most pet friendly people in the world. Half of our homes have dogs and nearly 70% of our households have one or more pet. For example, on my block which has 12 homes there are 7 dogs, 3 cats, and 5 birds (that I know of). In 2011, Lake Forest residents paid for more than 9,500 dog licenses, which means there is a licensed dog for every 8 people who live in Lake Forest, and you can imagine how many unlicensed dogs there are.
You can see how pervasive pets are in our community when you realize that more households have pets than have children (70% vs. 40%).
This fact isn’t lost on businesses. The people at PetSmart, who are pretty business smart, have 2 of their Superstores in our city while most of our neighboring cities (Laguna Hills, Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods, Mission Viejo, Irvine, etc.) don’t have a single store.
Find out what's happening in Lake Forestwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The other pet giant, PetCo has a store in our city too. And again, they didn’t build one in most of our neighbor cities (Laguna Hills, Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Woods, RSM, etc.).
Indeed, there isn’t any other city in Southern California with both a PetSmart and PetCo. In addition to these 3 Superstores, we have one of the premier pet health food stores in Southern California, a great Pet Resort, and we have dozens of pet related businesses including more than a dozen Veterinarians. Lake Forest, which is smaller than either Mission Viejo or Irvine, nonetheless is home to more Veterinarians.
Find out what's happening in Lake Forestwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
So if the people and the businesses in Lake Forest are so pet friendly, why is it that compared to our neighbors, we have the least pet friendly city services? We don’t have a dog park and we don’t have a local shelter. We don’t have a Trap-Neuter-Release program and our Spay Neuter voucher program is miniscule. We’ll look at all these issues in detail. Next time we’ll start with the dog park issue.
Meantime, please send me photos of you and your pet and I'll post them with our next blog. You can e-mail them to me at GardnerForCouncil@gmail.com
