Perth Voice Interactive

Dungnabbit
WA police are doing a crappy job in Northbridge on weekends.
Saturday and Sunday morning as you walk, cycle or jog around James Street, Beaufort Street, near McIver train station there they are—blobs of horse manure. Nobody to clean it up.
Doesn’t the commissioner have a clean-up squad? Do the manufacturers of disposable baby nappies have a suitable product for horses? I have drawn this matter to the attention of the fuzz previously. As usual they snubbed me.
Fair dinkum, those horses are manure-making machines of the highest order.
Raymond Conder
Central Ave, Inglewood
The Ed says: An opportunity going begging for all those local community gardens popping up. It’s brown gold, folks. Brown gold!

Perth not the main game
ANDREW MAIN (“Bus lanes the better option,” Voice Mail, May 16, 2015) criticises Vincent council for “withholding support” from the state government’s bus lane proposal—apparently on the grounds that something (anything?) is better than nothing—although he admits to severe doubts about light rail anyway.
Andrew appears to consider the only role of public transport is to get people to and from the City of Perth (“the bus lane proposal on Fitzgerald Street will benefit Vincent residents by making bus trips into and out of the city much quicker”).
I, for one, would rather see public transport that creates better access to and within the City of Vincent rather than simply speeding up journeys to the central city.
What Andrew fails to realise is light rail brings benefits beyond pure travel to a place that is already busy. Light rail has been demonstrated time and time again to encourage development, business, employment and appropriate residential density at key points along its route; bus lanes do not do so to anything like the same extent.
The key reason for this is the sheer permanence of light rail infrastructure, which gives investors reassurance about the future. Bus lanes and bus services are inherently flexible, but this apparent advantage is actually a disadvantage in a metropolitan region that is having to accommodate rapid population growth.
In the absence of a strategic and selective approach to development and density in Vincent, which is better supported by light rail than by bus, we will be faced with less discriminating pressure to increase density across Vincent as a whole. And even though the public transit authority states its proposed bus lanes are consistent with implementing the MAX light rail at a later date, the danger is that when patronage is sufficient to “justify” this it will all be too difficult—what do you do with that large number of existing passengers, who provide the justification, while you are installing the light rail?
Bus lanes do have a valuable role to play—but not everywhere. At the very least, we need to be sure the PTA has properly considered all the issues and this is not simply a cheap short-term fix that will make life more difficult and preclude desirable outcomes in the longer term.
Ian Ker
Vincent St, Mt Lawley

Our intention was education
I REGRET that you stated in your article (“Pet cafe howling,” May 16, 2015) that I had not responded, when I would have been keen to offer my opinion.
The owners of the Pet Lover’s Cafe listed themselves to purchase a designer “schnoodle” dog via the Trading Post, as shown in a screen capture provided to your paper. This was in direct opposition to their claim they support rescue groups.
Since the ensuing controversy over this, I understand they decided to purchase a schnauzer from a registered breeder instead. Great news! So why was the article published in your newspaper? Nobody boycotted the cafe. This issue was done and dusted.
If their business is failing it is because people don’t go there, not because of a couple of puppy farm activists. If all of their supporters coming out of the woodwork now had frequented the cafe, their business would be thriving.
I hope it does. It has never been our intention to put them out of business.
Our intention was to educate them about the hypocrisy of their decision to purchase a designer dog online, while claiming to support rescue. And we did.
Puppy farmers commonly sell online so as to avoid scrutiny and inspection of the breeding parent and the facilities. The price for the original dog is $1850. It’s absurd that a cross breed from an unregistered breeder can attract those sorts of profits (often untaxed), while shelters are overflowing and 250,000 dogs being euthanased each year.
It’s common knowledge within the pet industry and the owners of the cafe knew this (Australian Animals provides information to spot puppy mills at http://www.animalsaustralia.org/puppy-factories).
In recent weeks this issue has been highlighted on both Channel 9 and Channel 7. I hope this means the end of puppy farms and unethical breeders, and that pet shops and online puppy traders will be put of our business. Not cafe owners.
Steffy Forrester
Perth
The Ed says: Critics accused the purchasers of supporting puppy farming simply because they’d chosen to purchase a dog online. It was a gross defamation that was both personally and commercially hurtful.