Hi all

Many thanks again to people who have signed and shared this petition and to the 4 generous donations to help get this petition promoted. Your support is very much appreciated.

On Tuesday the cemeteries department posted a sign on the gate to the cemetery where the proposed ban petition derives from.

The sign can be seen in the photo and essentially re-iterates rules but also expands upon them to site specific troubling behaviours. 

This is great and what we feel is needed - more education on what is acceptable and not acceptable behaviour in terms of dogs visiting the cemetery. We'd also like to see more monitoring and control of the present rules rather than a ban.

People who disregard such rules will only disregard a banning rule. The banning rule would in effect only disadvantage those who take their dogs to cemetries responsibly for all reasons discussed previously.

Furthermore, the petition calling for the ban provided an update on the situation the following day - as has previously been the case they have not given full information for the situation to be properly assessed by anyone, see below:

"Unfortunately, after yesterdays great news that Edinburgh Council have posted new guidance re exercising dogs, keeping dogs on leads, and not allowing dogs to urinate on graves...less than 24 hours later, many dog walkers were observed doing exactly this, before even 11am this morning.  

It has been reported to the Council, and we are liaising with them on how to deal with this.

This only goes to show that "guidance" and "rules" are not enough - you will always get people who just don't care, if there are no consequences."

They have been asked on facebook how many people this was but have given no reply. The post has been updated on change.org to say it was 14, however, this is not enough information for an informed decision re a ban on dogs.

Without numbers prior to the notice there is no way of seeing if this has actually helped for instance "prior to the sign on the gate there were x amount of people breaking the rule and today there were y amount of people". Similarly we need to know out of how many dogs walked how many were walked in this manner, for instance "x amount of dogs were walked during the time period, y amount followed rules and z amount did not". We also need details re what behaviour occurred and how many times - with comparison data of before the sign was put up.

It would help people to make informed choices regarding petitions if we knew when this monitoring started and who it was by - how reliable is it? Is it impartial? What are they using to record behaviour and how is  behaviour defined?

Further, the petition for banning focuses a lot on teddies being destroyed and ripped by dogs  this is not mentioned in the update so one might presume this hasn't happened - does this mean the sign is working?

Finally, they themselves state that rules and guidance are not enough and there need to be consequences - in some respects this could be seen as backing our views that a ban is not required as it will not stop owners who do not use the space responsibly.