A Mission Bay parent was recently playing with their baby on the lawn at China Basin Park — a public park, not a designated off-leash area — and politely asked a dog owner to leash their animal. The response? "It's not a baby park."

Actually, friend, it kind of is. It's a baby park. It's an everybody park. That's literally what a public park means. What it is not is an off-leash dog park. San Francisco has plenty of those — over two dozen designated areas, in fact. China Basin Park's lawn isn't one of them.

This isn't an anti-dog take. Dogs are great. But the creeping sense of entitlement among a subset of SF dog owners — the ones who treat leash laws as suggestions and public green space as their personal dog run — is a genuine quality-of-life issue, and it's getting worse in Mission Bay as the neighborhood densifies.

As one local resident put it: "My toddler is quite scared of dogs. Everywhere we go there are dogs off leash and she gets scared. For the dog owners, they don't see any issue." Another was more blunt: "I hate all the entitled dog owners in this city. Your baby should be able to play on the lawn without an off-leash dog approaching you."

The core problem here isn't really about dogs — it's about enforcement, or rather the total absence of it. San Francisco has leash laws on the books. Animal Care & Control is nominally responsible for enforcing them. But anyone who's spent ten minutes in a non-designated SF park knows that enforcement is essentially nonexistent. Laws without enforcement aren't laws; they're suggestions. And suggestions don't work on people who respond to reasonable requests with "It's not a baby park."

This is a small story, but it captures something bigger about how San Francisco governs — or doesn't. We write rules, underfund enforcement, and then shrug when people ignore them. The cost gets passed to the most vulnerable users of public space: kids, elderly residents, people with disabilities, and anyone who'd rather not gamble on a stranger's assessment that their dog is "friendly."

Leash your dog or go to an off-leash park. It's really not complicated.