My husband and I have a disagreement about our greyhound and wanted outside opinions because we genuinely both think we have reasonable points.

We have a retired racing greyhound. She has prey drive, especially toward cats/squirrels, which is obviously common for greyhounds, but we’ve worked really hard on her training and recall and she’s honestly doing amazingly. In normal situations her recall is excellent.

The disagreement is about letting her off lead in a semi-enclosed pedestrian area in our neighbourhood. It’s not a dog park, more like a quiet grassy area surrounded by houses/paths. Some people in the neighbourhood let their cats roam outside.

My view is:

1) I only let her off when I’ve carefully checked the area first and can’t see any cats around.

2) I keep a very close eye on her the whole time.

3) She gets so much joy and freedom from sniffing and running off lead occasionally.

4) If people let cats roam outdoors, there is inherently some level of risk anyway (cars, other animals, dogs, etc.), even though obviously nobody wants anything bad to happen.

5) I feel like if we avoid every possible risk forever, she basically becomes a “bubble dog” who never gets to properly enjoy freedom.

My husband’s view is:

1) If we KNOW there’s one situation where recall could fail (a cat appearing suddenly), then we shouldn’t let her off lead in an area where cats could realistically exist.

2) Even if we check first, a cat could appear from under a car, behind a fence, from a garden, etc.

3) If our dog did get hold of a cat, she could genuinely kill it before we could react.

4) Because we already know she has high prey drive, taking that chance is irresponsible even if the odds are low.

For context, neither of us is careless and we both adore this dog. This isn’t a huge relationship argument or anything dramatic, we just genuinely can’t agree on where the “reasonable risk” line is.

So Reddit: whose side are you more on here?“If a loose cat runs in front of an off-lead dog, whose fault is it?”