Dog Lovers - Need Your Comments (residents & visitors)

My wife and I bought a home on the far end of Playa la Ropa in 2005, and for years have always enjoyed walking on the beach with our two little dogs, each 7 lbs. We travel with them and consider them to be family members. In fact, one of the reasons that we came to ZIhua, was that at that time it was a dog-friendly town where we could walk out the front gate onto the beach with our canine friends. We have always been very careful to pick up after them, and have never encountered anyone who objected to their presence, with the exception of one restaurant owner. During the last few years, however, we have been repeatedly confronted by rude "dog patrol" people, who have made a simple walk on the beach an unpleasant experience. These employees seem to do nothing to actually make the beach clean (like picking up trash), but sit around all day not doing much.
In addition to this being personally offensive to us, the current dog policies seem backwards, and are harmful to the economy of ZIhuatanejo. The clear trend in travel in the U.S. is towards INCREASING and not DECREASING dog-friendly travel opportunities. There are many articles on this (just Google "Pet Travel Trends". The number of tourists traveling with their pets has doubled in the last 10 years from 19% in 2004 to 37% in 2014. The U.S. travel industry is meeting this demand by increasingly accommodating pets in hotels, restaurant outdoor areas, parks, jogging trails, etc. The articles also point out that it is expensive to travel with pets, which means those who do so have plenty of disposable income to spend on the local economies.
It seems odd and counterproductive for Zihuatanejo to ignore this trend in tourism and in fact to move in the opposite direction by actively DISCOURAGING those with pets from coming to Zihuatanejo. In the U.S., this amounts to something like 40% of the tourist market, and I suspect it could achieve the same numbers in Mexico. It seems to me that our town and its local hotels and restaurants need as many paying tourists as they can get. I encourage the local government to take advantage of this opportunity to increase tourism and to bring tourist dollars in Zihuatanejo by re-opening the beaches to dogs and responsible dog owners.