As to children being terrified, thats unfortunate, but can you really expect the entire world to moderate their behaviour? I once had a woman have the screaming habdabs as I walked by with the dog, he hadn't even looked at her. I was profusely apologetic, but when I thought about it afterwards, I hadn't done anything wrong, it was her problem, not mine.
Slightly OT, but this reminds me of an incident when I was walking a friends dog for him whilst he was away. He had a German Shepherd, that was very well trained. In between his house and the park was a pelican crossing, and because he always made her sit at the road before crossing, she had actually picked up that she sat until the green man came on, which she knew due to the loud beeping when this happened. If she didn't hear the beeping, she wouldn't move for love nor money, even if the road was clear and you wanted to cross!
When I was walking her, we came to this crossing and she sat down naturally. A women then came round the corner, saw her and gave an audible gasp. We remained where we were waiting to cross with the road clear, and the women, clearly frightened of dogs simply wanted to walk past us - not crossing the road, just behind us on the same side we were, but was too nervous to walk past the dog. After an uncomfortable thirty seconds she asked, quite haughtily something along the lines of "could you move please I can't get past". There was plenty of room for her to walk behind, but she was clearly too scared of the dog to do so. I had to reply "I'm sorry I can't go til the green man comes on" and had to wait another thirty seconds or so until it did, and the dog allowed me to cross. Not a single car had passed us in all this time.
