TLDR: ESH: you were right, but you weren’t nice.
he’s obviously an AH for being rude, demanding and entitled, and you are technically in the right, it’s your property and he’s trespassing, but considering he had a young child, and was putting on snow chains so he could avoid causing an accident further down the road, would it have killed you to say,
“how long will it take you to put your chains on? I don’t want to leash my dogs, but I’m happy to keep them over here until you’re done if you’re only going to be a few minutes”,
and then give your dogs a couple of minutes extra strokes and pats until he’s done.
I’m actually leaning very mild ESH. I think you are 100% in the right not to leash your dogs on your private property, and I agree he was trespassing.
But it sounds like he stopped in a big car park to put snow chains on, he wasn’t in anyone’s way, which he may have been if he’d stopped on the road, and if he had driven to find somewhere else to stop and put them on it could have been dangerous.
He sounds like a piece of work, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’re in the wrong. But generally there’s 3 levels of wrongness/asshole behaviour: 1) when you’re an wrong asshole; 2) when you’re right but your asshole status neither asshole or not asshole 3) when you’re right, but you decide to actively NOT be an asshole, and go beyond just being technically right.
You had the opportunity to make a decision that was kind to someone else, even though they weren’t being kind to you, and you chose the path of “I’m in the right, legally, and they’re wrong, so I’m gonna do my own thing”, and while that’s perfectly valid, it wouldn’t have been much trouble for you to do something kind instead of just “not wrong”, and for me, that makes you slightly an asshole. Maybe next time he had a similar decision to make, he’d have remembered you and instead of being “right”, decided to be nice.
Come one everyone, let’s try and make the world a better place, where we do something kind for someone else because we can, rather than not doing something because we didn’t have to