I’ve written before about the two dog parks in town, but due to my self-inflicted rules for this All-Positive A to Z Challenge, I can repeat the name of only one of them: The Good Dog Park. (You can probably guess the name of the other.)
Now there’s a third, henceforth to be called The Best Dog Park.
“Have you been to the new dog park?” My hairdresser asked me last week.
“There’s a new dog park???”
I consider myself pretty locked in to the dog news around here, so I’m going to assume that I heard this first from my hairdresser because my dog training buddies have better pro-social activities for their dogs than the Wild West of off-leash parks.
We work hard to make our occasional dog park visits positive, even if that means leaving when the party is just getting started. Our visit last week to the Other Dog Park got really exciting when a year-old German shepherd zoomie-galloped into the fray, and Leo chased after him. I thought, Oh, good, Leo can wear himself out with this guy. But when the young dog slowed down, Leo mounted and humped him.
This has become our signal that it’s time to leave. While humping is a perfectly normal thing for a dog to do (Fern Camacho can tell you more), we keep things polite at the park. We used to have a three-strikes policy, but once Leo fixates on a dog, he keeps going back, so now we pack it up after the first mount.
Which is also what we did for our first visit to the Best Dog Park. While it’s farther from our house than the other two dog parks, it’s worth the drive. We’re still in the honeymoon phase, but it’s amazing! The ground is fully covered in bark, and there are some nice logs for people to sit on and dogs to jump over. More importantly, the people there were more attentive to their dogs than the folks tend to be at the Other Dog Park.
Somehow the dogs even seem better. This all might be because it’s new, but we’ll take it!
For the A to Z Challenge, I’m using all positive language in my posts. Find out how positive reinforcement training helped my dog in my book, Bark and Lunge!
Kari Neumeyer 
Great pics of dogs park. It’s heart warming to see such places in your part of the globe for our friends.
Cheerz
It looks like a nice big open space!
It’s always nice to find a good dog park!
I’m glad you found this dog park, and I hope it stays the best for you. I love the pics of your dogs. I miss my Shepherd. She used to run with me. Anyway, I look forward to more of your A-Z posts! Cheers!
looks like they are having a blast.
Looks like a great park. The only two close to us are in the “other” category, so we don’t usually go there.
Super fun times. We love the park too!