Opinion | Dog Parks Are Great For People, But Terrible For Dogs
For city canine house owners with a live-wire canine bouncing off the house partitions, an enclosed canine park can really feel like an oasis, providing off-the-leash train, an outlet for extra power, a social expertise for the canine and, usually, for the people, too. The truth is, canine parks are good, save for one small factor: They’re dangerous for canines.
Relatively than pondering of them as an oasis, we’d be wiser to consider canine parks as under-supervised and vaguely soiled watering holes throughout thunderstorms when there’s a great probability of lightning: excessive danger, and greatest averted.
Debates on this topic run deep amongst canine folks, steadily dividing alongside shocked-that-you-would and shocked-that-you-wouldn’t strains. Each every so often, these debates flare into full view on social media.
The canines can appear divided, too. To make certain, some appear to like canine parks, pulling on the leash to get there sooner and frolicking energetically for so long as they’re allowed to remain. However look intently and also you’ll see all of the canines who get discombobulated. For a lot of, the kerfuffle of the canine park is just too stimulating: all that sniffing and getting sniffed, the rolling and ruckus-ing, the prodding and the chasing. These crazy circles that canines make in a canine park, referred to as the zoomies? These could possibly be playful, or they might very properly could also be your canine screaming, “I simply can’t take it anymore!”
As for the canines that aren’t actively going berserk, they’re usually busy coping as greatest they’ll, clinging to the perimeters of the park or sniffing at pebbles. Canines are social animals, sure, and wish publicity to different animals. However very like us, they’re not essentially properly suited to random interactions with a rotating solid of strangers, every with disparate social abilities and reactive tendencies.
This mismatch between temperaments amongst random canines — their assorted skills at dealing with battle, coupled with the customarily sporadic consideration being paid to them by their house owners — could make for a extremely flamable state of affairs. Even small doses of stress can take as much as three days to empty out of a canine’s system — and all that extra stimulation can result in eruptions of seemingly inexplicable dangerous habits lengthy after the canine and its proprietor have gone house.
My first canine, Ruggles, and I went to a canine park ritually each morning, as a lot for me to see different canine house owners as to let my canine play. For people, canine parks are like mini-town greens — besides muddy and smelly — the place folks can go to gossip, swap canine care suggestions and benefit from the camaraderie of like-minded of us who will not be embarrassed to share cute animal pictures. Some folks have even found romance at a canine park; personally, I discovered an actual property lawyer.
It was all great till my canine’s ear was ripped off, and the attacking canine’s proprietor refused to pay the vet invoice — and even take away the canine from the park. Such incidents are all too widespread.
After I was elevating my goofily hyper Labrador, Sammy, I bear in mind studying dog-training books with page-long lists of all of the issues I needed to intentionally introduce him to, equivalent to pointed hats, males with beards and open umbrellas. These books additionally insisted that my canine ought to meet dozens of latest folks earlier than he turned 4 months previous. This philosophy — that younger canines must be socialized, and shortly — morphs naturally right into a helpful rationale for going to the canine park, as soon as the canine is sufficiently old. (Canine parks usually require — however hardly ever implement — vaccinations for canines.) This type of publicity and stimulation is essential for younger canines but it surely’s greatest administered gently, in small doses. There’s completely no motive any of it ought to result in hanging out in a thunderdome of rowdy pooches.
Then there’s the promise of joyful exhaustion — one other canine park delusion. Who hasn’t heard the mantra: A drained canine is an efficient canine? However drained canines, like drained folks, could be time bombs: pressured, worn out and infrequently unable to compensate for the 14 or so hours of relaxation a day that canines require to maintain a fair keel.
The answer to overstressed canines may be the answer for overstressed canine house owners: Skip the canine park. Cease worrying a lot about socializing your canine in precisely the correct means. She might take pleasure in working round with different breeds generally, however research counsel the reality is that she’d be happiest of all simply enjoying with you.
A 1996 examine by the experimental psychologists David S. Tuber, Michael B. Hennessy, Suzanne Sanders and Julia A. Miller checked out ranges of the stress hormone cortisol when canines have been put in a novel atmosphere to see what soothed them extra, the presence of a kennel mate or a human caretaker. For those who’re shocked by the truth that the human soothed the canines extra, simply take into consideration how they usually react while you get house on the finish of the day. They practically collapse with pleasure and aid.
Canines wish to be with us wherever we’re. In the event that they didn’t, they’d nonetheless be wolves. That goes for parks and metropolis streets, that are nice locations for canines to discover. So forgo the canine park: You don’t have anything to lose however your city guilt, and possibly an actual property lawyer or two.
Julie V. Iovine is a journalist and canine coach in coaching, and is on the board of the Animals & Society Institute.
