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I love dogs. They like to be outdoors with me, roughhouse, and do man things. Until recently I’ve only had one dog, which is plenty, but now that I’m engaged we have two. We take them to parties because people invite them too, since they’re so friendly and well-behaved. Everyone thinks they’re great, except for a few people who hate dogs for some unknown reason. Even those people don’t seem to mind them after they’ve been around them for a while.
I love parks. They break up the dense housing in the city with a bit of open space. I live next to a park. In fact, if I lived any closer to the park I’d be living in it. My dogs love parks too, since they get to run around a lot more than they can in my yard. As I said, some people don’t like dogs, so we don’t take our dogs to the park I live next to if there are people in it. Another reason is that some kids aren’t well behaved, and my dogs don’t like that. A well-trained dog knows the difference between right and wrong.
We love geocaching. Geocaching allows us to enjoy parks, dogs, and a challenge all at the same time. The dogs aren’t trained to find caches, but one of them figured out what we’re doing and usually tries to find them first. Hopefully the weather will stay nice and we’ll be able to get back to that this weekend.
So here’s the meaningless question of the day: Why do people take their dogs to parks and not clean up after them?
It’s pretty hard to train a dog not to use a park to relive themselves, especially since they’ve probably loosened things up by running around. I’ve done my best with our two, and on the rare occasion that fails I pull out a baggie and pick up the offense. (Let’s call it an offense because if you stumble across it, it’s offensive.) I’d hate to be “joy-rolling” down a hill like I saw in a geocaching video and roll over an “offense.”
Long before I knew of Cache-In, Trash-Out I’ve been cleaning up the park I live next to, including others’ dogs’ “offenses.” I just spent another session a few minutes ago, even though the city-employed park persons were here two days ago mowing, and potentially “cleaning.”
On this note, if you do see someone with a dog in a public park, try not to blow a gasket if you’re a non-dog sort of person–they’re quite possibly trying to do one of nature’s critters a favor by taking them out for a fun time. If that person or their dog is doing something less than intelligent, maybe mention a general situation that somewhat relates and the outcome that others see. Quiet often it sinks in after a few hours and that person and their dog have a better experience at the park, and the rest of the park goers have a new friend to play with, or at least lessened chance of stumbling upon an “offense.”
We don’t have a dog … but we like other people’s dogs … including my neighbor’s Boxer (Lily), she’s two years old, born on Easter. We love nothing better than to see her looking in our patio door’s window “pining” for our kid’s to come out and chase her. You can actually hear her sighing out there as she sits waiting for us to get done with supper. But we don’t like dogs that jump up on people … our daughter was scare by a dog that jumped on her when she was 4 yrs old, and she now needs to alway “check out” a dog first, before she will get near (which is a good thing, I guess).
Picture of Lily hiding behind our plastic rabbit ornament … http://www.wi-geocaching.com/cgi-bin/slide2/album.pl?photo=00000271/lily.jpg;function=logout;photo_height=500
I don’t understand it either when people don’t clean up after there dog … it’s their responsibility, and the world is not their personal dumping ground.
I don’t know why some people don’t like dogs … but maybe those are the people that rolled in one of the “land mines”.
[This message has been edited by EnergySaver (edited 05-20-2005).]
I manage a park system and I’ve seen some people be very responsible with their dogs and I’ve seen other people be incredibly LAZY. That is the only thing I can think of why they wouldn’t clean up after their dog when there are kids running around barefoot. Of course, as these people are the center of their own universe I suppose it is completely in their rights to act like this (sarcasm hopefully obvious)
Park? heck the neighbor lets his dog go on my front lawn and doesn’t clean up for weeks!I don’t have a dog because I don’t want to have to clean up after it. don’t get me wrong, I like well behaved dogs with respectful owners.
When I was a child I had a Golden Retriever, as did the people next door. Their dog, Hobbs, would come over to play with Daisy. If Daisy wasn’t out, then Hobbs would just leave his card. Since Hobbs would run away if left to his own devices, his owners had to have known this.
Daisy was yard trained, so she’d only go to play with Hobbs when I said it was okay. I’d bring a shovel and start cleaning their yard for them. It didn’t seem to hurt any, but my dad always wondered why they didn’t pick up after their own dog.
Fast-forward 20+ years to this past weekend. The weather finally turned nice and we had some free time on Sunday, so we went to find “microcache from micronesia” and bumped into two super-friendly members of the h-hoard team who were signing the logbook some distance from the cache site. They didn’t let any spoilers slip as we talked and offered to re-hide the cache for us to find. We went to the other end of the park with the boys (dogs) until one member came over and said the cache was hidden and gave the boys lots of attention, which they loved. “What nice people,” we thought. Just as we were about to start searching, SOMEONE had to be indiscrete. So, it was back to the truck for me while Mole & the boys took the GPS and found the cache while I cleaned up. (At least she didn’t rub it in by dancing around this time.)
We bought some lunch and went to a small park on the lakefront to enjoy it. What a great day.
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