Dear Dog Owners who attend the Leash Free dog run in Shell Park,
I understand that it is my responsibility to clean up after my dogs and keep an eye on them at all times.
What I don’t understand is how some of you don’t seem to take this same responsibility yourselves.
My dogs have never harmed another animal, bit anything (except playfully), pooped without myself or my husband cleaning it up or done anything remotely aggressive…yet I still keep my eye on them as much as humanly possible.
If you cannot follow the rules of the park please stop attending. It is YOUR responsibility to keep your dog in control (and i understand that they ARE dogs…even the nicest dogs have their bad days) and to clean up after it. I bring two dogs and I still manage to do this. I’m not saying you must leave if your dog gets rowdy, but you must know how to control it if its bothering other dogs or other people! Artoo is only 6 months old and he’s perfectly harmless…BUT as a puppy he tends to get over excited and can jump up…most people don’t like this. Even though this isn’t “scary” or really bad behavior, when he does this I correct him and make him stop…for the courtesy of other people and their dogs.
Yesterday when my husband and I were there with our dogs we constantly had to walk to the front gates and CLOSE THEM. If you cannot even enter and exit the park without closing the gates behind yourselves you should not be there. When we went to go leave the park we had not noticed that the first gate was left open…upon our dogs entering the inner gate they proceeded to run THROUGH THE OPEN GATE and into the parking lot. I admit that my dogs aren’t well behaved when it comes to walks and being off leash (outside of the park). They see an open door and they’ll run through it if we don’t tell them to stay fast enough…and since we did not see the open gate, we did not have the time to tell them to stay.
As we yelled and tried to get our now free-roaming dogs NOT A SINGLE PERSON attempted to help us.
Luckily enough I remained calm and simply opened the car door and they both ran back and into the car…. but i would like to express my deepest thank you to the NO ONE that helped us in this scary situation.
Closing the gate behind you is such a crucial step in attending an off leash area…and such a simple, small step too.
Should anything had happened to either of my dogs….good lord, i don’t even want to think about it.
Next time I go i’ll be bringing tools and springs and i’ll be fixing the gate myself and making sure it’s spring loaded to close by itself….as apparently it’s too large a task for some people to do themselves.
Cheers.
-Lori.
~Lori Hobin~ 