Monday, September 05, 2011

A funny thing happened on the way to the dog park...

Yesterday I saw the funniest thing I have ever seen when I was walking the dog and I have been doing that for 20+ years! Eco and I were walking along and there was a cat in a driveway crouching... when it saw us, it puked and then ran away. It may not sound funny to you but if you saw the cat's face, it was a pretty funny event. Unfortunately it was too quick to get out a camera and no one in the world saw it but me!

Today, Eco and I went up to the 'official' dog park - it's a big source of controversy because first they didn't fence the 'designated dog area' saying that only well trained dogs that can recall perfectly should use the park.  When multiple complaints came in about that city council agreed to put up a fence, but they put up a 4' high split rail fence so owners of small dogs don't want to use the area because little dogs can easily go through the rails and owners of bigger dogs don't want to use it because their dogs can easily jump over the rails. Also, there are no gates. In every other community I've ever seen dog parks have at least 4' chain link fencing and many have a special double gate area so one dog can't rush out and leave when another is entering. Clearly our city council are not dog owners or are pretending to care because what they created was a big giant failure and a big waste of money. (stepping off the soapbox now)

Anyway, back to this morning - I walked Eco up to the park hoping for her to get some off leash runningbut when I arrived I saw two people with their dogs already in the park. Eco is excellent with other dogs but has a tendency to jump on people so I walked past the 'fenced' area. Well the two dogs in the dog area saw Eco and blasted past their  owners and through the opening towards Eco. I knew she would be fine, so I unleashed her so she had a fair advantage of defending herself. When the owners approached, I told them why I had walked by and they said they were prepared for jumping and they were fine with it so we walked back into the open 'dog park' area and let them all play. As it turned out, Eco was so excited to play with the other dogs that she didn't even bother the people except for a couple of accidental crashes, but all three dogs were involved with that.  Eco is 2.5 years old weighing 57 pounds. Her playmates were a 6 month old collie/shepherd cross weighing about 80 pounds and a 1 year old bull mastiff who weighed 160 pounds. Eco may have been older but these young dogs had a great time rolling her over and at one point the mastiff even had her pinned. Another time they chased her so fast she ended up doing a 6' skid across the grass on her shoulder!

As soon as I finish my coffee I'll be giving her a bath as she's covered in mastiff drool and grass. Her sweet little pink and brown polkadot collar is more brown and brown at the moment so it'll need a soak too.  Oh the things we do for our sweet companions!

Happy Labour Day everyone, I hope you are having a wonderful sunny day!

1 comment:

Teena in Toronto said...

Happy Labour Day!