3 risky places to take your dog
The 3 top most risky places to take your dog
These common places might suprise you!
Jamie Flanders CDBC CFDM FPPE CBC
The three most risky places you can take your dog are neighborhoods for walks, traditional city dog parks, and day cares. All 3 of these places pose significant risk to your dog.
Neighborhood walks are risky
Your dog has limited space, they should remain on the side walk and ideally should not be venturing onto anyone else’s property. This is hard for dogs as it’s their nature to explore and follow their nose. Neighborhoods have terrible sight lines, which means there’s tons of ways other dogs, people, cats, and cars can surprise you when you’re not ready, this on top of the lack of space available to avoid running into something makes neighborhood walks a very risky environment to take your dog. Neighborhoods are very common places for dogs to be attacked by other dogs. The nature of a neighborhood with all the blind corners, surprises, and saturation of other dogs on walks, children, bikes, skate boards, stray cats, garbage trucks, sprinklers, dogs barking at fences, and the many rules your dog has to follow, increases the likelihood of your dog developing reactivity. Neighborhoods can be totally over-stimulating.
Dog parks are risky
Canine social dynamics are complex, bringing your dog into an enclosed area with a bunch of other dogs you know nothing about, with owners who have varying levels of understanding about canine behavior, potentially no control over their dog, who also may not be paying attention, is a definite risk. It is not uncommon for people to bring out of control, under socialized, reactive, or aggressive dogs to dog parks to “socialize them”, this is very dangerous.
It is common to see dogs behaving inappropriately toward other dogs, bullying other dogs, getting bullied, getting ganged up on, small dogs getting trampled or hunted, and resource guarding (when people bring toys) in a dog park. In addition to this, you don’t know the health status of any of the dogs joining you at the dog park, they may not be vaccinated, they may have parasites, they may have kennel cough or any other number of other things they can pass onto your dog.
Day cares are risky
If your dog is participating in the group “play” at a day care you can have the same type of problems you would at a dog park with some minor differences. Day cares should be staffed with people that understand canine behavior and body language, who know when and how to appropriately interrupt and redirect inappropriate behavior. However, the is no guarantee that the staff has this education and it’s not uncommon to find that the people watching over a large group of dogs have very little education or experience, they may even be in or just out of high school.
There should be multiple people supervising a big group of dogs. At the dog park there’s at least one person per dog, which is great if each person is actually supervising what’s going on, and understands what they are looking at. In a day care it’s not uncommon to have 1 person watching 10+ dogs. How would that person be able to interrupt and redirect if a fight broke out? Take a look at this video: https://youtu.be/9wHGaXOeXkk?si=kgwjdwH_2R9zsOwM This room is entirely too small for the amount of dogs. This is a big box pet store day care play group. There is only 1 person watching 10+ dogs, and at one point the person has to clean up urine, which means their eyes are not on the dogs. If you can understand canine body language, almost none of the dogs want to be there. They are all working very hard to be polite and avoid conflict with each other. this is why they come home exhausted, it’s stressful and exhausting to walk on egg shells all day, it’s not necessarily because they had a good time.
It’s getting harder and harder to find places to take our dogs that are appropriate and offer the right kind of mental and physical enrichment opportunities, but it’s not impossible. You have to be willing to search around and you have to be willing to drive your dog to an environment that is less of a risk. My recommendations are:
Industrial and commercial zones are everywhere, they offer a neighborhood type environment without all the neighborhood chaos.
Next to that try to find large less popular parks, or parks at less popular times. A park provides you with great line of sight so you can plan and avoid trouble.
Hospital grounds and school yards are the next type of location you can look into, but be careful as school yards often become unofficial off leash dog parks after hours and on weekends.
If you’re in a pinch you can search for Sniff Spots on the Sniff spot app.