Dog-park etiquette: an open letter to all of us
Bags, leashes, phones and the one dog who is 'friendly'. A gentle word about the places where we let the dogs run.
Dear fellow dog people,
We love you. We love your dogs. We would like to keep loving both, so we need to talk about four things.
The bag. You brought bags. We saw you pull one out. You even picked it up, which puts you ahead of a surprising number of people. Then you set the tied bag down on the path “to get on the way back,” and the way back never came. There is now a little green monument to you by the second bench. Carry it. The garbage can is forty steps away. If forty steps is too far, the can is still closer than the trunk of your car, where that bag would otherwise live until Tuesday.
The leash. An off-leash park is a place where your dog may be off leash. The parking lot is not the park. The trail you walk to get there is not the park. The soccer field next door with the under-7s practising is very much not the park. In both the City and the Township, the basic rule is simple: inside the posted off-leash area, run free; everywhere else, on a leash. Our off-leash page lists every official area we could source, so there is no need to improvise one.
The phone. We get it. The park is one of the few places a person can stand still for twenty minutes. But a dog park works on a quiet agreement that every owner is watching their own dog. When six people are watching their screens, nobody is watching the one dog who has decided the small fluffy newcomer is a toy. Look up. The group chat will survive.
“He’s friendly.” He may well be. The dog he is sprinting toward, ears back, has not been told. “Friendly” is a description of your dog, not a permission slip for everyone else’s. If someone leashes up and heads for the gate when yours approaches, call yours back. That is the whole etiquette, right there. Call your dog back.
Honourable mentions: the person who brings a toddler into the big-dog side and is shocked by big dogs; the person who brings a dog in heat; the person who brings treats and is then confused about why they are at the centre of a pack; and whoever keeps leaving the gate propped open with a stick.
To be fair to all of us, most visits are great. Langley has a lot of dogs and a good spread of places to let them run, from Uplands in the City to Yorkson, Routley and Old Yale in the Township, plus the regional parks. The regulars know each other’s dogs by name before they know each other’s. That is a nice thing about living here and worth protecting.
What would fix it
Nothing a council can do. This one is on us. Pick up, leash up at the gate, watch your own dog, and call them back when another owner looks nervous. Give it a month and the second bench will be a bench again.
Where to act
Find the official off-leash areas, the rules each municipality posts and who to call about a broken gate or a full bin on our off-leash dog parks page. If we have missed an area or got a rule wrong, tell us.