Community Solutions: Instant Dog Parks and Unfenced Dog Parks
Instant Dog Parks: Communities that desperately need cheap or free new off leash parks can simply re-purpose an underused tennis court as a new off leash area. Some communities have great success using pools, ice rinks, hockey rinks and tennis courts in the off season as makeshift dog parks. It is an inexpensive, practical, and quick way to solve a problem. Equestrian facilities, riding rings, warehouses, abandoned lots, tennis and basketball courts with cracked or poor surfacing, all make good off leash areas. For an example see an image of a converted baseball field at Joe Station Dog Park in Tulsa. Municipalities can offer a zoning variance and/or tax incentive, and liability waiver to anyone with a fenced pasture who is willing to let local dog owners use it. This along with allowing a property owner to install a donation box at the pastures gate provides incentive for a private land owner to help out the community at little cost to citizens and taxpayers. The constant traffic to and from dog parks can add safety to a community. The dog park at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C. was planned to deter local drug transactions and was successful in this endeavor.
Unfenced Dog Parks: Dog owners can find suitable off-leash space in many fenced dog parks and in a few unfenced areas where dogs are permitted off-leash. Prospect Park in Brooklyn is a national model for incorporating off-leash space without fencing, into a large multi-use park. Portland offers several unfenced off-leash dog areas with limited hours and restrictions. An unfenced dog park can present challenges to residents who live nearby or whose property abuts the park, especially if dog owners bring dogs that are not properly trained to follow commands.
Read more about this topic: Dog Park
Famous quotes containing the words community, instant, dog, parks and/or unfenced:
“I don’t think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.”
—Al, Reverend Sharpton (b. 1954)
“There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater ... suggest that he wear a tail.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One merit in Carlyle, let the subject be what it may, is the freedom of prospect he allows, the entire absence of cant and dogma. He removes many cartloads of rubbish, and leaves open a broad highway. His writings are all unfenced on the side of the future and the possible. Though he does but inadvertently direct our eyes to the open heavens, nevertheless he lets us wander broadly underneath, and shows them to us reflected in innumerable pools and lakes.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)