Thompson dogs now have a place where their human best friends can legally let them off their leashes at the Baffin Dog Park in Burntwood, which was officially opened with a ribbon-cutting Sept.
Thompson dogs now have a place where their human best friends can legally let them off their leashes at the Baffin Dog Park in Burntwood, which was officially opened with a ribbon-cutting Sept. 18, though it has been in use since mid-August due to popular demand.
“The dogs that come down here, they have a ball when there’s all the dogs here,” said Thompson Humane Society board chair Oswald Sawh, who did the honours of cutting the ribbon along with dog park user Wendy Saric and her Yorkie pom poo pal Bo. “We will have at times 10-12 dogs and they’ll be running together, they’ll be sniffing each other, they’ll be playing around and dogs just love it.”
Bo and his owners are big fans of the park, which gives the apartment-dwelling canine the opportunity to run free that dogs who live in homes have in the confines of their own yards.
Saric says she brings Bo to the park almost every day and that there are usually at least four or five dogs there when she visits, though Bo had the facility all to himself at the time of the ribbon-cutting. It hasn’t taken long for the park to become one of her pup’s favourite places.
“You say, ‘You want to go to the dog park,’ his ears go up and he runs to the door,” says Saric. “He knows what the dog park is.”
The transformation of an under-utilized baseball diamond into an off-leash park for dogs fits into the city’s master parks plan, said recreation and community services committee chair Coun. Erin Hogan in a news release announcing the grand opening.
“This new park will be a great benefit for our community and will give more recreation options to our residents,” she said.
The city provided the space, fences, landscaping and ornaments for the park, and will also provide maintenance such as garbage collection and provision of waste disposal bags. The Thompson Humane Society developed the park rules and policies and the signs to inform users of them.
Some of the landscaping touches were inspired and reflected a true understanding of what dogs like, said Sawh, singling out recreation director John Burrows as the brains behind including a couple of every dog’s favourite gathering places.
“They put those fire hydrants,” said Sawh. “Dogs love that.”
To ensure that the needs of dogs and their owners are taken into account and that any concerns are shared with the city, a dog park committee has been established by the humane society.
“We meet right after our monthly board meetings for the humane society and we have a list of things that we want to do in regards to the slow upgrades and additional stuff added to the park, like exercise equipment*,” said Sawh. “Whenever there’s concerns that’s what that committee would be tasked to do, to provide some advice and some way of addressing those concerns. Anyone who’s interested in being on that committee, they just have to email us at ths@mymts.net.”
The humane society hopes to use the park to host events like agility obstacle courses for dogs and Frisbee competitions in the long term, Sawh said.
* The original version of this article included the parenthetical addition “[for the people]” but Oswald Sawh has informed the Thompson Citizen that he was referring to exercise equipment for dogs. The Citizen apologizes for error.
