Buddy At the Dog Park

Ever since I took Buddy back to the dog park a couple of months ago, we have been making trips to the park on nice days because he seemed to love it so much. On nicer afternoons I’ll call Ryan when I’m leaving work and tell him to gather Buddy up so I can swing by the house and grab the two of them.

When we had Zoey, the two of them would play together constantly. I’m pretty sure that it was mostly because Zoey instigated it, but Buddy could keep up most of the time. After we lost Zoey, he really lost a lot of that energy that she brought out of him. Lately my cousin Michael’s dog Duncan has been staying with us, and even with him around Buddy’s still pretty mellow and more territorial then he ever was with Zoey – making it hard for them to really take advantage of having a live-in play mate.

However, when he’s at the park, Buddy become a whole new dog. He excitedly greats every new dog that comes in the park and does laps around the fenced in yard and occasionally will pay attention to Ryan or I long enough to play catch. Perhaps the biggest downfall about his behavior at the park is that he likes the little dogs. I honestly don’t think he recognizes how large he is because he will find the smallest dog in the park and run after them, smell them and want to play with them when there are a dozen other big dogs he can play rough with. Of course, he doesn’t realize he’s about 3 or 4 times their size, so when he tries to be a little rough they get scared and he looks like a bully. The poor guy.

An important thing to remember is that at the dog park there are two separate areas. One fenced in area for little dogs and one area for large breed dogs. The little dogs Buddy generally ‘bullies’ around are mistakenly in the large area, typically because there aren’t enough dogs in the little dog space to play with. Yesterday however, there were plenty of dogs at the park, so a few of the small ones filtered into the little dog space to play. In particular there was a little Chihuahua-looking dog with a frilly pink dress hanging out in the little dog area. It took Buddy a little while to notice her, but once he did, he wouldn’t leave her alone.

The two of them ran up and down the length of the fence together and he started barking like a crazy man. Not deep burly man barks like you’d expect, but loud ear piercing screeches. I couldn’t tell if he had just experienced love at first sight or if he wanted to climb over the fence and rip the dog to pieces. Either way, he wanted a piece of that poor pup. He was so drawn to her that we eventually had to leave because he had lost all interest in the park and the rest of the dogs that were there and wouldn’t leave the fence that joins the two sides.

I almost felt bad taking him away from something he seemed so attracted to.