Dog Owners Win Fight For Fido’s Rights

Since the city built a park just for dogs, Wally, a Labradorsharpei mix, has never been happier.<

“Dogs love to be with other dogs,” said Lisa Ennis, Wally’s human, as she watched half a dozen dogs run over the rough ground chasing tennis balls, rolling in the dirt and sniffing each other while their owners beamed.

It wasn’t always a dog’s life in Ashland.

Until just a few weeks ago, dogs weren’t allowed in any park in town, even on a leash.

“I felt like I wanted some of my tax dollars back,” said Ennis, who moved here three years ago from a suburb of New York with her husband, an architect. “My dog is something of an adjunct to me. It meant I couldn’t use public parks. It meant if he couldn’t go in, I couldn’t go in.”

Ashland is a picturesque town of about 18,000 in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. It is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which draws tourists in droves from February through October, as well as Southern Oregon State College.

When Election Day rolls around each year, Ashland stands out as a Democratic island in the sea of rural Republicans.

Yet for all its liberal leanings, the city didn’t allow dogs in parks.

One of the biggest reasons is that people don’t want to step in something unexpected. Then there’s the barking, the fights and the other things that happen when dogs get together.

Larry Roven, who wears a handlebar mustache and brings his dog, Hobo, to the park in a bicycle trailer, wanted to organize a Dog Day last spring but couldn’t find anyplace to hold it.

He had little trouble finding others interested in doggie rights. The last census showed 10 percent of the folks in town have a dog. The next thing you know, they had a committee.

“They were really resistant,” Roven said of the city. “They said stuff like, ‘Parks are for people, not for dogs.”’ He recalled one woman saying, “If you start letting dogs in, the next thing will be boa constrictors.”

Rather than take an existing park and let it go to the dogs, Ashland created a new one on the outskirts of town.

It isn’t much: a few acres of sloping ground with a rough stubble of mowed grass, a picnic table, a garbage can hung with cutout milk jugs for scooping up after the dogs, all surrounded by a wire fence. There’s a big old walnut tree, which the humans hope will shade them this summer, and a bush that the dogs have already staked out for their own use.

Trucks roll by in the distance on Interstate 5. Brown water burbles at the sewage treatment plant next door. A dilapidated building that was once a slaughterhouse stands nearby. Far off under the clouds, you can see the snowcovered slopes of Mount Ashland, the local ski area.

Ken Mickelsen, city director of parks and recreation, figures it all cost only $1,000, mostly for the fence to keep the dogs from straying while they’re playing.

It doesn’t even have a name.

None of that matters to the dogs and the humans.

“All I have to do is say, ‘park,’ and he’s all worked up,” Aileen Bergersen said of her mutt, Jet, who rolled in the dirt with Wally. “We have room for him to run at our house, but they don’t have the companionship. They love to get with the other dogs, as you can see.”