A Walk in the Park Dog Training Service

A Walk in the Park Dog Training Service A Walk In The Park training services offers training that is science based. We promote positive rein

Unfortunately, we have to cancel this morning’s group walk at Side Cut Park because of the rain. We were hoping the weat...
08/30/2026

Unfortunately, we have to cancel this morning’s group walk at Side Cut Park because of the rain. We were hoping the weather would cooperate, but it looks like we’re going to have a wet morning.

Hopefully we’ll have better weather next Sunday and can get everyone together for our walk then. Stay dry, and we hope to see you next week!

Someone called us recently and asked a very normal question: 'Do you offer a discount for the second dog?' We don’t. And...
08/29/2026

Someone called us recently and asked a very normal question: 'Do you offer a discount for the second dog?' We don’t. And the more I thought about it, the more interesting that question became. Nobody takes two dogs to the veterinarian and assumes the second exam should cost less just because both dogs belong to the same family. The second dog still needs to be examined. The vet still has to do the work. The staff still has to handle that dog, keep records and provide the same level of care. So why do we expect something different from daycare and boarding?

The second dog is still a dog. That dog still has to be checked in, supervised, moved through the day, cleaned up after and accounted for. Staff still need to know about health concerns, behavior, feeding instructions, medications, allergies and restrictions. The dog still takes up space in a playgroup or boarding area. If that dog needs individual attention, somebody still has to provide it. If the dog is boarding, somebody still has to feed, monitor and care for that dog overnight.

There are some efficiencies when two dogs come from the same household. There is one customer relationship, one reservation and one drop-off. But the actual work of caring for the second dog does not suddenly drop by 20 or 25 percent. If the price does, the cost has not disappeared. The business still has to bring in enough money to cover its expenses and maintain the margins it needs to operate. That means the customer bringing one dog may effectively be subsidizing the discount given to the customer bringing two. Discounts are not free. Someone still has to pay for the work.

And this gets to the biggest expense in dog daycare and boarding: labor. Yes, there is rent or a mortgage, insurance, utilities, software, repairs, equipment, cleaning supplies and all the other costs of running a facility. But what really eats the budget is people. Dogs need people to supervise them, move them safely, feed them, clean up after them, notice changes in behavior or health, keep records, manage groups, provide rest, handle medications, step in when something needs individual attention, and watch over them when they stay overnight.

Ten dogs do not require ten times the labor of one dog, but there is still a limit to how many dogs one person can safely supervise, and larger groups take more time to move, feed, settle, clean up after and monitor. More dogs also means more interactions to watch and more chances that one dog will need individual attention. At some point, adding dogs means adding another employee, another group or another rotation.

That is why big differences in daycare prices should make you curious. How many dogs is each employee responsible for? How much staff time is available when one dog needs individual attention? Are there enough people to rotate groups, provide rest, clean properly, handle meals and medications, and respond when something goes wrong? And if dogs are boarding overnight, is someone actually there caring for them through the night?

If a day of daycare is being sold for a dramatically lower price, ask what makes that possible. What kind of staffing and operating model supports that price? How much individual attention can each dog realistically receive? What happens when one dog needs to come out of the group or needs something extra?

The number on the price sheet only makes sense when you know what is behind it. Your dog is not just renting a spot in a room. Someone still has to do the work of taking care of that dog.

Sunday Pack Walk at Side Cut Metropark We’re getting together for another group walk tomorrow, Sunday, August 30, and yo...
08/29/2026

Sunday Pack Walk at Side Cut Metropark

We’re getting together for another group walk tomorrow, Sunday, August 30, and you’re welcome to join us.

We’ll meet at 10:00 a.m. at Side Cut Metropark near the Riverview Area playground, by the message board and drinking fountain. We’ll start walking at about 10:10. The walk usually lasts around an hour to an hour and a half, but there’s no need to stay for the whole thing. If you or your dog have had enough, you can turn around whenever you want.

Our group walks are a chance for dogs to practice something that can be surprisingly difficult: simply being around other dogs, people, movement, smells and all the other distractions of the real world without having to interact with everything they see. The dogs walk together, but we don’t have them greet one another. They get to notice the other dogs, settle into the walk and learn that being near another dog doesn’t automatically mean they need to go say hello.

The walk is open to dogs who can safely participate around other dogs and who can be handled comfortably by an adult. Please bring your dog on a collar or harness and a regular leash. We strongly discourage retractable leashes, prong or choke collars, and e-collars. Bring some water, treats and p**p bags too.

If you’ve been looking for a chance to get out with your dog, practice walking around distractions, or just spend a Sunday morning with a group of other dog people, come walk with us.

Sunday, August 30
10:00 a.m.
Side Cut Metropark, Riverview Area
1025 W River Rd, Maumee

We’d love to see you there.

Before the dogs come into the enrichment room, we have already changed the environment. There might be different objects...
08/28/2026

Before the dogs come into the enrichment room, we have already changed the environment. There might be different objects around the room, different textures on the floor, scents placed in several areas, food to search for, and sounds playing quietly from speakers or white-noise machines. Then the dogs come in. Finn sees a head of lettuce on the floor, grabs it and starts tearing it apart. Rosie comes in slowly with her nose down and starts working her way around the room by smell. Moose comes flying through the door and runs around for a while before he settles down enough to investigate anything. Later in the day, those same dogs might be playing with other dogs, resting, doing a training game, searching for food, spending time with a staff member or doing something on their own.

Compare that with a daycare where dogs come into a playroom in the morning and spend most of the day in the same group environment, with few changes in activity and limited opportunities to get away from the social activity. There is nothing wrong with social play. Social interaction is one of the five enrichment areas we use in our own program, and dogs can get a lot out of playing with other dogs. But social play is one kind of enrichment. It is not the whole thing.

I think of it a little like real maple syrup and table syrup. Table syrup takes one obvious thing people like about maple syrup, the sweetness, and builds the whole product around reproducing that. Both get called syrup, but they are not made from the same thing. Dog daycare can work the same way. Dogs playing together is the most obvious part of daycare, so it is easy to build the whole day around that one thing.

But enrichment is a lot broader than that. For decades, animal-welfare researchers have looked at what happens when animals living in human-controlled environments are given more chances to explore, forage, use their senses, manipulate things, solve problems, interact socially and make choices. Research with dogs has found that food searches, scents, toys, human interaction and changes to the environment can all affect how dogs behave and how they spend their time.

Choice matters too. A dog may want to play with other dogs. Later, that same dog may want to stop. Another dog may want to sniff instead of wrestle. Another may be tired and want to sleep. If a dog can play all day but has very little opportunity to get away from the other dogs or do something else, then the dog does not have much choice about that social interaction anymore.

That is one reason our daycare day is structured the way it is. Dogs play, but they do not spend the entire day playing. There are changes in activity and environment, quieter periods, rest, training, sensory experiences, food enrichment and individual activities. And when we set up an enrichment adventure, we do not expect every dog to use it the same way. Finn might destroy the lettuce. Rosie might spend ten minutes smelling one part of the floor. Moose might run around first and investigate later.

When you are comparing daycares, it is worth asking what your dog actually does between drop-off and pickup. Not just whether there are other dogs there to play with, but what else happens during all of those hours.

When something goes wrong, ‘Who did it?’ can feel like the obvious first question. But if that is the only question, you...
08/27/2026

When something goes wrong, ‘Who did it?’ can feel like the obvious first question. But if that is the only question, you usually do not learn very much. In dog daycare and boarding, a lot of good care depends on small things being done correctly, over and over again. Did the morning health check get completed? Did the right dog get the right food and medication? Were feeding instructions followed? Did belongings get placed in the correct bin so they go home with the right family? Did important information get passed from one shift to the next?

When one of those things does not happen the way it should, we need to know why. Sometimes a person made a mistake. That matters, and accountability matters too. But stopping there does not necessarily fix the problem. Was the procedure clear? Was somebody specifically responsible for the task? Was the area organized in a way that made mistakes more likely? Were two dogs' belongings too easy to mix up? Was there an interruption? Was there a second check that should have caught it? Those questions are not about making excuses. They are about figuring out whether the same problem could happen again.

If a feeding instruction gets missed, saying ‘someone messed up’ may be true, but it does not tell us whether the same thing could happen tomorrow. If a health check was skipped, we need to know more than whose initials are missing. We need to know what broke down and what would make that breakdown less likely in the future. That is the kind of accountability we want in animal care.

We also want staff to speak up when something is wrong. If they made a mistake, we want them to tell us. If a procedure is confusing, we want to hear that. If they notice another employee missed something, we want them to say so. A workplace where everyone is worried that speaking up will immediately turn into blame is not a workplace where people communicate well.

There is a human side to this too. Animal-care work can be emotionally demanding, and compassion fatigue is something our industry talks about for good reason. Being told you made a mistake is one thing. Feeling that every problem immediately becomes an accusation about whether you care or whether you are good at your job is another.

The answer might be more training, a clearer procedure, or another safeguard in the system. And sometimes, after looking carefully, you find that the process worked the way it was supposed to.

The goal is not to excuse mistakes. If something was done wrong, we need to know that. But we also need to know why it happened, whether the system played a part, and what would keep it from happening again. That is a lot more useful than deciding somebody is at fault and stopping there.

We just spent close to $10,000 on a backflow device. It is required, it has to be installed by people with the right lic...
08/26/2026

We just spent close to $10,000 on a backflow device. It is required, it has to be installed by people with the right license, and there are not many companies around here that can do the work. That does not exactly put you in a strong bargaining position. So, roughly $10,000 later, what changed for our customers? Nothing you can see. There is no new play equipment, no new room, no fancy feature. Most people coming into the building would have no idea anything had been done at all. It is just one of those things that has to work.

And there are a lot of those things in a dog daycare. We spend money on plumbing, heating and cooling, doors, floors, electrical work, drainage and all kinds of building improvements that nobody is ever going to get excited about. We spend money training staff. We travel to pet industry conventions because I want to know what other people are doing, what is changing, what new information is out there and, sometimes, what I absolutely do not want to bring back to our daycare. We spend money on software and IT because client information has to be protected and the systems we depend on every day have to keep working.

We also spend a lot of time trying to educate people about dogs and about this industry. Sometimes that means talking about the good parts. Sometimes it means talking about things the pet industry gets wrong. Sometimes it means admitting that we changed something because we learned more.

None of that is especially visible when you drop your dog off in the morning. And we are a small business. There is no large company behind us with a building department, IT department, training department and a pile of money set aside for improvements. When a bill like this comes along, we have to figure out how to pay for it. Sometimes that means borrowing money from the bank and paying interest on it.

I am not saying that because I expect anyone to feel sorry for us. We chose to do this. But the dogs playing, the enrichment activities and the pictures we post are only the visible part of what people are paying for. There is a lot underneath that. Much of it is boring, expensive and absolutely necessary, and if we are doing it right, you may never notice most of it.

If you had brought your dog to us ten years ago, parts of the day would have looked very different. People used to come ...
08/25/2026

If you had brought your dog to us ten years ago, parts of the day would have looked very different. People used to come into the lobby for drop-off and pickup. Dogs were on leash, sometimes standing only a few feet apart while their people talked at the counter. For some dogs, that meant barking, pulling, frustration, or anxiety before they had even made it into their group.

During the pandemic, we had to move drop-off and pickup outside. Once we did, we noticed how much calmer arrivals had become. We no longer had several leashed dogs waiting near each other in the lobby, people walking in and out, and all the activity that went along with it. When the pandemic restrictions went away, we had no desire to bring that part of the old system back. We saw calmer arrivals with curbside service, so we kept it.

We used to allow drop-offs and pickups throughout the day too. Over time, we started noticing what that did to the rhythm of the groups. A dog arriving at noon might come in fresh and excited just as dogs who had been with us all morning were starting to slow down. Pickups could stir everybody up again. Dogs learn the routines around them very quickly. A car pulls up, the pickup phone rings, someone heads toward the front, a leash comes out, a door opens, and suddenly dogs who had been settling are watching, moving around, barking, or following the activity. One dog reacting can get several others going.

Eventually we closed the lobby between 9 AM and 3 PM. That gave us a long stretch in the middle of the day when dogs were not constantly arriving and leaving. Groups could move through activity, quieter periods, rest, and the next part of the day without being interrupted every time someone came to the building. We saw the difference and kept the schedule.

It is also one of the reasons we stopped offering half days of daycare. Half days put those arrivals and pickups right back into the middle of the day. By then, we were also paying more attention to what happened between the active parts of the day. In our program, we want dogs to have the opportunity to be active, come back down, rest while other dogs are nearby, and then get up for the next part of the day. They do not need something exciting happening every minute they are here. Being able to settle during the quieter parts of the day is part of the experience too.

A lot of our changes have happened this way. We notice something, sometimes only after doing it the same way for years. We try a different approach and watch what happens. If the dogs are doing better and the day runs better, we usually keep the change.

There will probably be things we do differently a few years from now too. We are still watching the dogs, still learning from the way the day unfolds, and still willing to change something when experience gives us a good reason to.

One comment we hear from time to time after daycare is, 'He still has so much energy when he gets home!' Years ago, we m...
08/25/2026

One comment we hear from time to time after daycare is, 'He still has so much energy when he gets home!'

Years ago, we might have taken that as a sign that we had not done enough. A common way to think about daycare was simple: let the dogs play, keep them active, and send them home tired. If a dog slept the rest of the evening, that seemed like proof that daycare had worked. We do not look at it that way anymore. A dog who comes home exhausted may have had a great day, but exhaustion by itself does not tell us that. A dog can also be physically depleted after spending too much of the day highly stimulated, moving from one interaction to another without enough opportunity to stop, rest, and come back down.

Dogs need sleep and rest during the day. Rest is not wasted daycare time. We also want dogs to have opportunities to move between different levels of activity. A dog might play for a while, step away, rest, get up later and explore something, use his nose, participate in a training game, interact with dogs again, and then settle afterward. An all-day activity model can mean spending much of the day active and excited, with fewer opportunities to move back and forth between activity and rest. We want dogs to have opportunities to stop and settle before they are simply too tired to keep going.

We have also learned that trying to exercise all of a dog's energy away can become self-defeating. Exercise creates fitness. If the answer to a high-energy dog is always more running, more wrestling, and more physical activity, we can simply create a dog who is better conditioned for even more activity. That does not mean exercise is bad. Dogs need movement, and many dogs love vigorous play. But if all we do is keep adding more physical activity, we are not giving the dog much opportunity to practice stopping, resting, and settling between activities.

Our thinking about dog-dog social time has changed too. Playing with other dogs can be a wonderful part of daycare, but more play is not automatically better. Dogs also need to be able to pause, walk away from another dog, choose who they interact with, sniff, explore, and sometimes simply be around other dogs without constantly interacting with them. A dog resting at daycare is not necessarily getting less from his day than a dog who has been wrestling for hours.

That is why we now pay much more attention to the quality of the whole day. Did the dog choose to engage in play? Could he disengage when he was finished? Did he rest? Did he explore? Did he use his nose and brain? Could he settle after something exciting? Did he seem comfortable with the dogs and activities around him? Taken together, those observations give us a much better picture of the dog's day than simply looking at how tired he is when he gets home.

And daycare is not the right environment for every dog. Part of paying attention to the individual dog is being willing to recognize that too. Some dogs thrive in a social daycare setting. Others may do better with a different routine, fewer dogs, more individual activities, or something else entirely.

So if your dog comes home from daycare and still wants to take a walk, play with a toy, or follow you around the house, we do not automatically see that as a sign that he needed more activity. And if he comes home and sleeps all evening, we do not automatically take that as proof that the day was perfect either. We have changed how we structure the day because we now pay much more attention to rest, variety, choice, and the dog's ability to move between activity and calm instead of treating exhaustion as the goal.

You might love having dinner with friends, playing a sport, working on a craft, or going to a party. But would you want ...
08/23/2026

You might love having dinner with friends, playing a sport, working on a craft, or going to a party. But would you want to do any of those things for six to eight hours without a real break?

Enjoying something does not mean more of it is always better.

That is an assumption worth questioning in dog daycare. Daycare has traditionally been built largely around one activity: dogs interacting and playing with other dogs. And social interaction can absolutely be valuable enrichment. Many dogs enjoy it.

But it is only one way dogs can engage with the world.

When we talk about the five pillars of enrichment in our program, social interaction is only one of them. Dogs can also benefit from opportunities to sniff, search, explore, solve problems, manipulate objects, forage, learn, move, interact with people, and rest.

The problem is that social play is often the easiest thing for us humans to recognize as fun. A dog running, wrestling, chasing, and getting excited with other dogs looks like he is having a great time. It is active, visible, and easy to understand.

What we cannot know from that moment alone is whether the dog wants more of the same, or whether another activity, a quieter environment, or some rest would suit him better.

That is where we have to be careful about projecting our own ideas onto dogs. We cannot decide that because a dog enjoys social interaction, the best possible day must be as much social interaction as we can give him.

Dogs cannot tell us in words what they want. Their behavior gives us information we can work with.

One dog may repeatedly seek out social interaction. Another may do better in a smaller group. One may eagerly investigate every enrichment setup. Another may participate for a while and then lose interest. Another may seem to need help slowing down even though he would happily keep going.

None of those dogs is having the wrong kind of day.

We cannot know exactly what is happening inside a dog’s mind, and no group-care environment can respond perfectly to every preference. But we can offer more than one way to engage with the day, pay attention to what a dog’s behavior is telling us, and make reasonable adjustments when that behavior suggests he needs something different.

The important part is that we stop thinking of daycare as one activity that every dog should want in the same amount.

A dog can love playing with other dogs and still benefit from a break. He can enjoy his friends and also enjoy sniffing, searching, exploring, learning, or resting.

If we really want daycare to be dog-centered, we have to leave room for dogs to show us that there may be more than one way to have a good day.

There is something very different about dogs walking together compared with dogs simply being turned loose to play.On a ...
08/22/2026

There is something very different about dogs walking together compared with dogs simply being turned loose to play.

On a group walk, the dogs are moving in the same direction, exploring the same environment and sharing space without being expected to interact directly. They can sniff, look around, investigate new smells and sights, and gradually become comfortable being near other dogs while still having room to make their own choices.

That can be especially valuable for dogs who enjoy the company of other dogs but do not necessarily want close, high-energy play. Walking together can help dogs practice calm social behavior, build confidence in new environments, and learn that seeing another dog does not always mean they have to rush over and greet them.

And, of course, the walk itself provides exercise, sensory enrichment and a chance to experience a much bigger world than the same familiar neighborhood route.

We’re heading out again tomorrow morning, Sunday, August 23!

We’ll meet at 10:00 AM by the playground in the Riverview area of Side Cut Metropark.

Come walk with us and let the dogs explore Side Cut together.

Address

1920 Indian Wood Circle
Maumee, OH
43537

Opening Hours

Monday 6am - 9pm
Tuesday 6am - 9pm
Wednesday 6am - 9pm
Thursday 6am - 9pm
Friday 6am - 9pm
Saturday 6am - 9pm
Sunday 6am - 5pm

Telephone

+14199306229

Website

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