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http://awalkintheparkoftoledo.com/

A Walk in the Park, 1920 Indian Wood Circle, Maumee, OH (2026)

08/31/2026

A dog owner tells me, 'I called him in from the yard. He looked right at me and went back to sniffing. He knew what I wanted. He was just being stubborn.' Most of us understand exactly what the owner means, and we might describe the same moment in much the same way. The observation and the explanation have been folded together so naturally that they sound like one thing.

The person called. The dog looked toward the person and continued sniffing. We can observe all of that. The dog may have heard the cue and may even have responded to it many times before, but 'stubborn' is still not something we observed. It is a judgment about why the dog continued sniffing. For now, we do not need to replace it with another explanation. We only need to notice that an explanation has been added.

We do the same thing when we say that a dog was jealous, felt guilty, was protecting someone or wanted to be in charge. There may be real behavior underneath each of those descriptions. A dog approached while another dog was being petted. A dog lowered their body when a person entered the room. A dog stood between a person and a visitor. Then we supplied a reason. Once that reason begins to feel like something we actually witnessed, we tend to stop looking for other explanations. 'The dog is stubborn' feels settled in a way that 'I called, the dog looked at me and continued sniffing' does not. The second account leaves us with questions.

When we are trying to understand a dog’s behavior, it helps to separate what we observed from what we added ourselves. A useful test is to ask what a camera and microphone could have recorded. They could record movement, posture, direction, sound and sequence. They could not record guilt, jealousy, defiance or intention.

Try this with one recent interaction with your dog. Describe it the way you normally would, then remove everything a camera could not have captured. What remains is what you observed. What you removed contains questions you have not answered yet.

08/30/2026

The Voices Beneath the Hill

Our travelers have entered the hollow hill, but nothing inside it can be trusted to remain where it belongs. Voices travel through the ground and walls. Familiar sounds emerge from unfamiliar places. Following what they hear only leads them deeper into confusion.

The way forward appears when they stop chasing every sound and begin using other information. Moving air reveals a passage. Physical evidence helps separate useful clues from distractions. In the final chamber, dozens of bells compete for their attention until the travelers change the environment itself, quieting the bells one by one and recovering another silver moonflower petal.

Friday’s enrichment invited the dogs into that same sensory puzzle. Motion-activated fans moved paper leaves and streamers through the air. Three tunnels passed beneath an uneven hollow hill, while PVC “roots” carried different combinations of sound, scent, food, or nothing at all. Cardamom and nutmeg first appeared on the scent wall, then resurfaced elsewhere in moving plumes of air, much as the misplaced voices reappeared throughout the story.

In the Bell Chamber, the dogs’ investigations changed what happened around them. When a dog chose to examine or manipulate one of the bells at ground level, a corresponding bell overhead became quiet. With each discovery, the chamber grew calmer until only the ancient bell and silver petal remained.

There was no correct tunnel and no required route. The dogs could follow a sound, investigate moving air, compare scents, change strategies, return to an earlier clue, or decide that something was not worth pursuing.

That kind of experience has an interesting connection to Shakespeare’s original theatre. Audiences did not have electronic sound systems or elaborate realistic scenery to create the enchanted forest for them. Language, live sound, visible movement, simple stage effects, and the audience’s own imagination had to make an ordinary stage feel like a place where the natural world had become unreliable. On Friday, our dogs entered a forest built in much the same spirit, through information that moved, changed, disappeared, and invited them to decide what it meant.

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!

08/29/2026

At last, we know what happened to the Moonflower.

Puck has finally explained himself, although “explained” may be generous. Oberon and Titania were already arguing over the flower when Puck decided the safest solution was to remove it from both of them. The roots fought back, Puck ended up in the fountain, the Moonflower broke apart, its five remaining petals scattered through the forest, and its golden heart disappeared. Then Puck tried a spell to quiet everything and accidentally stopped the night itself.
By the end of the chapter, the Moonwood Players have a new job. They must search for the scattered petals while Oberon and Titania separately hunt for the missing heart. But the forest is already changing. Paths no longer reliably lead where they should, voices are calling from the wrong places, and even familiar voices cannot be trusted.
That gave us a lot to work with for Thursday’s enrichment.

The dogs moved through rosin-paper paths toward tilted platforms and moving Moonflower petals. They investigated the scent wall and food activities, encountered cups that might contain a reward, a scent, or nothing at all, and followed scent trails that crossed the space rather than neatly telling them where to go. We also brought the strange voices from the story into the room through sound buttons placed near the floor. Like the Players entering the changed forest, the dogs had information coming from several directions and could decide what was worth investigating, what to pass by, and where to go next.

There is also something particularly fun about putting Puck at the center of this chapter.

To us, Puck is usually introduced as one of Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare’s first audiences had another layer available to them. Robin Goodfellow was already part of English folklore, a mischievous supernatural figure associated with tricks, confusion and sometimes helpful household work. So when Puck appeared onstage, many people were not simply meeting a new fairy. Shakespeare was taking someone they already knew from stories and giving him a part in his own strange version of Athens.

That makes Puck’s explanation here especially appropriate. He has caused an enormous problem while insisting, almost every step of the way, that what he did was perfectly reasonable.

And now the Moonwood Players have to clean it up.

Five petals are still somewhere in the forest.

The golden heart is missing.

And something beneath the ground has just roared.

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.

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.

08/28/2026

On Wednesday, our Midsummer Night’s Dream adventure reached The Flower That Broke the Night.

Puck finally handed Titania the silver petal he had been carrying through the Moonwood, and we learned what it belonged to. The Moonflower normally guides moonlight through the forest, keeps the paths where they belong, separates waking from dreaming, and carries the night toward morning. But its six petals and golden heart have been scattered. The moon has stopped moving, the paths are changing, and the longer the flower remains broken, the stranger the forest will become.

Naturally, Puck insists he had very little to do with any of this.

For the dogs, we took the broken Moonflower out of the story and built it into the enrichment room.

Six rolling platforms started together as the petals of a flower, each holding a food puzzle. As the dogs pushed, pawed, leaned into, and worked the puzzles, the platforms rolled apart. The dogs were not simply exploring a prop representing a broken flower. They were actually the ones breaking it apart.

Around it, green fencing and vine-covered arches created different routes into and around the Moonflower garden. Some dogs went straight through an arch. Others circled the outside first or tried another entrance.

Then we brought in Puck’s suspiciously “very private wind.” Hanging sheets of rosin paper surrounded another part of the room, with scent and treat pouches attached. When a dog approached, a motion sensor activated a fan and the paper began to move and rustle. Some dogs immediately investigated. Others stopped, watched, sniffed from a distance, and approached when they were ready. We also turned the mysterious wall from the chapter into a scent wall filled with different things to investigate.

One thing Shakespeare’s original audience may have experienced differently from us is the forest itself. We tend to picture fairies as charming fantasy creatures. For an Elizabethan audience, Robin Goodfellow was already a figure from English folklore, and fairies could belong to a much stranger and less predictable supernatural world. A forest where paths refuse to stay put, dreams wander into waking, the moon stops moving, and Puck may or may not be telling the truth would therefore have carried a little more unease beneath the comedy.

That mixture of curiosity and uncertainty is also what made this such an interesting environment for the dogs. They could investigate, manipulate things, follow scent, work for food, retreat, approach again, or decide that one particular part of the room deserved all of their attention.

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.

08/27/2026

Wednesday’s chapter of our A Midsummer Night’s Dream adventure was “The Flower That Broke the Night.”

In our story, Puck finally delivers one silver petal of the broken Moonflower to Titania. We learn that the flower’s six petals are supposed to guide the moonlight through the forest, keep the paths where they belong, separate waking from dreaming, and keep the night moving toward morning. Now the flower is broken, the moon has stopped moving, the paths are shifting, and Puck has an increasingly questionable explanation involving what he calls a “very private wind.”

We took those ideas into the enrichment room. Six rolling platforms began together like the petals of the Moonflower, each carrying a food puzzle. The dogs themselves made the flower come apart. A nose pushed into a puzzle, a paw landed against an edge, or a dog leaned into a platform, and suddenly one of the petals rolled away. Around it were vine-covered arches to investigate, our scent wall filled with things to find, and Puck’s private wind became hanging sheets of paper that began to move and rustle when a motion sensor switched on a fan. Some dogs went straight into the middle of it. Others investigated from the outside, followed the scent moving through the air, or took their time deciding what deserved a closer look.

There is a fun difference between the way we tend to see this world and the way Shakespeare’s original audiences would have approached it. We often picture fairies as tiny, pretty, harmless creatures. Robin Goodfellow, however, was already a familiar figure from English folklore, and Shakespeare’s fairies are mischievous, unpredictable and capable of throwing the ordinary world badly out of shape. A forest where paths change, the night refuses to end and Puck insists that an impossible wind really did happen would have been funny, but the folklore underneath the joke would also have been recognizable.

So Wednesday’s room was supposed to be a little strange. Things moved. Paths offered choices. Smells came from unexpected places. The Moonflower did not stay neatly assembled.

That was the point. The dogs got to break the night themselves.

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.

A Walk in the Park

08/31/2026

08/30/2026

08/30/2026

08/29/2026

08/29/2026

08/29/2026

08/28/2026

08/28/2026

08/27/2026

08/27/2026

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