Take Paws The official pet travel blog of GoPetFriendly.com

Following Up on Permit-Only Dog Parks

Please let me in!

Last week, I wrote a post about our recent stopover in Louisville that included comments about one of the city’s permit-only dog parks that we visited. Louisville has five permit-only dog parks: Champions, Cochran Hill, Old Louisville (under construction), Sawyer, and Vittner. These dog parks are gated and access is granted by entering a pass code into an electronic keypad. The cost of a 2010 dog park permit is $30.00 for the 1st dog, $20.00 for the 2nd dog, $10.00 for the 3rd dog and $5.00 per additional dog in the same household. Proceeds from the permit sales go towards the parks’ maintenance and improvement costs.

I wondered about the constraints such a system placed on people traveling with their dogs – people like us! The websites for all five parks have this advice.

VISITING LOUISVILLE?
Are you and your dog planning on visiting Louisville? If you will be visiting or passing through Louisville please email us at info@louisvilledogs.org to find out how your four-legged traveling companion can have access to the [name of] Dog Run. We do what we can to help give out-of-town visitors a place to allow their dog’s to stretch their legs. All we ask is that you contact us before you come to town, make sure to bring along your vaccination records with you, and email us after you’ve visited the park to let us know what you think. Also, be sure to email Metro Parks … and tell them what a great time you had at the [name of] Dog Run.

I was wondering about how tedious these arrangements might be, so I wrote to info@louisvilledogs.org and asked these questions.

1. What is the fee to use one of the permit-only parks for a day?
2. Does that fee allow you access to more than one of the permit-only dog parks?
3. What vaccination papers are required? Is a current rabies tag sufficient?
4. I noticed an electronic keypad on the gate at Cochran – how do we get an access code?
5. Do we need to meet someone in person to accomplish all of the above?

Someone got back to me a few hours later, and here is what he had to say:

Cool blog post.  I actually learned something from it because I’ve never heard of the Patterson Dog Park.  Also funny that you reference the Minneapolis permit system because that was one of the one ones we modeled our system after (the other was Indianapolis).  If we could avoid the fee system I think it would be great, but we don’t get any money from the city (or state to operate the Sawyer Dog Park) so we have no choice. Here are some answers to your questions below:

1. There currently isn’t a set up for one-day permits but if out-of-towners email us in advance we happily provide a code for them so they can access the park.  They just need to punch the code in those keypads that you saw and push the gate when they hear the click.
2. The code that we give people allows them to enter any of the dog parks that are operated by our organization.
3. We just ask people to bring along vaccination papers showing they are up-to-date on the usual things (rabies, parvo, etc.) just in case there is an incident.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Woof! Much lower barriers to entry than I would have thought! I would also imagine that the permit-only dog parks in Minneapolis and Indianapolis work the same way since Louisville modeled its system after these two cities. So, out-of-town canines rejoice … you, too, can play in these awesome parks with just a tiny bit of advance planning by your humans.