The Social Etiquette of Dog Parks
Dog parks are an intersection between man and dog; they are also an intersection between man and man. After observing, photographing, interviewing, and petting, I believe that you can learn a lot about how people interact with each other through the medium of dogs. When we look at the dog park's social dichotomy, we see it broken down into two groups: dog owners and non-dog owners. This binary can become infinitely more granular, but we will start there.
Dog Owners
In the average dog park, dog owners would make up approximately 90% of the people at the dog park, but due to this study being conducted on Zilker Park, a dog-friendly metropolitan park, dog owners only actually make up about 30% of the people in the park. This is important because the ratio has now drastically changed, making the dog owner a minority of the “dog park”. In Zilker Park, we break down the dog owner into two more groups: those who keep their dogs on leashes, and those who do not. This is an important diverging point in the differences between dog owner personas because off-leash dog owners have significantly more opportunities for focused social interaction than someone keeping their dog on the leash. Their dogs quickly run up to different groups of people, getting love and attention from strangers in the park, often causing the owner to come up to that group of people and get their dog, sparking a conversation. This creates the most central theme in the study: dogs are an unpredictable catalyst for conversation.
Leash vs. No Leash
Anything can happen with an off-leash dog. They roam the park freely, sometimes with their owner closely following, other times completely alone. This creates very unpredictable focused and unfocused interactions between dogs and people, and their owners and people. Out of over 50 dogs that ran up to us during our two fieldwork park visits, about 20 led to us having a focused interaction with the owner, where we talked to them about their dog, the breed of the dog, how cute the dog is, or how funny/zany/goofy the dog was acting, before saying our goodbyes and parting ways. I felt that this was a necessary part of the social etiquette of the park on the owner’s side, as it is important to acknowledge the people that your dog is interacting with. Obviously, it is hard to always do that, especially if your dog is making his rounds around the park and you cannot/are not trying to keep up. But if you are walking along with your off-leash dog and it stops to give some picnickers a sniff, I believe that good social etiquette requires you to at least say “hello” to that picnic and acknowledge them. While it may be a strange topic to harp on, I am only doing so because of how many people acted like we did not exist while we interacted with their dog. Many owners would continue walking without acknowledging our presence, likely just assuming their dog would catch up to them eventually. This to me is a violation of the unspoken etiquette of the dog park, yet it was surprising for me to see just how many people did this. It also forced me to reconsider what the social etiquette of the dog park should be, considering the fact that I am creating this definition while not even being a dog owner.
On-leash dog owners experience a bit of a paradox when it comes to focused interactions: they have the control to fully avoid social interactions with others, yet, when they occur, they cannot be avoided or ignored. When you are walking your dog on a leash, you two are bound together by the leash. This allows you to (semi) easily control where your dog is going and is able to go, giving you the power to avoid large groups of people, picnics, and individuals. For this reason, we saw significantly fewer dogs on leashes come up to us, as they were typically being walked by their owner and would just walk right past us, avoiding anything greater than an unfocused interaction and giving us a passing glance at best. This advantage of control brings a conundrum of entrapment, however, as you cannot separate yourself from your dog, or any situation it gets itself into. This means that if your dog walks up to someone while on a leash, you will be with it, and cannot avoid the interaction or avoid responsibility for any actions your dog takes. Because of this, the ratio of dogs on leashes (15) that came up to us to the number of owners we talked to (15) was one-to-one. It was impossible for the owner to be far enough away from us to ignore us, and we had brief conversations with all 15 of the owners whose dogs came up to us. This helped me conclude that while there were much fewer dogs on leashes that came up to us than unleashed dogs, the ratio of owners that spoke to us was significantly higher with leashed dogs. This means, that even though off-leash dog owners have the greater opportunity for focused interactions with others in the park, they do not take it as often as the leash using dog owners who cannot avoid interaction once they have been involved in it.
Conclusion
The social etiquette of the dog park is very interesting to me because dogs are such an unpredictable catalyst for interaction that almost anything can happen. There are many unwritten rules and different strategies that dog owners have in order to navigate the park. Due to the dog-loving nature of the non-dog owners at Zilker Park, dogs were almost always a positive catalyst for social human interaction, despite the unpredictability of dogs.
