Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to visit an offleash dog park--either with a dog or without--can recognize the importance of these facilities. A tired dog is a well-behaved dog, and allowing your dog to play freely with other dogs is an extremely easy and effective way to exercise your pet. For the weary owner of a high-energy puppy, all it takes is one visit to the dog park and suddenly, a new dog park advocate is born.

In addition to exercise, the benefit of socializing your pet--getting him or her used to encountering new people and animals, especially at an early age--is necessary in order to avoid aggressive behavior and to train your dog to behave properly in any situation. Even the non-dog owner has to appreciate well behaved, non-aggressive neighborhood dogs. Plus, the designation of specific areas for dog use means fewer dogs run offleash and leave waste in other public areas such as parks, baseball and soccer fields.

Most major metropolitan areas recognize the importance of fenced, offleash dog areas and have established these parks in several convenient locations, just as they would other types of public parks. Until recently, Raleigh has been the exception. Local citizens interested in exercising their dogs offleash have, in response, formed "defacto" dog parks where offleash dogs break the law and can interfere with other park/forest users.

PUP was first organized in 1999 when NC State University began actively ticketing dog owners who let their dogs run off lead at one "defacto" park, the Schenck Forest in Raleigh (click here for more information about Schenck). Bill Hornsby, the founder and leader of PUP, brought together frustrated dog owners to see if, as a group, they could convince Wake County and/or the City of Raleigh to create legal, offleash dog parks. To gather public support of this concept, PUP began circulating offleash dog park petitions and collecting signatures. Currently, we have approximately 3,000 supporters who have signed petitions and another 200 folks who have joined our e-mail list.

PUP members attend events like the Cary Dog Days to collect petition signatures, give presentations at park planning meetings to argue in favor of offleash parks, circulate dog park information packets to people involved in park planning, and search for potential park sites. PUP is responsible for the inclusion of an offleash dog park in the master plan for the Buffaloe Road Athletic Park. PUP also helped other groups such as the Cary Dog Park Club, the Friends of Millbrook Dog Park and Paws for Fletcher Park get their start.

Most of our energy over the past year has been focused on the following projects:

• Working with neighborhood organizations to establish dog parks at existing "defacto" dogs parks such as the Millbrook Exchange Park (for more Millbrook information, click here)
• Working with the Forestry faculty at NC State to improve relations between dog walkers at the Schenck Forest and other forest users (for more information, click here)
• Supporting other groups in Raleigh and Cary to establish dog parks.

Anyone is welcome to join PUP, and any and all help is appreciated. Simply send an e-mail to Bill via the "Contact Us" link on the navigation bar. If you'd like to join our Yahoo! Group, send us an e-mail or go to Yahoo! Groups and search for the "pupnc" group.

We always welcome your ideas, questions and feedback! Just use the "Contact Us" link to reach us!