Press Releases

It’s daybreak at Berkeley’s Ohlone Dog Park and the pressure is on Rebecca Denison.  

Her dog Sally is an unrepentant barker, and with a tenuous cease fire in the city’s dog park wars officially underway, Denison will try just about anything to mute her six-month-old mutt. 

Early Wedesday—day one of a six-month trial period establishing quiet hours at the park—Dennison affixed a citronella cartridge to Sally’s collar. 

“When Sally barks she gets sprayed and she doesn’t like the spray,” Denison said.  

The potion worked like a charm Wednesday morning. Sally and her six canine comrades were as quiet as bunnies as they chased each other around the dusty park grounds at Grant and Hearst streets. 

Owners of Berkeley’s estimated 35,000 dogs might need plenty of citronella if they want to keep early morning and late night access to the city’s only fenced dog park. After 25-years of persistent barking, bleary-eyed neighbors want to muzzle the nation’s first-ever dog park. 

“We’ve been living with this for a long time and we’ve tried everything,” said Claire Schoen, one of 97 park neighbors who signed a petition last year demanding changes at the park. Last weekend, she said a dog owner threatened to shoot her husband when he asked him to keep his dog from barking. 

“We have confrontations every day,” she said. “It ruins our mornings.” 

Neighbors argued that the park’s weekday schedule from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. often meant they woke up and went to bed to the sound of barking dogs. Besides demanding that the city reduce park hours, they wanted the city to install an automatically locking door to prevent late night trespassers. 

Denison, who takes her dog to the park before work, said closing the park in the early mornings would ruin her neighbors’ afternoons. “If she didn’t get her wiggles out here, she’d just bark in the house all day long.” 

Last spring, amid heated debate, the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission crafted a compromise resoluton. Park hours would remain the same on weekdays, but dog owners would have to observe quiet hours from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. On holidays the park would follow weekend hours and open at 9 a.m. If dogs started barking during quiet hours, the owners would have to remove them. If the owners refused, the police could be called to escort the dog out of the park. 

On Tuesday afternoon, the city placed “Quiet Hours” signs at the park commencing the six month trial period. 

Park users interviewed generally supported the compromise, but several leaders of the Ohlone Dog Park Association (ODPA) fear the quiet hours are nothing more than a stepping stone in the neighbors’ drive to reduce park hours or close the park entirely. And unlike previous battles, they fear city support has swung in the neighbors’ favor. 

“I really can’t see [the neighbors] stopping now,” said Doris Richards, who founded the park in 1979. “Who is going to say if the six-month trial worked? There’s still going to be barking. It’s not a Zen monastery for dogs.” 

Richards was around in 1987 the last time neighbors joined forces against the dog park. In that battle, she said the city council was squarely on the dog owners’ side. When the neighbors declined to attend dispute resolution, she said the council dropped the item. 

This time around, she and other dog park leaders are having difficulty getting the council involved. In March, at the request of Councilmember Linda Maio who represents the dog park neighbors, the council delegated the issue to the Parks and Recreation Commission with suggestions to limit park hours. 

Sasha Futran, an ODPA member, questioned why the council didn’t have final say over the Parks and Recreation Commission’s compromise plan and why resolutions passed by the Commission on Disability and the Citizens’ Humane Commission in favor of maintaining the current park hours weren’t initially sent to the city council. 

“It seemed like an awful lot of fuss and breaking city regulations on behalf of neighbors who never documented their complaints anyway,” she said. 

City Attorney Zach Cowan replied that Berkeley’s city charter allows the City Manager to set park hours, but that the council can choose to intervene.  

Shirley Stewart, who has lived near the park for 28 years, admits she is skeptical about whether the compromise can work. 

“The dog owners don’t understand what it’s like to live next to a dog park that’s open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t wake you up, it affects you anyway. The ear never closes.”