The Great Lawn in Central Park became the Great Doggie Lawn…
For four days after the Global Citizens Concert, the fence around the great lawn was left down…and the dogs moved in.
I swear I could hear all the dogs say, “Best day EVER. And…why not every day?”
Those dogs have a good question. Why not every day?
Our dogs are no longer just pets. We know the power and pervasiveness of the human-animal bond that we have with our dogs.
Our dogs sleep in our beds, sit on our couches, comfort us when we cry, make us laugh when we most need it. They visit strangers in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, etc., to bring joy and therapy. They work to find, support, and guide their humans as various working and service dogs.
Don’t they deserve some of the fifty-five acres of the Great Lawn more often than just by accident after concerts.
I would imagine that morning dog-play won’t tear up the lawn any more than these huge concerts or any more than hundreds (if not thousands) of baseball cleats do every weekend during the season.
These four days when it was the Great Doggie Lawn were a civilized gift for dogs and their humans who live in an often emotionally and physically challenging city.
Why can’t the Central Park Conservancy give that gift more often by opening up the Great Lawn and other baseball lawns for dogs and humans, even if only occasionally throughout the year?
The year started out with the 
Then we saw the loss of Riley, a little Wheaton who loved the “paws up” command so much that she passed it onto her Golden sister before she suddenly passed away. She was even remembered by Santa this year when the rest of her pack went for pictures and he asked where she was. Riley’s sweetness clearly touched Santa, too.
that just wouldn’t quit – came at the end of her battle with a host of illnesses and left a not so mini-sized whole in her human’s hearts.
As if three were not enough HEART dogs to lose, one of the founding dogs, Hunter, left his family to cherish his memory and all of us the legacy of his work.
would visit together at the library the name confusion between the two made for a fun game with the kids when asking them if they wanted to visit Boo or Beau.
Maude was a seasoned veteran in the world of animal-assisted therapy. Always the trooper, she started fading when her sister Vesta passed and just wasn’t able to rally back to her old self after the loss.
The lovely Miss Torrie, a white German Shepherd Dog who had been a puppy mill breeding female only to be rescued for a new life as an animal-assisted therapy dog – and one of the greatest testing neutral dogs I have ever met – left her family on Christmas Day.
