Barx Parx

Melissa, First off, I’d like to thank you for coming in to Barx Parx yesterday and for taking my call this morning. As I explained on the phone, our behavioral assessment is a process that takes approximately 20 minutes per dog, is completely free of charge and is used to determine the suitability of dogs for our dog park and accompanying services. I apologize that it has taken some time to respond to all of your reviews but I wanted to have the opportunity to speak with the trainer, review the video and call you to ensure that I fully understand the situation. Your assessment was at 3pm and you showed up at 2:15pm, which was 45 minutes earlier than your appointment was scheduled for. When your dogs entered the facility, they were barking loudly in the lobby for a few minutes when they arrived but we were able to move a few things around and free up a trainer to accommodate you within two minutes of your arrival. During the first step of our thirteen step assessment, we bring out decoy dogs to see how your dogs behave when exposed to other dogs. Nearly immediately after the decoys were introduced, your dogs started barking. Our trainer asked if they're normally this vocal. You said "Yes, whenever they're excited". The trainer proceeded to tell you that because of how talkative they are we might not be able to continue today and was cut off as she started to explain the reasoning behind her comment. You clapped and tried to get their attention but they continued barking until our trainer removed the decoy dogs. Once removed, our trainer informed you that we were going to discontinue the assessment due to being reactive to the decoys but she said that we can definitely reassess on a different day when the park is a bit more quiet and even suggested that we assess them individually. You said that they weren’t barking now so we brought the decoy dogs back out and your dogs proceeded to bark at them until they were removed again. The purpose of our assessment is to determine how good of a fit the dogs are for our environment. At no point did we suggest that there is anything wrong with your dogs, in fact our trainer stated that they were very friendly, just not a good fit for an indoor park if we aren’t able to manage their excessive loud barking. Loud barking can contribute to the stress level in the park as the other dogs become concerned about threats or even make other dogs fearful of large barking dogs. In addition to potentially causing other dogs (and people) to feel threatened and afraid it can also prompt high energy dogs to become even more energized, play harder, and that frenzied play can slide from the yellow zone to the red zone which is where scuffles and fights happen. That said, we do certainly allow intermittent, controlled playful barking as that is all part of canine communication and simply dogs being dogs. Our behavioral assessment process is documented and intended to be very thorough to control the safety of our environment for our members and their dogs. Unfortunately, we don't pass every dog and sometimes we do have to turn customers away because our environment simply isn't a great fit for their dogs but that shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on how good of dogs they are or how good of an owner you are. While we do stand behind our initial assessment, we'd be more than happy to re-extend the offer to schedule another assessment to see if we can try again another time when they might be less stimulated. As with this time, there would of course be no charge. Thanks!