Sad fate of a special place for dogs
New development destroyed space, spirit of Dogday Play School
They say every dog has her or his day, and you’d like to think it’s true, that there’s a little good luck, a taste of success, however fleeting, waiting around the corner for each of us at some time in our lives, and, yes, for our animal friends too.
Is it true? Probably not. Some dogs, it seems, never get lucky.
But, still, we’d like to believe. Maybe that’s why Vickie Venturelli called her business Dogday Play School. Yes, a school, so to speak, for dogs. No, not a kennel. They’d come in the morning; then, at 5 or 6 o’clock, to paraphrase Teddy Bears Picnic, their (human) mommies and daddies would come to take them home, because they were tired little (and big) doggies. From a day of happy play and stimulation.
Vickie brought me a bag stuffed with albums of coloured photographs from 14 years of owning Dogday.
The pictures fit together, as I apprehend them now in memory, as one integrated scene, to suggest broad reaches of green and woods, foliage, farmer fields and big sky, almost painterly in its loveliness. The nature and freedom of it, the “beyond” that developed from the threshold of Vickie’s large backyard.
It was where Vickie walked the
many dogs of her clients, up to 30 of them at the business’s peak; it’s what her dogs saw and felt, even as they cavorted among the play structures and features in the yard.
So why would she send me an email with “hurting in mind and heart” as the subject line? If her clients’ dogs were “having their day,” as it were, so was she. She’d had her bumps, but when she graduated from a Mohawk business course in 2004 and launched Dogday, part of a startup program, she was flying.
But Dogday Play School looks nothing now like it did two years ago. In September 2016 — Vickie remembers it vividly — “I woke to the sound of the Tree Killer machine. Its purpose is to devour trees to pulp, and any living ... thing in its way was gone. It worked savagely on the bush and land around.”
That’s how it started. Over the next two years, a new 92-unit townhouse development rose up where the sprawling fields had been. New structures changed the skyscape. Almost all the trees
are gone, even the maple where the monarch butterflies would stop on their migration.
It wasn’t just that the buildings went up (a Losani project, but I suppose it could’ve been anyone); it’s what happens during a construction period; by its nature, devastating. All dirt, rubble, dust and rebar; animal habitat disturbed, and, consequently, displaced mice, rats and even weasels — six weasels once ended up in Vickie’s house. When the rains came ... mud. So much mud. And flooding.
Vickie showed me other pictures. In them the property she rents, intersection of Garner and Glancaster roads, sits in a sagging landscape, stripped bare and sopping wet, like the wasteland trenches in the First World War. At one time, her basement was full of mud.
Her yard, once on a level with the surroundings, is sunk five feet below the grade, and there’s a concrete wall around it.
But it wasn’t just the construction. At the same time there had been a gas line dug up near the front of her house. There’d been a road closure for major work along Rymal where it turns into Garner. It all added to the “disaster area” feel.
To top it off, after years of doing good business, she started getting fined by Hamilton bylaw. All of a sudden, they started saying Dogday Play School is a kennel, and for that she’d need a bigger space but, she counters, it’s not a kennel. There’s no staying overnight.
It didn’t matter. Bylaw, it seems, has no category for what Vickie does. The fines kept coming. So now, with all that’s happened, she’s down to three or four dogs.
Vickie is indeed “hurting in mind and heart.” She tells me, “They (the dog owners) were heartbroken. Some (dogs) have passed away since and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I don’t like to go outside. In my brain, I’m finishing the business. I’m dismantling the structures.” Ramps, ropes, play equipment.
She knew the development was coming, not when she started, of course, but in recent years. It was by the books. She never dreamt the effect would be so profound. She says she’s disappointed so little was done to help, by city council, bylaw, others ...
Still, she’s not giving up. She’s determined there’ll be another day, some different luck. She’s considering another property where she hopes to start a kind of canine water park.
Regardless, it just seems sad, maybe inevitable, but sad. Not to affix blame, but still sad. Maybe what replaced it was worth it — who knows? — but something that worked, something that was good, got lost.