Dog owners, dog lovers, hiking groups, professional dog walkers, animal welfare organizations, local businesses, and open-space advocates are working together to preserve East Bay off-leash options. Join us!
Places where people can walk their dogs are under attack throughout the Bay Area and beyond.
In response, dog people have been coming together. Here are some of the things ALDOG has been up to — and we want to do more. Can you join us?
There are many ways you can help — from sending an email to a parks official, joining our beach cleanups, turning up at public meetings, tweaking our email database… all the way up to providing legal advice, doing research, meeting with key stakeholders, and working with us on strategy.
Please join the pack! Send us an email at albanycadogs@gmail. com. If you can donate $10 to help the cause, we’d love that, too! It’s not tax-deductible but it helps us with outreach, education, and park cleanups.
To learn more about the Albany Bulb, Albany Plateau, and Albany Beach off-leash issues, please click here.
And for a great book about the off-leash movement, check out Unleashed Fury by Julie Wash!
The past few years, in a nutshell:
- In 2011, East Bay dog advocates gathered 10,000 signatures in support of allowing dogs off-leash in undeveloped areas of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) and at the Albany waterfront. We began forming alliances with other dog groups in the East Bay and San Francisco Bay Area at large. On 20 December 2011, a coalition of four East Bay dog owner groups presented those signatures to the EBRPD Board of Directors.
- In 2012, ALDOG, Lamorinda Dogs, Oakland Dog Owners Group, Point Isabel Dog Owners, ARF (Tony La Russa’s Animal Rescue Foundation), the East Bay SPCA and The Bark met with EBRPD officials to explore ways to work together including education and training. ALDOG was very active in the park district’s Environmental Impact Review for the upcoming Albany Beach Restoration and Public Access Project and lobbied for continued off-leash options on Albany Beach. In April, we persuaded the park district’s Board of Directors to modify the new “200-foot rule” in Ordinance 38 (the policy that includes rules pertaining to dogs in the parks) to apply only “if posted.” (Otherwise dogs throughout the 114,00-acre park district would have had to be on-leash for the first 200 feet of every trail.) We began an informal program of beach cleanups.
- In 2013, ALDOG became a California Coastal Commission (CCC) adopter of Albany Beach. At three beach cleanups that year, in collaboration with the EBRPD, our volunteers removed 1,000 pounds of trash, plastics, cigarette butts, syringe,s and other debris from the beach. We also began building relationships with other dog owner groups in Central and Southern California.
- During 2014, we forged a very successful beach-cleanup-and-sand-globe-workshop collaboration with nature artist Zach Pine. We supported efforts to get the City of Berkeley to mow the Off-Leash Area (OLA) at Cesar Chavez Park against foxtails. With Friends of South Park Drive, ALDOG successfully negotiated official off-leash dog-walking privileges on South Park Drive in Tilden Park during the winter closure (November 1 through March 31) when the road is closed to motor vehicle traffic to protect migrating newts.
- In 2017, ALDOG coordinated the East Bay’s first big beach microplastics cleanup. Thanks to a grant to ALDOG from Alameda Countywide Clean Water Program and in collaboration with EBRPD, Sea Turtles Forever, the Albany Community Foundation, The Watershed Project, and others, our 115 volunteers sifted and removed 2,440 pounds of debris from the beach in just six hours.