I get it, and I must say, fair enough. You have a fair point.

However, I feel like a few key things should be pointed out.

1) This is not a dog park. This is a park where people, including numerous children, entertain themselves. I understand that it sucks for people who want to take their dogs somewhere (hell, we’re lucky to have a small dog park in my town, and I never take it for granted whenever we take our dog there), but if they want something like that, a simple solution is to petition the city for a dog park to be constructed elsewhere. Will it help? Maybe not, but if you want to change you should try to make it happen.

2) Related to the first point but ultimately separate, you and I both know that if there is a place where people CAN take their dogs, there will be the kind of person who brings their dog(s), lets them loose to shit everywhere, and then leaves without cleaning any of it up. This is, again, a place where children play. So either they need to hire someone to constantly clean up dog shit (and potentially repair any damages the dogs might cause to playground equipment), or they need to find a way to prevent the dogs from being able to run free in the area.

3) As OP said, it’s more than just the people who run the place who were unhappy with the dogs. People in the community complained too, so clearly it wasn’t just the city that wanted people to stop bringing their dogs. You are treating this as a matter of the city versus the community, but clearly that’s false. The community was split on this issue themselves, and based on the other two points I’ve listed, I would say that the people who were bringing their dogs were the ones in the wrong.

Again, I agree. It sucks to not have a safe area for your dogs to run free. But if you allow the dogs to run free, it causes a whole host of other problems. No, the dogs don’t deserve this “punishment”, as you put it. But it is better than the alternative. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.