Don’t Worry, She’s Friendly!

It was a bichon frisé that pushed Krista Kais-Prial over the edge. On a Tuesday morning this past April, the employment lawyer and mother of two found herself juggling parenting and work, so she headed to Humewood Park to let her two-year-old daughter blow off steam. A tree-lined patch of green just north of St. Clair and west of Bathurst, Humewood is expansive for a neighbourhood parkette, with gentle slopes and a winding path where locals walk their dogs. Kais-Prial’s toddler was playing with a few other kids in the playground when a small white pup resembling a balled-up Kleenex ambled by, off leash. Toy breeds are called toys for a reason—once the cluster of children spotted the sentient stuffie, they beelined for it.

The toddlers’ erratic movements freaked out the bichon, which started backing away. The owner, standing a few feet behind the dog, scolded the children: “Gentle, gentle!” she tsked. While her dog cowered, tail between his legs, the woman made no move to leash him. Instead, she doubled down, pointedly repeating, “Gentle, gentle!” as she glared at the kids. Kais-Prial, bristling, told her that a loose dog in the park violated city bylaws. The woman lobbed the complaint right back: “It’s against the bylaws!” she fake-whined. Rather than remove her dog from a simmering situation, she suggested that the kids were the ones who should be controlled.

Kais-Prial was livid. It wasn’t that the bichon seemed like a serious threat, though it’s impossible to predict what even a small dog might do when it’s scared. And it wasn’t just the scuppered social contract or the bylaw violation or even the petty mockery. This exchange was part of a pattern—a reflection of a neighbourhood that was increasingly overrun by dogs. That same month, the gates to the nearby Vaughan Road Academy had been locked after-hours because of rampant digging and pooping. At Cedarvale Park, a few blocks away, Kais-Prial and her kids had been herded up a hill by an overzealous standard poodle gnashing its teeth. A friend of hers, after asking a man to leash his dog in that same park’s ravine, was met with an aggressive “Fuck you, Karen!” But, most of all, Kais-Prial was haunted by thoughts of another friend’s young daughter who had been mauled by a pit bull mix on Kenwood Avenue, a few streets east of Humewood Park. She couldn’t shake the horror of what had happened to the child—or the knowledge that, before the attack, the animal had sauntered, untethered, through the neighbourhood.

Kais-Prial refused to back down. She pulled out her phone and dialled 311, loudly informing the agent on the other end that a dog owner was breaking a bylaw. The woman grabbed her bichon—still no leash in sight—and stormed off.

Within hours of the altercation, Kais-Prial posted a Facebook message in the Oakwood Families Group calling for a hyper­local “subcommittee” to compel the city to enforce off-leash bylaws at Humewood. By the next day, her group had nearly 30 members eager to advocate on behalf of their ­neighbours—and all ­Torontonians—who want to spend time in a public park, take their kids to a playground or just stroll down a sidewalk without having to worry about being charged by a free-range dog. When I met Kais-Prial at the end of that turbulent week, on the patio of a coffee shop near Humewood Park, she was still visibly rattled. The experience, she says, ignited something inside her. “Parents either say nothing, and their children are at risk and these people get a pass, or you say something and get into a yelling match in front of your kids. I needed to do something constructive.”

Humewood Park itself is a product of ad hoc community activism: in the mid-1970s, after nearly a decade of resident pushback, the city bought back the land from developers who had planned to erect high-rise apartments on the site. The park is proof that there’s power in numbers. Kais-Prial knows that a single voice of dissent can be easy to dismiss, but get enough voices shouting in unison and the right people may start to pay attention.

She isn’t anti-dog—far from it. She has a boisterous Bernedoodle at home, and before her kids were born, he was her baby. Ultimately, her Facebook call-out wasn’t about the run-in with the bichon owner—it was the culmination of countless lousy canine encounters. And hers are only a small fraction of the conflicts playing out across a cash-strapped, space-deprived city that forces neighbours to live cheek by drooling jowl with bad dogs and worse owners.

Ten years ago, there were some 300,000 dogs in the city—roughly one pooch for every 10 people. Since then, Toronto has grown exponentially, and so has its dog population: based on recent national data, the city is now home to 610,000 canines, more than one and a half times the number of children 14 and under. Included in that figure is the deluge of dogs, many of them from rescues and shelters, who were acquired during Covid lockdowns. Canadians reportedly adopted 200,000 dogs between 2020 and 2022, pushing the country’s official canine population to nearly eight million. As more and more millennials and Gen Zers opt for pet parenthood over actual parenthood, the divide between the number of dogs and the number of children will only grow. The reasons vary—climate anxiety, precarious housing, shifting social mores—but finances play a big part: these days, having a child costs on average $17,000 annually, while raising a dog rings in at $650 to $4,500 per year.

Condo dwellers once exasperated by the elevator-cramping strollers, piercing shrieks and horseplay that come with toddlers now have to deal with howling, rambunctious dogs. Toronto’s condos and high-rises can include as many as eight canines per floor, which comes out to dozens upon dozens of dogs per building with not enough private green spaces where they can run free. The city has 81 off-leash areas—eight more than there were five years ago—but their planning and oversight are haphazard. Throw in the pace of residential development in already dense neighbourhoods and it’s hardly surprising that opposing factions are at each other’s throats—sometimes literally.

The neighbourhood of Humewood-Cedarvale, where Humewood Park is located, isn’t the city’s only hot zone for dog-related showdowns. In Spadina–Fort York, 88 per cent of residents live in high-rise buildings, including the 30-tower CityPlace complex. In 2017, the CityPlace residents’ association pushed for an interim enclosed off-leash area while the city laid the groundwork for a permanent spot within a new two-acre park. But that temporary solution was far too modest—it could accommodate only 15 or so small dogs at a time—and was objectively gross: pooled water, poor maintenance and overcrowding resulted in an alarming accumulation of urine and feces. So some dog owners started using the nearby sports field to exercise their pets leash-free, sparking a series of dust-ups. In 2019, for example, an aggravated CityPlace resident named Arthur Melon had his phone smacked out of his hand by a dog owner when he started filming in an effort to shame a group of them off the field.

And then there’s the anarchy of the Trinity Bellwoods dog bowl. Last year, restaurateur Jen Agg posted a multi-part Insta­gram story after being bitten on the butt by a large shaggy dog while she was walking through the park. “This Lululemon yoga mom did nothing to stop it,” says Agg. The painful nip broke the skin and caused some bleeding, but the ensuing interactions were more traumatic: the dog’s owner embarked on a Kübler-Ross-worthy emotional journey, progressing from flat denial to full-on weeping, forcing Agg to comfort the very person whose animal had attacked her.

Shock and frustration aside, Agg’s Bellwoods butt-bite debacle was relatively minor compared with other recent cases. In May of 2023, a student at Rawlinson Community School, near Oakwood and Rogers, was seriously injured by a dog who was roaming the schoolyard after-hours. The following month, a six-year-old girl was attacked while walking with her mother in Scarborough. And a month after that, East York resident Cara van der Laan was mauled by a pair of bully-breed dogs during an evening stroll near Mortimer and Greenwood. In February of this year, while waiting at a bus stop in Rexdale, a 54-year-old woman named Anita Brown was knocked to the ground and badly bitten on the face and arm by two bulldogs who went on to attack a cyclist. A few weeks after the attack on Brown, a nine-year-old was hospitalized with injuries described, chillingly, as “life-altering” after being mauled by an off-leash dog in Little Norway Park, near Bathurst and Queens Quay. The offending animal, an American pocket bully named Capo, had been involved in an attack on a dog and its owner in 2021, and Toronto Animal Services had subsequently issued a dangerous-dog order. Capo’s owner, Patrycja Siarek, was required to keep the dog muzzled and leashed in public. Following the attack in Little Norway Park, she was charged with multiple counts including criminal negligence causing bodily harm.

Last year, Animal Services received 2,726 calls to investigate potentially dangerous altercations. In response, city staff asked that the 2025 budget earmark $500,000 for awareness efforts. City council has ramped up its dangerous-dog protocols, making the dangerous-dog database public for the first time. As of early June, the database revealed 346 offenders—from Ace to Zorro—reported for bites, maulings and other serious altercations since 2017. While German shepherds and American bulldogs topped the list at 12 per cent each, 10 per cent of orders were imposed on Labrador retrievers, the archetypal man’s best friend. For what it’s worth, only one of the dogs was a bichon.

The number one ward for dangerous dogs in the city is Toronto-Danforth, followed by Scarborough Southwest and Beaches–East York. Fourth on the list is Toronto–St. Paul’s, the area housing Humewood Park and the much larger Cedarvale Park. The latter, which sprawls diagonally northwest from Bathurst and Vaughan, includes a ravine, wetlands, tennis and pickleball courts, a cricket pitch, a splash pad, a playground, and other facilities, but its fenced-off leash-free space is the park’s defining feature, for better or—mostly—for worse.

At Cedarvale, the off-leash ethos extends to all parts of the park, not just the delineated section. “Parents have stopped taking their kids there because dogs have knocked them over, taken their food or surrounded them barking,” says Kat Hannivan, a frank but friendly former dog walker who owns two German shepherds and a company called the Tired Pooch, which specializes in positive training for reactive dogs.

There are hundreds of Facebook and Reddit posts detailing the problems at Cedarvale. Dog owners who leash their pets no longer frequent the trails for fear of being charged by untethered animals; older residents unsteady on their feet are too nervous to risk walking through the ravine. “It doesn’t matter if the dog owners say their dogs ‘are friendly’ or ‘don’t bite,’” one 80-year-old wrote. “A fall for a senior can have serious consequences.” In the Toronto Dog Park Community Facebook group, members commiserate over the state of Cedarvale. (“Lots of fights, lots of poo, I don’t go anymore because of it,” reads one cogent summary.) They also periodically revisit a litany of gripes about the poor planning and endless construction that hampered their use of the off-leash area—including a notorious shelter built by the city for more than $135,000 that had to be torn down because it was so low that most adults couldn’t huddle under it without bumping their heads.

In theory, designated dog parks should help facilitate the peaceful sharing of space, but subpar offerings and badly behaved pets have made that impossible. So off-leash dogs and their owners opt for the next best thing: schoolyards, parkettes and sidewalks. Hannivan is 31 and has lived in Humewood-­Cedarvale her entire life, but she’s planning to move by the end of the year. She’s sick of undisciplined dogs and their unbearable owners, so she and her German shepherds are heading to another neighbourhood in search of abundant green space and a bit of peace.

Off-leash clashes are an inevitable symptom of the existential condition of living in Toronto, where there are more people and more dogs than ever but not nearly enough green space for all of us. Tensions are seething, a situation that’s been half a century in the making. Relations between dog owners and everyone else were bad enough in the 1950s that parks commissioner Tommy Thompson suggested banishing dogs from the city’s parks and the Toronto Islands altogether. A dog’s right to run free was still a hot-button issue during mayor David Miller’s tenure, and in 2007 the city’s new off-leash parks became NIMBY lightning rods. By 2013, there were 59 parks in place and another five under development. That same year, wealthy homeowners with places backing onto North York’s Ledbury Park grew apoplectic over the noise emanating from the dog run. In 2014, Baird Park, near Keele and Annette, was the site of a battle royale between dog owners and disgruntled residents: police were inundated with noise complaints about the off-leash pen, which was briefly shut down after a walker discovered chocolate, which is toxic to dogs, buried in the mulch.

Irate residents of all stripes have frequently opted for vigilante measures. For years, an occupant of an apartment building close to Wychwood Barns found myriad ways to convey her fury at the barking throngs in the nearby park. When her incessant calls to her city councillor didn’t stop the din, she screamed at dog owners. She was also suspected of attaching her bike lock to the gate to block public access. In March of 2023, city staff put up signs by the entrances to off-leash areas at both the St. Andrews Playground, near Spadina and Adelaide, and the Huron Street Playground, in the Annex, instructing users to curtail “excessive” barking. The outcry at St. Andrews over this subjective and impossible-to-enforce directive was so loud that the city took down the signs within 24 hours.

Predictably, anti-dog vigilantism has dark consequences. In 2004, one dog died and 16 became ill after eating hot dogs laced with agricultural insecticide in Withrow Park. Four years later, there was a rash of dog deaths in Etobicoke, likely linked to toxic substances planted in Delma Park. And in March of this year, police issued a warning after several dogs became seriously ill from eating poisoned peanut butter near East York’s Taylor Creek.

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A luxury hotel near Barrie has a pet taxi for pups who need to be shuttled to and from their homes

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Meanwhile, the city was busy looking for ways to make urban life more dog friendly: in 2020, it encouraged building developers to adopt a set of design guidelines. These include checking to see whether ventilation grates are “paw-friendly,” adding dog-wash stations and facilitating access to “pet relief” (making sure a desperate dachshund, say, can get to a sanctioned pee spot in a pinch). But, on the flip side, the increased canine presence prompted more stringent rules from condo corporations, mainly related to noise. In 2021, a downtown condo resident named Bella Shen was slapped with a bill from building management for $850 in “lawyer’s fees” tied to complaints that her dog was too yappy.

Landlords of rental units in the province can’t technically reject or eject tenants because they have pets, but Ontario’s Condominium Act doesn’t prohibit pet bans. Condos are also free to apply breed and size restrictions, with some exceptions. In 2023, a condo resident named Monika Karnis was told to get rid of her service dog, a 60-pound German shepherd trained to help with Karnis’s vertigo. She appealed to Ontario’s Condominium Authority Tribunal, which ruled in her favour.

The question of needs versus preferences is at the heart of Toronto’s current dog wars. The Human Rights Code naturally doesn’t extend to canine citizens, but with animals increasingly functioning as family members, many owners maintain that their own well-being is tied to their pets’ quality of life. They argue that sniffing, barking and exploring freely are part of a dog’s essential nature. But so are nipping, herding and chasing prey—all winning qualities on a farm but a recipe for disaster near a playground. I should know: for the past 12 years, I’ve shared my life with Violet, a profoundly neurotic Jack Russell terrier mix. Her anxiety is triggered by most aspects of the modern world, save for rodents, which she dispatches with a lethal combination of bloodlust and hyperfocus that would have made her a hot commodity on the 19th-century British badger-rousting circuit. I’ve strived to be an exceptional urban pet owner: ample socialization, exposure to stimuli, puppy school, specialized agility classes. But all that nurture plus a heroic load of SSRIs are no match for her nature, which includes a tendency to go berserk when another dog is in the vicinity. I’m acutely aware of my dog’s particular challenges, and I know which situations to avoid. But I—and, by extension, Violet—also have the privilege of a fenced-in yard on our property, tiny though it may be. Without that option, we’d have to navigate the city streets far more often, which for Violet would be like negotiating a minefield.

Dog wars are being waged all over North America. In California, the number of ER visits for dog attacks jumped 32 per cent between 2020 and 2022. Short-staffed animal services departments have suggested that people carry air horns. A recent Rolling Stone story touched on the boiling rage directed at New York’s pooch population, invoking the words of actor Chloë Sevigny to crystallize the issue. “Everyone’s in Lululemon and has a fucking dog and it’s driving me crazy,” she told the interviewer. “I’m sorry, dog lovers. There are too many of you.”

It’s not just that more of us own pets—it’s that the way we care for them has fundamentally shifted. According to a recent survey of childless-by-choice millennial women published in Psychology Today, a third of respondents believed that caring for a pet would be more rewarding than raising a child. Nearly three-quarters of those polled said they’d much rather spend time with their dogs or cats than with children, and 70 per cent were adamant that those dogs or cats are their children. No wonder they think their pets deserve the same rights and freedoms we afford our human offspring—not to mention the same frivolities.

A thriving industry of canine-focused capitalists has emerged to meet the demands of indulgent pet parents in the GTA, who now have multiple options if they want to organize a birthday celebration with their pup’s pack. For $190, you can book two hours of indoor-outdoor frolicking at Doggie Playland in Etobicoke. Birthday “pawtys” at Trinity-Bellwoods’ Treat Bar include goodie bags and custom themes. The Ossington hangout Sweaty Betty’s—a human watering hole—now features a bar-within-a-bar for dogs that includes dog treats, a water station and a TV playing canine-themed movies like 101 Dalmatians. Instead of simply providing dog-friendly accommodations for owners, there are hotels exclusively geared to canines: Royal Pets, a luxury pet hotel near Barrie, offers a day “spaw” and a pet taxi for pups who need to be shuttled to and from their homes or—almost ­unbelievably—the airport. And this fall, a private indoor dog park called Hound House is set to open on Queen West, appealing to protective pet parents willing to dish out $150 a month for a curated guest list of well-socialized, vaccinated, and neutered or spayed dogs.

These over-the-top services are driven by economics, but they’re also meeting an emotional need. If our dogs provide the meaning and validation we’ve been conditioned to derive from raising children, treating them like cosseted almost-humans makes a twisted kind of sense. Yet, when it comes down to it, a dog is just a dog. And most experts agree that dogs benefit from socializing with other dogs—running and tussling and sniffing and barking with their peers can remind them how to be a dog. Does organizing a meticulously planned playdate really fall into that category? It’s a person’s prerogative to engage with their canine companions as progeny rather than pets—they just can’t expect others to comply. As Kais-Prial says, “I was a dog mom before I was a mom. But my babies are my babies and my dogs are my dogs.”

If there’s any hope for a détente in the current conflict, it lies in the growing influence of neighbourhood groups like Kais-Prial’s and the widespread horror and condemnation in the wake of episodes like the brutal Little Norway mauling, both of which apply pressure on lawmakers to fix things. At city hall, many developments on the dangerous-dog front have been driven by Paula Fletcher, the councillor for Toronto-Danforth, who was spurred to action after one of her constituents was attacked by two dogs last year. Toronto Centre’s Chris Moise is coming at the problem from another angle: he’s advocating on behalf of the barking masses.

In Moise’s opinion, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners. He’s still mourning the recent loss of his late Jack Russell terriers, Oscar and Ollie; it’s partly in their memory that he runs a small pet store on Front Street catering to animals with specialty diets. Moise feels bad for Toronto’s space-starved dogs and wants to carve out more quality places for them to run free, so he put forward a motion last fall to implement a master plan for dog parks. Loosely, he’s in favour of more oversight, infrastructure improvements and better geographic distribution, but when pressed, he’s short on details. Right now, Moise says, he has staff looking to other municipalities and consulting local stakeholders to develop a framework. One of those stakeholders is Tracy Loconte. A real-estate lawyer by day, she fosters dogs in her spare time. She is also the founder of Paws for Parks, a volunteer-led group that promotes environmentally and socially responsible dog-walking.

Most of the people I spoke to for this piece doubt that new off-leash areas will solve Toronto’s canine-human tension. For one, parks can be a hotbed of terrible behaviour, instigating skirmishes between reactive pups and their lackadaisically trained or aggressive peers. And ultimately, owners tend to prefer wide open spaces to tiny fenced-in zones. “I get it,” says Loconte. “What’s more joyful than watching a dog romp through a lush forest? But the rational part of your brain needs to take over. How would that affect people who aren’t comfortable around dogs? Also, if everybody in High Park did that, it wouldn’t look like a lush forest.” Even now, the hordes of dogs stampeding outside the park’s off-leash area have left their mark: paws and pee have eroded the sandy soil in sections earmarked for conservation; there are exposed tree roots, hills worn away by digging and an influx of invasive plants inadvertently carried in by the dogs.

I asked Moise whether implementing off-leash spaces in existing parks will just result in more scenarios where the lines between the designated zone and its surrounding areas have blurred. Perhaps we need to change our mindset, he countered. The question reminded him of how he used to bring his terriers to the East Coast so they could walk on the beach and play in the ocean. “Dogs here miss out on a lot of those things,” he said. Maybe it’s okay to let a dog walk off-leash on a wooded trail, he said. Maybe it’s a bit like suburban sprawl: there are areas where people keep building into nature, and then they complain that the bears and the coyotes are coming into their space. “Meanwhile,” he added, “they were there first. A dog’s not a bear, but it’s an animal too.”

Nobody wants to believe their beloved pet could kill. But even dogs who’ve never shown signs of hostility have the capacity for aggression. When Kais-Prial’s friend Elena and her daughter, then seven years old, were walking home from school one afternoon in November of 2022, they had no idea that the sleek-coated pit bull mix charging toward them had attacked before.

The little girl had been scared by a dog as a toddler, so Elena—who requested a pseudonym due to an ongoing criminal case against the pit bull’s owner—held her hands in front of her daughter to protect her and told her to stay calm to avoid provoking the dog. But it lunged anyway. Standing on its hind legs, the dog was as tall as the girl, who started screaming. When the animal and the child staggered backward off the sidewalk and fell into the street tangled together, Elena realized that the dog had sunk its teeth into her daughter’s head. She wasn’t sure what to do—she couldn’t figure out how to make the beast release its grip without causing more bleeding and further damage. “I was scared that it would turn on me, and if I was incapacitated there was nothing to prevent it from killing her,” she said. First Elena grabbed the dog and pulled, trying to wrestle it off her child. When that didn’t work, she jammed her fingers into the dog’s mouth, trying to pry apart its jaws. Finally, the pit bull let go, taking a four-inch strip of the child’s scalp with it. Elena, panicked, ordered her daughter to run. The child backed up, stumbled over a curb and fell to the ground, at which point the dog charged at her again. A group of neighbours, alerted by the screams of both mother and daughter, rushed out of their houses.

“She was being very brave, but I didn’t know if she was going to live,” Elena tells me flatly. “I kept asking her to open her eyes because I was afraid she would lose consciousness from blood loss and not wake up. She told me afterward—she has a very clear recollection of the attack—that she wanted to close her eyes because she needed to pretend it wasn’t happening.”

One neighbour called 911 while others brought a yoga mat and towels. Elena noticed some of them whispering and shooting furtive looks at a man standing near the pit bull, which had wandered away from the group. “Is this your dog?” she asked him. The man denied it. Elena tried again. “You’re the owner?” It was less a question than a statement. This time, the man had a different answer. “My dog doesn’t do this,” he said. When she asked a third time, saying 911 would need to know whom the pit bull belonged to, he gave her his name.

When they got into the ambulance, Elena realized the dog had also left a gaping three-inch wound in her daughter’s thigh. At the hospital, the ER doctors told her they’d have to graft cadaver skin onto the lacerations as an interim measure until the injuries healed enough for additional surgeries. Her little girl spent the next two weeks in the hospital. During that time, Elena tried to make sense of what had happened.

She wanted to go door to door in her neighbourhood for information, but both Toronto Animal Services and the police were against it—she and the bystanders were potential witnesses, they explained, and to do so would undermine the integrity of their accounts. Nothing was said about turning to Facebook, which is how a friend of Elena’s found out that the pit bull had a violent history. Eight months earlier, the dog had sent a five-year-old to the ER and left the child’s caregiver with a deep puncture wound in her thigh. According to police, there was insufficient evidence to charge the owner with criminal negligence, so they lobbed the file over to Toronto Animal Services. TAS took more than 24 hours to follow up; in the meantime, the man had taken the pit bull and his other dog, a cane corso mastiff, and disappeared. Unable to locate him, TAS let the file go cold. But, within a few months, the owner returned to the neighbourhood, dogs in tow. Nobody in the community was formally notified about what had happened—an unconscionable oversight, from Elena’s perspective. “If I had known there had been a dangerous dog attack in the neighbourhood and the dog wasn’t apprehended,” she says, “I would never have been out walking with my child on that street at that time.”

This is exactly the kind of horrific incident that the dangerous-dog registry is designed to prevent. Now that the registry is public, anyone can download information about known offenders in their area. Users can search by postal code, by date, by breed or by name (the animal’s, not the owner’s) and can find out about the severity of an altercation. There are ramped-up penalties too: mandatory muzzles and tags that indicate a dog is dangerous; compulsory obedience classes; Beware of Dog signs posted on owners’ properties. All owners with dogs under an active dangerous-dog order will receive in-person compliance checks—and anyone found to be in violation of the terms could be fined as much as $100,000.

Dangerous dogs are also prohibited from off-leash areas, though this can create a new problem if owners instead let them roam free in schoolyards and parks. Currently, a dog caught off-leash outside a designated area faces a fine of $365. But, as Carleton Grant, the executive director of municipal licensing and standards, points out, there aren’t enough bylaw officers for regular patrols, and even if they catch someone in the act, the officers lack the authority to compel an owner to disclose their name, address or other identifying details. “If $365 isn’t a severe enough penalty to convince someone to follow the rules, could we increase that amount to $1,000?” Grant asks rhetorically. “Sure, but when they’re caught, people claim they don’t have their wallets with them, and they say their name is Jane Doe.”

Fine increases aren’t going to keep leash-free dogs from spaces like schoolyards, which tend to attract owners eager to let their pets run in a fenced, grassy area but who don’t want to, or can’t (in the case of dangerous dogs), take them to a ­designated off-leash park. Officially, no dogs are allowed on any TDSB property, says Alexis Dawson, the trustee for Ward 9, which includes Davenport (where the student at Rawlinson Community School was attacked) and Spadina–Fort York. Dawson agrees that dogs need usable outdoor space, especially in Davenport, which she calls the city’s most “green-space-compromised” ward. She also understands why dog owners want access to school grounds, which are underused ­after-hours. But there are issues with that, she says. “Dog owners don’t pick up after themselves, and kids are out there sitting on the grass during the day. Many parents can identify with the nightmare of having to clean pee off their child’s snowsuit or shit off their child’s shoes.”

In the southern part of Dawson’s ward, the field at Canoe Landing Park, near CityPlace, is a crucible of canine-related tension. It abuts two newly built elementary schools—Jean Lumb and Bishop Macdonell—as well as a community centre and child care facility. Recently, residents have noticed an uptick in the number of unleashed dogs roaming the schoolyards, raising concerns about health and safety. In the wake of the mauling at Little Norway Park, which is within spitting distance of the site, deputy mayor Ausma Malik, who is the councillor for Spadina–Fort York, piloted a project to address the problems. Between March 26 and April 21, bylaw officers were dispatched to the area accompanied by police, and the paired representatives conducted 104 “proactive patrols.” They encountered 164 off-leash dogs, issued 101 warnings and slapped 15 owners with fines. Those ­admonishments, handed out in less than a month, represent just under a quarter of the 430 official warnings and fines given across the entire city in all of 2023. But, however effective the CityPlace blitz was, dispatching cops to monitor loose canines is unsustainable from a resourcing standpoint. It’s also unlikely to broker lasting peace.

Ask Jody Berland and she’ll tell you that the city belongs to everybody—and “everybody” includes Jasper, the dog that she and her partner, David Hlynsky, adopted 10 years ago from a rescue agency in North Carolina. Berland is a cultural historian and professor emerita at York University whose work has included studying human-animal relations. She grew up with dogs but considered herself more of a cat person until her husband had a mini-stroke. Hoping that walking a dog would help with Hlynsky’s rehab, she turned to Petfinder and met Jasper, a medium-size brown-and-white spotted mutt with a pinkish nose and a feathery tail. He’s unfailingly gentle and rarely barks, Berland says, and he’s never been inclined to chase cats or bunnies. He even waits for cars before crossing the street.

Because of Jasper’s docile nature, Berland has few reservations about taking him on leash-free walks—but only if they’re in the middle of a wide empty area or if there are other dogs off-leash. “When there are big spaces with no one on them, it seems wasteful not to let him enjoy the grass or roll in the snow,” she says. Plus, she has a bad knee, so if he quickly zips over to sniff the bushes, it’s often safer if he’s not attached to her. “And ­needless to say, I always clean up after him,” she adds.

Berland’s logic is easy to follow—if a park is underused and it makes a well-behaved dog happy, what’s the harm in maximizing that joy? It’s the rationale of many urban dwellers who just want to play a game of fetch with their dog in a schoolyard after-hours. What’s trickier is that, as Berland points out, when one pup is roaming free, others usually follow. And those others aren’t always as disciplined as Jasper. “I’m aware that I am making an exception for my dog in some special circumstances,” Berland says. “If my dog were aggressive, I would keep him on leash. I believe in the leash bylaws.”

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There isn’t a bylaw that can dismantle hubris. There will always be entitled dog owners

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I trust Berland when she says that Jasper wouldn’t hurt a fly. Still, it’s a slippery slope. Elena’s current neighbour, for instance, allows his German shepherd to roam leash-free in his backyard. But the fence separating their yards is so low that the dog’s head hangs over it, which scares Elena and her daughter. “I once tried to explain that my child was nearly killed by an off-leash dog, but he kept talking over me, insisting that his dog is trained not to attack—unless it feels its owner is being threatened.”

There isn’t a bylaw that can dismantle hubris. There will always be entitled pet owners who don’t see the need to control their dogs or pick up after them or follow other rules. But what’s particularly exasperating about this attitude regarding what dogs deserve is that it doesn’t even benefit all dogs. Reactive or anxious ones, for example, would be better off if their peers were leashed. And a leash is preferable to the risk of an attack and the possibility of criminal charges and euthanasia.

Elena says her daughter is doing well, considering the circumstances, but both of them are still traumatized by the 2022 attack. The pit bull was subsequently euthanized, and its owner is facing a charge of criminal negligence with a trial scheduled to wrap up this summer. His other dog, the cane corso mastiff, is now in the care of a friend and is often seen wandering around the neighbourhood without a leash.

It’s unlikely that enforcement alone will change attitudes among the anti-leash crowd. The trick to convincing people that they should modify their behaviour is to give them something better to strive for. Tracy Loconte, the Paws for Parks founder, chooses friendly engagement and education over confrontation. She and her fellow volunteers approach owners with off-leash dogs and start chatting about the importance of protecting ecosystems, citing a 2019 study that found dogs were a major contributor to trampling and erosion in High Park. Eventually, they’ll ask the person to let their dog become a “bark ambassador,” which involves keeping the animal on a leash. Seven times out of 10, the owner—faced with the tangible impact of free-roaming pets—complies.

A year and a half after prying a pit bull’s jaws from her daughter’s head, Elena isn’t prepared to wait for slow-burning awareness campaigns to take effect—nor is she entirely confident they ever will. What she wants is communication: when a dog attacks, local schools and daycares should be alerted and, by extension, so should the parents of small children. As simple as it seems, Elena’s demand is anchored in the same aphorism that unites Berland and Kais-Prial, even though they seem to be at odds: dogs will be dogs. It’s the humans around them who need to adapt.

This story originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.