Providing a Place in Parks Where Pooches Can Play : As more people move to apartments and condos, the need grows for spots where dogs can exercise. Canine freedom is cramped by the Valley’s lack of such areas.

In a city as troubled as ours is at times, I’ll be the first to admit that canine rights probably are not at the top of most people’s list of pressing matters. But since my dog can’t speak for herself, and since she can’t do much with my keyboard except chew on it, I thought I would throw in our two cents about something near and dear to our hearts.

The problem I’m talking about is the San Fernando Valley’s lack of dog parks or, as the folks at the Department of Parks and Recreation like to call them, “Off Leash Dog Exercise Areas.” The point of having these areas is to provide a place where dogs can follow their primal instinct--namely, to run like hell away from you. Or, to put it another way, it’s a place where Rover can frolic with Snoopy without the danger of being steamrollered by a Mercedes owner determined to prove 60 m.p.h. is attainable in second gear on a 25-m.p.h. street.

Right now, the Valley has just one four-acre dog park despite the fact that the Valley has about 5,000 acres of parkland and an estimated 10 times as many dogs. And the dog park we have, while very nice, is not a full-time dog park and is not within reach for many Valley residents. It’s on the south side of Mulholland Drive just off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. That’s a long haul from Chatsworth.

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A second park, a five-acre tract in the 1,200-acre Sepulveda Basin, has been proposed and will now undergo studies for environmental impact. But, as is always the case when a dog park is proposed, it’s been a source of controversy.

City park officials thought they had a spot picked out in another part of the basin, but some people complained that it would somehow disturb a nearby concrete riverbed where waterfowl sometimes gather.

“We don’t agree it’s a problem,” says one park official I spoke to. We did not dive into the, uh, complicated issue of how concrete got to be part of the environment and how exactly a concrete environment is disturbed.

Anyhow, the waterfowl problem illustrates a point. It’s not city officials that resist dog parks. It’s their constituents. It took Silver Lake residents years to get a small dog park installed adjacent to Silver Lake recently--and it’s only a dog park on a one-year trial basis.

“Everything we do is complicated,” says Dick Ginevar, golf and park program manager for the city parks department. “Any kind of development is a long, protracted procedure that makes it difficult to build new parks.

“We would like to see more of the dog parks, but we want to do so without negatively impacting neighbors of the parks or people who use our facilities now.”

In other words, every dog park the city tries to install is going to be trench warfare against people who fear or don’t like pooches. And what really yanks my leash about the whole thing is the idea that a few fenced-in acres of dog park are such a nuisance to everyone else. Even New York City has fenced-in areas for dogs in most of its parks, and it’s an arrangement that benefits everyone. The dogs play in their part of the park, the people in theirs. Everyone’s happy. And, in New York’s case at least, it should be pointed out that the activities within the dog areas are usually much more dignified, not to mention more legal, than what’s going on in the rest of the park.

Maybe the resistance to dog parks in Los Angeles is a reflection of how the city has changed. Until recent years, dog parks weren’t a priority in the L. A. area because there simply wasn’t much need. People lived in neat little houses with neat little yards where dogs could play.

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Now our city’s boulevards are lined with apartment and condo buildings that have no space for dogs to play unless you enjoy the atmosphere of an underground parking garage.

As a dog owner, I’m the first to admit that I don’t think of my dog, Molly, in the most rational of manners. After all, Boutros Boutros Molly (her nickname) has an annual rawhide budget that rivals my clothing budget. But like thousands of other dog owners, I find Molly to be the joy of all joys and she’s my little part of Mother Nature indoors.

It’s a shame she can’t be part of most of our city’s parks, too.