Park brings furry friends in service dog form

field. Scarlet and other service dogs like her now have a new place to play.

This April marked the grand opening of a new service dog park created by Paws for a Cause, an organization on campus that trains service dogs. The park, located by Cook Field, is the first of its kind and is only available to service dogs and service dogs in training (SDiT).

The park has a picnic table, water fountain and pet waste station. To make the park more accessible, the entrance has a gate-opener button and a concrete pad. The park also requires a code to open the double gates, which can only be accessed through a form submitted to Paws for a Cause.

Neff, a junior psychology and neuroscience co-major, joined Paws for a Cause her sophomore year and has been an active member of the executive board for the past year. This year she’s fostering Scarlet, a 1-year-old golden retriever.

Service dogs and SDiTs typically can’t use a normal dog park due to the disruption that regular dogs can have on the working dogs. In the past, Neff used study rooms and the tennis courts to let her SDiT play. But that came with some of its own issues.

“There are people obviously using the tennis courts,” Neff said. “So there would be times where we would walk all the way over there and not be able to have our dogs play.”

The tennis courts are made from concrete, so Neff noticed sometimes her dog’s paw pads would be injured after playing.

Abby Bammerlin

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Mouth open, tongue out, Scarlet raced to catch the ball as it rolled in the grass. Once retrieved, she rushed back to her handler Taylor Neff, who held out her hand with a smile. Neff tossed the ball again and off went Scarlet. Without a leash, she was free to run across the entire

COSETTE GUNTER EDITOR-AT-LARGE

When Mónnica Gay entered Miami University her first year, her goal was simple: be best friends with everyone.

“That’s my entire thing, just try to be best friends with everyone on campus,” Gay said.

Gay, a sophomore social work and urban and regional planning double major with a minor in social justice, is involved with several different organizations on campus and said her schedule tends to scare people when they see it.

“I’ll pull up my Google Calendar, and I’ll just get jaws dropped,” Gay said. “It’s really not that bad.”

Gay is currently an intern for the Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion (CSDI); the president of the Latiné Student Alliance, Miami’s Latinx and Hispanic student organization; the vice president of Recruitment for Sigma Lambda Gamma National Sorority Inc. and the community liaison for FUSE, a student organization that aims to build community around Queer and trans/non-binary students of color.

Before coming to Miami, Gay grew up in Virginia and Ohio. She was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and moved to the United States when she was 2 years old. The middle child of two sisters, Gay followed in her older sister’s footsteps and was the president of UNIDOS and Sigma Lambda Gamma National Sorority Inc.

“My sister and I are really close,” Gay said, “so I would always see her, especially over summer breaks. She would be doing club stuff, and she was like, ‘When you come to campus, you

In early 2019, members of Paws for a Cause’s exec team approached Robert Bell, director of planning, architecture and engineering, to start the project. At the time, he decided the group didn’t have the park planned enough for his team to start the project. They needed funding, approval from administration and a sponsoring department to maintain the park.

Over the next two years, the group was able need to come to meetings.’”

Gay said her level of involvement can be tiresome, as most of her work involves putting her identity at the forefront.

“I eat, sleep and breathe diversity work,” Gay said. “And it’s really, really exhausting because I’m putting my identity online all the time. Because I am a Queer, Latina woman, that’s difficult [at] a primarily white institution.”

Gay said she’s used to attending predominantly white institutions but was newly challenged with finding a place for her culture without her family around at college.

“My culture has not been one that I’ve really built. It’s one that’s been passed down,” Gay said. “So me as Latina, it was like learning recipes from my mom, dancing Bachata in the kitchen with my grandma and trying really, really hard to hold on to Spanish with my older sister because the only times we spoke Spanish were in the house … So now coming into college it’s trying to figure out, once again, what that Hispanic identity looks like to me because my culture came [from] completely inside the home.”

Building a Latinx community at Miami has been the focus of Gay’s work over the last two years and was one of the main reasons she applied to be an intern with the CSDI.

“[Miami’s] Latinx community doesn’t have [a] face yet, which is something that we’re working on,” Gay said. “It doesn’t have that base [or] that connection yet that we really want it to. It’s as soon as you find a person that is even a little bit similar, like holding on and not letting go.” to gain approval from Miami’s administration and raised more than $60,000 for the project. They received $3,500 in donations from MoveinMiami donors and numerous donations from other sources. A majority of the funding came from different fundraisers the organization held throughout the past few years. In October 2021, they approached Bell again, and he officially began working on the project.

Mallory Stiles, a sophomore theatre and marketing double major, has been roommates with Gay both years they’ve been at Miami.

“When we hear the compelling arguments, whether it’s our office or another administrative office, at some point someone hears those arguments and says, ‘Yeah, this is something we feel the university can help support,’” Bell said. “I think we saw that there were a lot of students involved in this kind of mission and so it made some sense to support that.”

Ally DeProfio, junior microbiology and public health double major, has used the park multiple times since it opened. She said the location has been helpful for her because of the parking. The added space also means that more dogs can be in the park at once.

“We normally have a lot of playdates too, so we’ll see if a few other people want to meet and then our dogs just play at the dog park,” DeProfio said.

Paws for a Cause outlines all of the rules for using the park on its website. Neff is thankful to have somewhere to go to allow her dog a place to run around, without risking injury or disruption.

“For our dogs [to have] that space to be able to let them play and run and have fun with other dogs that’s really important, especially for like the higher energy level dogs,” Neff said. “My foster Scarlet is very energetic, and she definitely needs to be able to play and run around, and the service dog park has been great for that.” bammeraj@miamioh.edu

Stiles said their relationship as roommates has been both supportive and beneficial.

“As a white woman, and coming from a white, fairly affluent family, I’m coming from such a place of privilege, [and] I have learned about so many different things on this campus that I never would have learned if she wasn’t involved in them,” Stiles said.

Stiles said an important part of their relationship is their nightly debrief with each other because that’s one of the only times the two of them are both home.

“That centering aspect of our relationship, really, is when we both get to come home and talk to each other, and that’s a pillar of my routine is coming home and telling her everything,” Stiles said. “Then [I’ll] be like, what happened in your day, and get to know what they talked about in her social work class, or like, what one of her professors said about trains or something like that.”

After their first year living together, Stiles said Gay wanted to apply for the Scholar Leaders program, which would require her to live in a specific residence hall.

Stiles wanted to live with Gay again, so she applied too.

“I followed her and I was like, you know what, Mónnica is the type of person that you will write five essays for and sit through an hour interview just so that you can room with her again. And that is what I did,” Stiles said. Gay said her focus going forward is self-re-