[alaskayorkie]

I do a dog blog for my newspaper, and one of the first things people asked about was just that. Where can we take our dogs to get socialized? In our town, there are no fenced dog parks. So a bunch of us got together and started meeting up at local ball parks when they're not being used by kids.

We've been doing it for about 9 months now, and it's worked out wonderfully. We had a few problems in the beginning with aggressive dogs, but all the owners were diligent about intervening when it got out of hand. Now, all the dogs know each other and there are rarely any problems.

We've since started a little-dog meetup for dogs 20 pounds and under. That's working out great too.