Dog Play Date is a community of dog lovers who support their dogs social and playful engagement in daily/weekly play date/group activities.  Click on connect to join our Twitter-like social network where you can arrange, or participate in, a play date/group event, start/join a group, talk with other members, and more.  Join us!

Most canines are very social creatures and love to hang in a group with other compatible canines and engage in play date/play group activity.  Dog Play Date was founded by web geek doggie lovers that want to help make your dogs play date/group experience the best that it can be.  Date/group experiences can help dogs in many ways.  Socially, date/group play can help develop, hone and maintain group/socialization skills through sharing, competing, communicating, and generally interacting in a group/pack environment.  Physically, a play date or group can help push the exercise envelope.  It’s fun exercise, therefore dogs typically push themselves further when interacting in date/group scenarios.  Emotionally, dogs can benefit from regularly hanging out in a play date/group with other dog friends.

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From a young age, dogs engage in play with one another in a group; and play is made up primarily of mock fights.  It is believed that this group and non-group behavior, which is most common in puppies, is training for important group behaviors later in life.  Research on puppy group play has shown that puppies do not engage equally in both dominant and submissive roles in fights; rather, puppies will tend to start play fights with weaker puppies in the group that they believe they can dominate.  Additionally, puppies will intervene in play engaged by others in another group.  In these situations, the puppies overwhelmingly aid the dominant dog in the group.  Puppies do not show reciprocity in interventions, suggesting that they prefer to be dominant in a fight, and are being opportunistic in the short-term.  In the long-term, intervention may aid the puppies in learning coordination.

The social unit for dogs is the pack (group).  From research on wolf packs that are formed in captivity, the pack (group) has traditionally been thought of as a tightly knit group composed of individuals that have earned a ranking in a linear hierarchy, and in which there is intense loyalty within the group.  It is believed that dogs were able to be domesticated by and succeed in contact with human society because of their social nature.  According to this traditional belief, dogs generalize their social instincts to include humans in their group; in essence “joining the pack” of their owner/handler.  While the majority of research to date indicates that domestic dogs conform to a group hierarchy around an Alpha-Beta-Omega structure, domestic dogs, like their wild wolf counterparts, also interact in complex hierarchical ways.

Canines have lived and worked with humans in so many roles that they have earned the unique nickname, “man’s best friend”, a phrase which is used in other languages as well.  They have been bred for herding livestock, hunting (e.g. pointers and hounds), rodent control, guarding, helping fishermen with nets, and pulling loads, in addition to their roles as companions.  Service dogs such as guide dogs, utility dogs, assistance dogs, hearing dogs, and psychological therapy dogs provide assistance to individuals with physical or mental disabilities.

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We support dogs social and playful engagement in daily/weekly play date and play group activities. Thank you for visiting.