Bringing Your Dog: Rules and Etiquette

Bringing Your Dog: Rules and Etiquette

Bringing your furry companion on the trail is great fun and good exercise! Make sure everything goes smoothly by following these pet friendly tips.


Safety Tips

The great outdoors are not your neighborhood dog park, but that only makes the trip more exciting! Simply follow these safety tips to ensure everything goes smoothly.

•In most national parks and recreation areas: Pets must always be kept on leash. This safeguards both your dog and others. The great outdoors can be very thrilling to our four legged companions, but dangerous as well. Keep your dog from encountering poisons, other aggressive dogs, and wild predators.
Update all vaccines and make sure you have some flea and tick control. While cases of rabies in wild populations in the US is rare, it is not unheard of. Other illnesses like lyme disease and kennel cough (tracheobronchitis) can also be picked up on the trail.
•Make sure all identification markers are up to date. In case you and your dog are separated, these can be integral to your reunification. Including your name and number on the dog’s tags and ensure that they always wear them.

bringing your dog: exploring nature
bringing your dog

Pet Friendly Spots

Luckily the National Park System has a few fantastic sites around the country that make bringing your dog practically a given. However, not all areas in the parks are open for dogs, and they usually require your animals to be on leash.
Additionally, there are many trails governed by smaller entities that allow pets. Bring Fido and Go Pet Friendly are two useful resources that can help you find local areas for you and your dog.

Keeping Your Pet Safe around Wildlife

Where’s the Wildlife is committed to promoting positive, enriching experiences for all species involved. Bringing your dog on your wildlife tour can be wonderful, but we ask you keep the following rules and regulations in mind. Check out our Code of Conduct for more information!

•Never, under any circumstances, allow your pet to chase after wildlife. Not only is it bad for the ecosystems they trample on, it is both traumatizing for the animal and endangering to their survival. The energy needed to escape your pet may make the difference between survival and starvation.
•Some wild animals can act aggressively around dogs. The largest concern is actually the littlest ones such as snakes and spiders.
•Please always clean up after your dog. Due to its composition, dog waste doesn’t improve soil fertility, and can actually be detrimental to nearby streams or riparian areas.


May you and your four legged companion enjoy your wilderness adventures!

5 Wildlife Apps to Use With Ours

5 Wildlife Apps to Use With Ours

These Free Wildlife Apps are Great Companions to Where’s The Wildlife and Can Truly Enrich Your Experience

Find Your Tribe

We at Where’s the Wildlife have noticed that a love and concern for nature tends to bring people together. NatureFind is an application that helps you do just that. Want to know what your local nature groups are up to? Learn about events happening wherever you are (or plan to be)? Then this app is a great place to start. Find others that share your passion for the outdoors.

Features
•Search or add local events (get the who, when and where)
•Search or add areas of particular interest and index them by activity (including wildlife viewing!)

wildlife apps: what will you discover?

All About National Parks

All the information you could possibly need about US National Parks. It doesn’t use data or wifi. It’s GPS enabled. And it’s free. This app is the perfect companion to those using Where’s the Wildlife in any of our National Parks. On a time limit and trying to decide which one to go to? National Parks by Chimani gives you up to date info about what’s where and how to get there in the National Parks.

Features

  • Use up to date maps to find and navigate your local parks (requires data/wifi)
  • Get the latest news about national parks near you
  • User friendly search functions to find what you need, when you need it: fast

For the Birds

Here’s a specific one for the bird watchers out there. Aubudon Bird Guide: North America is everything you could ever wish for in a mobile field guide. The sophisticated features are impressive and while they can be a little slower in remote mountain areas (as it works using data), they are absolutely worth the wait.

Features
• Use their unique identification system to quickly find out just what you’re looking at
• Access general and migratory information about over 800 species of bird
• Admire some beautiful professional photography they’ve put up on their gallery
• Keep a list of your sightings and share them with friends!

What Am I Looking At?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell one chubby rodent from another, or differentiate between species of butterflies or types of deer. Map of Life seeks to assist. This application has an ambitious goal: bringing you information about over 30,000 species from around the world. Their database is user driven and growing. While it’s still being developed to bring more and more content, we can see a lot of potential!

Features
• Identify just what you’ve seen
• Learn about species around you and where else they can be found
• Record and share about your animal sightings (syncs with www.mol.org)

Pretty Pictures

For those times the photographer in you wants to take your wildlife picture to a new level (and you can’t access your heavy duty photo editing software), Google has create an app for you. Snapseed is rapidly becoming the smartphone photographer’s best friend. With a plethora of filters, effects and corrections, it can help your photos rise to their true potential.

Features
• You don’t need to be a professional: Easy to use
• Tons of cool filters and textures to add
• Basic photo editing abilities like crop, rotate and transform
• Selective adjustment ability (for contrast, saturation, etc…)

Disclaimer
Where’s The Wildlife has not received any monetary or other endorsement from these applications or their parent organizations. They are on this list because they deserve to be.


Got any more app suggestions? Do you have a wildlife app you cannot live without? Share it with us here!