"They will work from dawn till dusk and still be wanting to go in the evening when we finish work." That's how Gareth Williams describes his two border collies — and right now, they might be doing some of the most quietly important groundskeeping work at the entire World Cup.
Ben, 8, and Sally, 2½, are patrolling the training facilities at Centennial Park in northwest Toronto twice a day, five days a week, chasing Canada geese off the pitches that national teams are using to prepare for their matches. It sounds like a quirky sideshow. It isn't.
This is actually a turf protection operation
Canada geese are not a minor nuisance. They're territorial, occasionally aggressive, and they descend on green spaces in numbers. More importantly, their droppings carry disease and chemically burn grass — two things that could quietly compromise the playing surfaces teams are training on before knockout football.
Williams, who runs Border Control Bird Dogs — a goose management agency contracted for the job — put it plainly: "Goose feces actually carry disease, which would obviously be bad for everybody. It also actually burns the turf, so it would cause the playing surface not to be as good."
For a tournament where pitch quality directly affects how teams perform, and where a hamstring tweak on a sub-standard training surface could sideline a key player before the group stage is done, this is not a trivial concern. Any team's injury odds are at least partly shaped by the conditions they prepare in.
Sally puts the vest on and it's game time
Ben is the experienced one — calm, focused, eight years of goose-chasing in the bank. Sally is younger and, according to her handler Spencer Jones, transforms the moment she puts on her high-visibility vest. "The bond between her and me... it's grown so rapidly, and we've become an awesome team working at FIFA World Cup," Jones said.
Williams's agency has been managing goose populations across Ontario for years — cemeteries, hospitals, golf courses. The World Cup has simply given the work a bigger stage. "It's actually been a breath of fresh air to have the chance to make people aware of what we do," he said.
Billions will watch the matches. Almost none of them will know two dogs in Toronto helped make the pitches worth playing on.
