Puppy play in Berlin now has its own square at the biggest fetish street fair in Europe, its own weekend in spring, its own guided tours and its own monthly meetups. None of that existed twenty years ago. The oldest of the formats that put pups on a Berlin programme was the Walking Dog, a Paris idea brought over in 2015 by the French group GayDogTraining and run with the BLF until 2019, at both Folsom Europe and Easter Berlin. On 14 September 2019, the BLF board handed GayDogTraining an engraved metal plaque for it. This is the story that plaque records, and what became of the work behind it.
Before 2015: an old calendar with no pup slot in it
Berlin’s leather and fetish calendar is not a recent invention, and puppy play in Berlin arrived late to it. Understanding how late is the only way to read what happened next.
A gathering running since 1972
According to the BLF’s own history, the Easter gathering began in 1972 after a visit from the New York club The Cycle MC, when clubs from Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich and London put the first Ostertreffen together. The MSC Berlin association ran it officially from 1973 until it dissolved in 1997. The founding assembly of BLF, Berlin Leder und Fetisch e.V. was held on 16 April 1998, and the BLF has organised the gathering ever since, rebranding it Easter Berlin in 2013. Folsom Europe, a separate non-profit, was created in 2003 and moved its street fair to Fuggerstraße and Welserstraße in Schöneberg in 2004. Two long-running institutions, then, and in neither of them was puppy play in Berlin a line on the programme. Pups came, wore their gear and mixed into a leather crowd. Nothing was built for them.
The Walking Dog: five years of GayDogTraining and the BLF
GayDogTraining was founded in 2015 by Franck Deloux (Barka Xetal) with Henry Falco, Pup Dolko, Pup Sony and Pup Vega, and it moved fast. In that first year alone the group held its opening meetup at La Mine in Paris, drew up the first Puppy Play France flag, walked its first Walking Dog at the Paris Pride march, and took the format to Folsom in Berlin in partnership with the BLF. That last one is the reason puppy play in Berlin has a visible place today.
One idea, run at both events
The Walking Dog was exactly what the name says: pups out in the open, moving through the district as a pack, in daylight, in front of everyone. It had been tried on the Paris Pride march first, which is the part that usually gets lost: Berlin did not invent it, Berlin adopted it, and that adoption is where puppy play in Berlin starts. The name dates the era too: “pup” only became the community’s default word well afterwards, so in 2015 the thing was a dog walk and was called one. It ran at Folsom Europe and at Easter Berlin, which matters more than it sounds. Folsom Europe and the BLF are separate organisations with separate boards, so getting the same pup format onto both programmes meant convincing two structures, not one. For five years running, puppy play in Berlin was something a visitor could actually see happening in the street rather than something they had to already know about. The footage is on this site and is being restored to it: Folsom Berlin 2015, the BLF and GayDogTraining stand and the Walking Dogs at Folsom 2017, The Walking Dog 2018 and the Easter Berlin 2019 teaser.
Tommy Schenz, and the Berlin–Paris line
Partnerships between clubs in different countries rarely survive on paperwork. This one ran through Tommy Schenz, the BLF contact who became a friend of the French side, and that personal line is what the plaque calls “die Verbindung von Berlin und Paris”, the link between Berlin and Paris. It is worth naming plainly, because the whole cross-border layer of the European fetish calendar is built this way, and that one friendship is why puppy play in Berlin ended up with a French chapter at all.
The plaque, 14 September 2019
The award was made on the Saturday of Folsom Europe 2019, and it is the one document that puts a date and a set of signatures on the early years of puppy play in Berlin. It is not a certificate on paper: it is an engraved metal plate, carrying the BLF and Easter Berlin logos at the top.
What it says
Translated from the German, the text reads: “In thanks and recognition of five successful years of cooperation between the two associations BLF and GayDogTraining (Puppy-Play), and of the link between Berlin and Paris, this plaque is awarded to Agron Copper Xetal and Barka Xetal. The members and the board of BLF, Berlin Leder und Fetisch e.V., wish you continued creative drive and success in the years to come.” It is signed by Tommy Schenz, Jens Walker, Matthias Kaminsky, Norbert Bethke and Maik Randau, and dated Berlin, 14 September 2019. The first signature on the plate is Tommy Schenz’s: the man the whole partnership had run through for five years signed, first, the document thanking the two of them for it. The German text calls both sides Vereine, associations. That was generous towards the French side: GayDogTraining was never a registered association, just a group of people who organised things, which is how most of this scene actually runs. Five years, a club and a group, one line between two cities, and enough of a result that the German side had it engraved rather than sent by email.
Handing over, and what grew afterwards
The Berlin chapter closed after 2019, handed on to others. It was a deliberate exit, decided before anybody had heard of COVID, and it was only the Berlin side that stopped: the French side kept going, became the Puppy Play France association in 2021, ran a first fetish cabaret that year and a first Puppy Walk at Darklands in Antwerp in 2022, and only wound up in 2024. What matters here is what happened to puppy play in Berlin once that ground had been cleared.
The puppy walk is still on the programme
Folsom Europe’s current programme still lists “a joyful puppy walk”. Same format, new vocabulary: nobody was calling it that in 2015. That is the format, still running, seven years after the two people who started it walked away from it. Very few things in an event calendar outlive the people who invented them, and a pup walking that route today has no particular reason to know where it came from. It is the oldest surviving piece of puppy play in Berlin.
What came later, and was built by others
The rest of the pup programming at Folsom Europe arrived afterwards, and GayDogTraining had no hand in it. The official site now describes “the wild and woofy Animal Farm powered by Furrjoy, welcoming pups, furries, and their handlers”, plus “the legendary Puppy Games on Sunday at prideArt@theKnast” and a “Puppy Sightseeing Bus rolling through the city on Friday afternoon”. Those three are other people’s work, and saying so is the point: puppy play in Berlin grew from one walk into a whole wing of the festival because a series of different organisers each added something once the door was open.
Puppy play in Berlin today: the practical calendar
All of puppy play in Berlin happens within about fifteen minutes’ walk of Nollendorfplatz. A single hotel in Schöneberg covers the entire year.
Three fixed points
Easter Berlin, run by the BLF at Easter, is the oldest and the most mixed. The 2026 edition, the 53rd, ran from 31 March to 6 April with the Mr. Fetish Berlin contest on Easter Sunday. Wikipedia describes it as one of Europe’s largest leather and fetish events. [Doggy Weekend Berlin](https://www.doggyweekendberlin.com/timetable), organised by Big Red Bone Ltd, is the pup-only option: the 2026 edition ran from 27 to 29 March across Segunda Casa, Mikropol, Ulrichs, Säälchen, Kantine am Berghain and Clubsauna, with an ANIMALZ XTRA night, a Doggy Dealers Market, workshops, a Puppyoke session and a closing Dead Dog Party. It closed two days before Easter Berlin opened, so a pup with a week free gets nine consecutive days for one set of flights. [Folsom Europe](https://folsomeurope.berlin/streefair/) draws around 25,000 visitors and is the largest event of its kind on the continent; the 2026 edition runs from 10 to 13 September, street fair on the 11th and 12th. It is a fundraiser, not a commercial festival: €70,058.47 was raised at the previous edition before taxes and fees, and roughly €400,000 has gone to non-profits since 2004. Bring cash.
The rest of the year
Kinky Events Berlin lists recurring pup nights including Wagging Tails at Quälgeist, the Puppy Night of Sins at sinberlin and Animalz at Folsom, plus a monthly petplay Stammtisch, which is a sit-down meetup with food rather than a play party. Venues move, so check a live calendar. KiezTour also runs a three-hour Puppies Tour of the Nollendorf quarter in cooperation with Folsom Europe, which is a reasonable substitute for knowing anybody locally. A newcomer heading over for the first time will get more out of any of it after reading what puppy play is and the notes for beginners.
Going as a pup: what actually goes wrong
Two things catch out pups who travel for puppy play in Berlin, and neither is about the gear.
Heat, hoods and hydration
A neoprene hood in a packed club, or on a street fair under September sun, gets hot fast, and a pup deep in headspace is not a reliable judge of their own state. Handlers exist partly for this. Agree in advance who calls a break, drink on a clock rather than on thirst, and treat the hood as something that comes off regularly rather than at the end of the night.
Substances, consent and knowing the line
Big fetish weekends run late, and GHB circulates in this environment with a dangerously narrow margin between a dose and an overdose; the signs and the response are worth reading before travelling, not after. Consent works the same under a hood as without one: a pup who cannot speak still needs a signal that stops everything, agreed before play starts. And if headspace starts serving to avoid something rather than to enjoy something, or if the drop after a big weekend does not lift, that belongs in front of a therapist, ideally a kink-aware one.
None of that is a reason to stay home. Puppy play in Berlin exists on a programme today because people organised it into one, and the walk is still there.
Sources
– The plaque awarded by the BLF board, Berlin, 14 September 2019, and GayDogTraining’s own photo and video archive of the 2014 to 2019 editions, published on this site.
– BLF, Berlin Leder und Fetisch e.V. — club history
– Folsom Europe — official site
– Doggy Weekend Berlin — timetable
– Kinky Events Berlin — puppy community
Contact
I am one of the two people named on that plaque. If you are planning a first trip to Berlin, or you want to know how a pup format actually gets onto a festival programme, write to me through the contact page. I read everything myself.
