Our Animal Experience Days run every school holiday except over the Christmas period.
They offer children and young people aged 5-16 a unique opportunity to learn about responsible pet ownership and safety in a fun, relaxed environment.
For more information and to join our mailing list for the sessions please visit our Animal Days page.
We had a fantastic time during our sessions this February half-term.
Our children and young people helped look after the rescue animals by cleaning kennels and rabbit pens, making cat toy pom-poms, and experiencing exclusive animal interactions.
During the session we focused on pet safety and how our pets communicate through their body language to tell us how they are feeling.
We also learnt about the ‘ladder of communication,’ which is a tool originally created by Kendal Shepherd. The ladder demonstrates steps dogs will typically show when communicating stress or uncertainty in a situation.
Animal Encounters
For our dog meets, the children met Jasper the Greyhound and Mia the SBT X Shepherd. During the session they had the opportunity to meet one of the dogs and then set up lots of scent games and enrichment items for them. This included hiding treats amongst towels, egg boxes, cones, snuffle mats and treat balls and puzzles.
The children also met Jasper, Rory, or Cinnamon the cats who enjoyed playing with the children with interactive rope toys. These toys are great for mentally stimulating our cats and enabling them to express natural behaviours such as, pouncing and stalking as they would when hunting!
While we had the cats in the sensory area, we discussed cats body language and how they communicate to us how they are feeling.
For our rabbit interaction the children met shelter residents in small groups where we had an informal chat about rabbit handling, nutrition, and enrichment! Marlin took part in most of the sessions. All the children and young people did a great job being calm and quiet around him, which really helped build his confidence around people.
Sessions for Young Adults!
One of our sessions this holiday was aimed exclusively for secondary school students. During the session the young people helped clean out small animal pens, prepared enrichment items by making destruction tubes for either a rabbit, dog, or cat, and met our rescue animals.
During the session the young people learnt about dog body language, and “life skills.” We also looked at calming signals and how our dogs may use lower-level signs of stress to show they are unsure or need a break from training. We then looked at basic trick training and positive reinforcement by rewarding our dogs with toys, treats, or praise.
With our rescue dog we put this to practice by doing trick training with Mia. Each of the young people had a chance to get Mia to ‘sit,’ ‘touch’ or ‘wait,’ which are all important life skills for dogs.
Our dogs knowing these commands can also help when finding them a new forever home. After her training we had some ‘down time’ with Mia in the education room with some human company and snuffle mats.
