Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter: Build-A-Bear Youth Humane Education Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
The grant that our Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter received last year has done wonders in supporting and improving our existing humane-education programs. It was very touch-and-go and shoe-string budgeting before, but now we feel like we really are solid in these programs. Our youth volunteers and other youngsters who take part in these activities such as After School Animal Advocates and summer Critter Camp feel so much more welcomed and official now!
While we still are using a multipurpose room and two very small back rooms in our Cottage Shop thrift store for many of our activities, the grant has allowed us to decorate with education posters, have locking cabinets for our materials, clicker-training tools, a small but growing library, our own volunteer aprons and name tags, certificates of gratitude and achievement, a screen, projector, speakers, white boards, and cork boards, art materials, and so much more!
We’ve been able to host speakers from other specialty rescues and many animal professionals, too, and have been inspired by the wide range of work that they do!
We have helped shy and fearful dogs blossom through our clicker training, promoted pets with posters and mini-biographies, done many small shelter-help projects, and are so excited about ways to do more! With the support of the grant, we continue to move forward in integrating more youth volunteers. The path that we set up is from After School Advocates, to assisting with younger humane-education groups such as summer camp, on to fully fledged Youth Volunteers!
How many pets did this grant help?
Any of the pets that came in contact with our Animal Advocates, Youth Volunteers, and Critter Campers are better socialized and easier to adopt from the information we learn from their interactions!
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
A number of the families of the students have adopted pets from our shelter and they have brought in other adoptions through friends and family members, too! We learn details about how different pets will do interacting with children of different ages as well, which is very helpful with placement of these pets The one who stands out most for me, though, is not one who was a direct adoption but a dog who was seriously boosted in adoptability through clicker-training with the Animal Advocates.
The dog’s name was China. She is a soft-eyed, soulful black dog. When she came to us, she was what we call a “pancake dog,” which means that she was so frightened that she literally could not stand-up; she laid flat on the ground, only moving her eyes to follow people in a hopeful but lost way.
I did some in-kennel assessments and found that, with gentle and persistent positive reinforcement work with clicker-training, she slowly began lifting her head and finally would move around some, even exiting and entering the kennel. She was very hesitant to start but gained in confidence with repetition and patience.
We moved her into a very quiet area of the shelter, the back isolation kennels. There, the Animal Advocate kids worked the magic they had been learning with clicker-training. First they trained each other to do tasks, then they worked with clicker-savvy dogs, and finally on to helping the shelter dogs! The taught China “touch” (reaching out and touching hands with her nose), how to go in and out of the kennel on cue — as that was very scary to her at first — and to play the Treat and Retreat game to boost her confidence.
She was always a beautiful dog, but through their help she became a beautiful, adopted dog! Just this week she came in with her person, who was taking a dog body-language workshop here at the shelter!
