Grand County Animal Shelter: Play Group Training Grant Report

How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?

Dogs Playing for Life mentorship

This grant helped teach me how to properly run playgroups at our shelter. I had never done playgroups, so this was a unique experience and a lot of information to process. I work at a small shelter and have limited staff, and volunteers are very random and not an everyday occurrence. I am hoping I can get some consistent volunteers so we can use what I have learned to enhance our shelter dogs' lives until they are adopted. It is hard, though, because when I am working, if I get a call (since I am an ACO), I have to leave. I do plan to implement it as much as possible when I do have the volunteers and more than one dog. This mentorship also helped me work and handle dogs that come through the shelter, as I learned about eye contact, walking, door routine, etc.

How many pets did this grant help?

Hopefully all those who come in to the shelter

Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.

As of now, we have had only one dog here and there. We are a small shelter and luckily we have had dogs who have been adopted quickly. All the others have been strays/owner pick-ups. The dogs we have had in our play area do like the open space and like being in the front as opposed to the back kennels. I have been able to observe whether the dogs that we’ve had in the area like to charge when you open the gate, look for escape routes, bark at cars or dogs walking by, etc. It’s been very helpful, because we can tell the new adopter this information. However, we have really had no playgroups because of only having one dog at a time. The pictures I am showing are of the one dog (Ocean) we have and our play yard. We make sure it is always snow-blown so that we will be able to do playgroups when we have more than one dog.