Picnic Thieves
Apparently, we are not supposed to be picnic thieves. Who knew? Yesterday we received an email from the lovely people at Dogs For Good. They describe themselves as being ‘an innovative charity, exploring the ways dogs can help people with disabilities overcome specific challenges and enrich and improve lives and communities’. That sounds pretty good to us, so we read a bit further. I’ll tell you more about the work they do in a moment, but back to the picnics first.
Why no picnic thieves? – Safety first
Now, you may think your humans don’t want you to raid other people’s picnics just because they are mean, or that they don’t want to upset the other people. There seems to be more to it than that and some of it is in your interest. Their first concern is that we don’t eat things that will make us ill. Lots of family picnics include foods that can make us very ill. Some could even kill us and with that in mind it probably doesn’t do any harm to sit your human down and suggest you work on this together.
Listen Up Humans
Dogs for Good Instructor Katie Steel has worked with Dogs for Good for four years and is the charity’s autism instructor. Katie said: “Consider free-running your dog in different areas that are more likely to be picnic-free. Instead of town or country parks that are the first choice for picnics, you could take your dog to canals, woods or much bigger open spaces where they can enjoy their free run and you’re not worried about him or her making off with a cocktail sausage. You could also take high-value treats with you on your free-run – their very own picnic! Cheese and tasty meat treats are largely irresistible and will encourage your dog to come back to you for something yummy instead of raiding someone’s picnic.” She sounds my kind of person.
Other tips
Katie’s other tips include:
Take different treats each time to keep us interested.
Keep your eyes peeled and put us back on a lead before we have chance to realise what we’re missing.
Take our favourite squeaky toy or ball to distract us with and play with us so we don’t feel fed up about having to skirt around a picnic.
If you can’t change our walk time or location, go a different way around to keep us on our toes.
If you can take us out and times less likely to be favoured by picnicers or better still in the rain – we like that but people having picnics don’t.
Practice recall with both voice and whistle to cover all eventualities. We make it a game and play tag. Mum calls ‘tag’ and we have to run and put our noses into her hand. She then praises us and gives us a treat. She does it at all sorts of random times, even in the garden so we see it as a fun game.
Awesome Charity
We get hundreds of press releases and don’t tell you about most of them. This one though not only interested us because of the advice but they really seem to be an awesome charity.
Dogs for Good provides expertly-trained assistance dogs to people with physical disabilities and families who have a child with autism. The charity also supports people with learning disabilities and dementia to help them lead a more independent life through the help of a trained dog.
Across the UK, Dogs for Good:
supports 311 current Assistance Dog partnerships
trains and matches 50 new partnership per annum
has 12 Community Dogs working with 196 adults and children alongside a specialist handler
has helped and continues to support over 1400 families through its Family Dog service
has over 600 essential volunteers
You can find out more about them HERE
Love
Wilma