Humane Education is an important part of animal shelters. Our local shelter was in need of a program to bring more humane education to the 4 cities that they cover for services. The cities include Petaluma, Healdsburg, Cloverdate and Calistoga, all in California.
In January 2020, North Bay Animal Services, Petaluma’s local animal shelter, became aware of the current word that Kids-n-K9s was doing in Petaluma and asked to be a sponsor for the kids-n-k9s dog safety campaign that originally began in 2017. This is very crucial because as of December 2019, even with the help of local businesses, I only had half of the schools sponsored for the children to receive Stop, Look & Paws sets free of charge. As I have mentioned, It is very important that in addition to my visits to the classrooms, the children get the learning activity to take home to their parents to play and learn together. If parents don’t have the same safety information to support the decisions that their children make when interacting with dogs, children will continue to get bitten.
North Bay Animal Services believe in the dog safety program so much that they have decided to be my sole sponsor for providing the Stop, Look & Paws sets for part of their Humane Education services starting in the 2020/21 school year. They also covered the remaining schools for this year so all of the schools in Petaluma that have requested this program will now be receiving Stop, Look & Paws sets.
However, if it wasn’t for local Petaluma businesses funding the program for the last two years this campaign would have never survived. I want to give a big thank to the local businesses who sponsored half of all the Petaluma kindergarten classes for 2019/20 school year. Thank you to:
Bertotti Landscape, Xandex, Petaluma Veterinary Hospital, Petaluma Kids Dental, Lakeville Eye Care, Rip City Riders, Dr. Frasersmith DDS, Brixx Pizzeria, The Glass Shop of North Bay, Hollingsworth Jeweler.