TORONTO — Summer camp season is here and though many kids have been shipped off for countryside swims, canoe trips and marshmallow roasts, a small group of youngsters at a Toronto animal shelter is getting a hands-on education in training man’s best friend.
For Justine Bystram, a 10-year-old attending Pawsitively Pets Kids Camp’s junior dog trainer program, the toughest task on the first morning of the camp is getting Zoe, a well-fed Pug, to do what trainer Margaret Pender calls a “doggie push-up.”
Pender, standing dead centre in a small yard behind the Toronto Humane Society shelter in the city’s east end, repeats herself so all 11 kids and five shelter dogs can hear.
“Sit, down, sit, down, stand.”
White-haired Zoe, at age one the group’s oldest dog, plops down and stays there, despite the urging of Justine and fellow classmate Jez Vanrooy, 11.
“She can only do one,” admitted Justine.
The dog training session is the latest program offered by Pawsitively Pets, a company started three years ago at a small Toronto animal hospital that has branched out with camps in southern Ontario, Ottawa and Delta, B.C., teaching hundreds of kids in summer classes.
It offers week-long camp sessions, mostly outside the school year, giving kids aged five to 15 detailed lessons on animal medicine and training. There’s even a camp giving toddlers a chance to touch more than 40 creatures.
Founder Jennifer Ego, director of K9 Rescue Me, which finds homes for unwanted dogs, says the camps boost kids’ knowledge of animals, both domestic and exotic — snakes, reptiles and crawly bugs — and hammers home that owning a pet is a big commitment.
And the knowledge gained at the camps can help kids decide if spending their lives working with animals is right for them.
“I think it gives kids a good chance, instead of just going to a general sports camp, or camps that maybe they outgrow in their older years. These camps give older kids an opportunity to do something they really get a lot out of.”
A few would-be veterinarians are found among the group attending the Toronto shelter camp.
One is Meghan Bowman, who attended the group’s mini-veterinarian camp last year. She’s back again this year to help animals at the shelter, and to get some tips on training her 11-week-old Yorkshire terrier, Pipa.
The 15-year-old is sure she wants to be a veterinarian after pitching in at shelters and a veterinary clinic.
“I love animals and I really want to help them,” said Meghan.
The camp also provides access to the world of pet care that most children don’t get a chance to see, since many shelters and clinics don’t take volunteers under 18, Ego said.
For Bobbi Venier, it was the wild bunnies she says are found everywhere in the Vancouver suburb of Delta that inspired her to take Pawsitively Pets to British Columbia.
“It all started when someone let their bunnies go free” instead of being responsible owners, and resulted in a “major population” of feral bunnies hopping around the city, said Venier, a friend of Ego.
She hopes the kids at her camp won’t make similar mistakes with their own pets.
The camp, run out of the second floor of a Mennonite Church — strictly a business agreement, she says — just launched this week. Like the Ontario camps, it takes on a range of ages, groups from toddlers to teenagers, giving them a guide to commonly-seen animals in the province, from the too-common bunnies to dogs, raccoons and other urban wildlife. Like Ego, she says she expects many attending the camp are destined for careers in animal medicine.
“A lot of them want to become veterinarians, they know this. (Yet) they’re, like, seven years old.”
She says she is “floored” by the kids’ animal knowledge, such as one young girl who taught Venier that owls can’t move their eyes.
“By the end of the summer all of us will know an awful lot, both the children and the adults.”