04/26/2024
I'm a big fan of Playgroups & Play, and dog socials can look very different, depending on their purpose and resources available... 🤔🎭😻🐾🐺🐺🐺
This sort of social (video) with dogs and owners constantly navigating together was great to watch, since you could see some dogs trust in their owners growing, and the same was true the other way around... 💪
For the purpose of enrichment, and to reduce stress in shelter environments with limited resources (to keep dogs mentally healthy and thus adoptable)... Aimee Sadler's Dogs Playing for Life program should be the standard... 🔥
Though I haven't had the chance to see it in action yet, Heather Beck's K9 Lifeline structured daycare program seems like the best alternative to keep things comfortable for daycare staff, and to safely give more dogs the chance to be part of Playgroups... 🤘
Lya Battle's Territorio de Zaguates (Land of the Strays) is a sanctuary in Costa Rica that keeps over 1800 dogs living together, and even allows a limited amount of visitors/volunteers to interact with the group... An extraordinary place that I would like to visit sometime... 🙀
I've implemented structure to social groups in daycare, encouraging social interactions between the staff and the dogs (I joke that Aimee & Heather would kill me for that)... It's worked, and it generalized to other handlers with minimum involvement from my part, but for a while now, I've had a hard time picturing how to empower others to safely maintain the structure as they expand the group, without my involvement (end goal).
*Grateful for some insights gained on this trip, to make changes moving forward... 🐾
Long story short... Dog socials can be extremely useful, and they can have different rules & boundaries... Some set by the dogs, some set by the humans... Being mindful of them, and allowing/using them with purpose is the responsible thing to do.
Dog Trainer - Fernando Gustavson 
