With winter approaching and space tight at its current facility, a Burnaby-based group is looking for a larger place to house and train puppies as assistance dogs.
Pacific Assistance Dogs Society (PADS) have been breeding, raising and training certified assistance dogs that help people with mobility issues or post-traumatic stress disorder for over 35 years.
Volunteers with the group typically take in and raise young puppies and shape them into assistance dog trainees ready to enter advanced training.But with the arrival of several litters of puppies recently, the indoor training capacity has reached a maximum, said Katelyn Mills, director of canine operations at PADS.
While trainers typically took the trainee puppies off-site during the summers, with a wet Vancouver winter in the forecast, it could become uncomfortable for the dogs and the trainers, she said.
“We would love a [warehouse-like] space somewhere that all of our trainers and puppies could work throughout the day..., as well as our [evening] puppy classes," she said. “Right now, during the day, we have three staff members that work on site in the advanced training program, and they are training about 10 dogs a day."
Ten dogs in a small space would make it difficult to get all the work done and train properly, she explained.
Logistically too, the society feels that the absence of a large secure indoor training facility can result in confusion and depletion of resources, which could be better used in training puppies to become certified assistance dogs to help the community.
“We were able to place significantly more of our dogs with clients, and these dogs are life changing for these clients,” she said. “That's been incredible, but in order to do that, more dogs have to be going through our training program.
“We have off-site trainers, so trainers that train out of their home. We have a trainer on Vancouver Island, we have two trainers out in Chilliwack, as well as our training staff that work out of the Burnaby campus. That's allowed us to keep some additional dogs without having that added pressure on site. But it would be nice for us to all be able to train in one space again because when we're doing all these separate spaces, we get a kind of disconnect between the team.
“It'd be nice for us to all be able to train in one place and work together and kind of grow the internal teamwork."
For more information, you're encouraged to visit PADS' website.
