Dexter, Lulu, and Jake. Dogs affected by Board decisions! See their stories.
DAWG Exercise
DAWG used to get as many as 500 dogs a year adopted from their shelter. As of June 2017 they had gotten about 70 dogs adopted. They also used to do frequent volunteer trainings and got lots of UCSB students to fulfill their 7 hr volunteer requirement. DAWGs got numerous walks a day. Humane Society guidelines recommend that dogs kenneled in small areas (such as at DAWG) should get a minimum of 3-20 min walks a day.
More recently DAWG has relied more on paid staff to work with the dogs and so haven't offered a volunteer orientation in some time. A lead volunteer used to train new vols on an individual basis in Spring of 2017 but in April she was told in a public meeting that her services were no longer needed.
Because of this, the big dogs that the volunteers are allowed to handle (about 10 of the 20) rarely get more than 1 walk a day. 5 of the 9 lead vols that used to walk the big dogs are now gone from the shelter. In addition, DAWG changed their approach from taking every dog out to a yard for a pottie break in the morning to only taking the 7 pee (dogs that don't like to pee in their kennel) dogs out in the morning.
The small dogs do better than the big dogs because there are more volunteers that handle them. Even so, there are a number of red and yellow dogs (need more experience to handle them) or some that are staff only because of past behavior problems. These dogs rarely get out for more than one walk a day.
The lack of walks for big dogs was reported to the Board President and she requested that the vols take pictures of the walk board to show what was happening. One of the walk boards on a recent weekend shows 11 dogs getting to yards, most for a brief period at 7am. 3 big dogs got out for walks as of noon that day. Of the dogs listed on that board, Max, Duke, Raja, Buzz, Lulu, Cody, Phoenix, Rico, Benson, Panda, Karissa, Bronson, and Bourbon were staff only. Since the trainer and kennel manager don't work on weekends, that means those dogs were not getting out for any walks on those days.
