Day One of Fun!

To check out all of photos throughout the week, follow this link: https://goo.gl/photos/CHcqNPAQ1rYhwLtF6

Our day started off with decorating our name tags and filling dog Kongs until everyone was here. Dog kongs are filled with peanut butter and a treat and then frozen. Every night when he staff and volunteers leave, each shelter dog gets a frozen peanut butter Kong to snack on and play with until the next morning. Throughout the week, there are three things that campers will be helping the shelter with: filling dog Kongs with peanut butter, feeding the feral cats, and taking care of Carman the box turtle.

As soon as everyone was here, we went out back to learn about the feral cats and what we will be doing to help them. Cameron, one of the cats, made a guest appearance! Then we made our way back to the tent so that we could learn about Carman (the three toed box turtle with four toes!) and how we will be taking care of her. Every camper will have specific days that they will get to feed Carman and help with the feral cats, and campers can help with dog Kongs every day!

Our first guest, Erin Alamed, from HSCC can out to the dog yard to tell us all about the shelter, the volunteers, and what it takes to keep the Humane Society running smoothly every single day of the year (did you know that staff work at the shelter 365 days a year! Pups and kitties are still hungry on New Years and Forth of July!) She brought out a furry, four-legged, happy tail friend named Shelby. Shelby is one of Erin's personal pets (she also has another dog Sienna, and two cats, all of which were adopted from HSCC!).

After Erin left, we had snack, got our shirts, and took a group picture. Everyone definitely looked pretty enthused to be dressed just like their counselors for a few minutes! After the picture, we fed the feral cats and Carman then we started our tours! Campers learned about the structure of the building, got to see first hand what our MAC (morning animal care) volunteers do everyday, briefly learned about the adoption process, and got to meet all of our upstairs animals (bunnies, cats, guinea pigs, and ferrets)! Due to not only how stressed the shelter dogs can get when overstimulated with too much interaction (we don't want them to be worked up when an adopter comes to meet them!), and the range of behaviors and triggers that various shelter dogs have, we won't be playing with or taking care of them. We will however have plenty of time with our speakers and other animals!

After the tours were finished, we had a surprise animal hangout! The staff told us we could have ferret play dates! Groups of four campers at a time, got to go inside to the intake room and play with three of our ferrets!

After ferret time was over, we ate our lunch and suddenly our second speaker was here! Linden Higgins is a professor at UVM who studies arthropods (ask your camper about that one!) and taught us all about "bugs". After we talked for a while, we went around the yard and hunted some of our own bugs.

When we said goodbye to Linden, we made our way down to the pet cemetery for a scavenger hunt. We learned how to respectfully walk around the pet cemetery and appreciate all of the pets that were there. We saw a lot of fun names, and even got to learn a little bit about some of what these pets were most remembered by. Campers had a blast checking out off of the stones and names! On our walk back, we grabbed some pine cones and made pine cone bird feeders!

We're looking forward to another lovely day tomorrow!