Summer’s meant to be a break from school but it doesn’t have to be a break from learning. Among the many summer camps available in Yuma, the Humane Society of Yuma has been offering five one-week sessions. Each week is focused on a different age group and theme. The first week, for campers ages 7 to 9, was themed “Being Good to Our Pets.”
“So this week, we've been having a lot of fun with just the basics again: how to meet an animal, what to do if you see an animal outside, what to do if an animal attacks you, how to just exist around an animal,” said HSOY Education Coordinator Jimmy Gibbs on the last day of week one. “We're gonna end our day with talking about basic animal training like ‘sit,’ ‘come.’ We've talked about kennel training. We've talked about vaccinations, spay and neuter–just like the things that you would talk about in your first day of adopting an animal.
“My biggest emphasis with this class is compassion. You know, we try to teach these children to be kind to animals, and we believe that if you can teach a kid to be nice to a dog, it teaches them to be nice to everybody.”
KAWC dropped in the day Poppy the miniature horse, a volunteer therapy horse for Tails of Joy at Onvida Health, and her handler, Amy Karvoski, visited. Chips, an ambassador dog for HSOY, was another special guest earlier that day. Campers learned how to approach and pet both animals.
“Well, first of all, if, like, there's a dog that has an owner and they said you can pet it, you should probably first let the dog sniff your hand so that they know you're nice,” said Rayne, a camper. “Don't go straight for the face because then they might get scared or they might bite. You should do that.”
When asked why it’s important to be kind to animals, she explained that “Well, they all have sort of defenses like, well, so cats and dogs have really bad defenses to hurt you so that's why you should be nice to them. Because they can hurt you real bad.”
Kinley, a fellow camper, also put it succinctly: “Because if you don't treat them well, then they might treat you not well.”
A lot of the kids shared that they loved creating their own tie-dye shirts, which they’re pictured wearing the day they met Poppy, but campers like Rayne and Wyatt emphasized that they learned quite a bit.
“Well, I learned about horses, I've learned about sicknesses from cats and dogs, and I've learned that dogs and cats are adorable!” Rayne exclaimed.
Wyatt commented he was most interested to learn about “dogs and diseases.” One of his peers, Isaiah, asked him why.
“So you know what diseases are and it doesn’t hurt you,” he said.
When asked about his favorite parts of the week, he replied, “tie-dye and getting to see Chips!”
At the time of this publication, the summer camp has reached its third week. The weeks and age groups are as follows:
- June 9-13: Being Good to Our Pets (ages 7 - 9)
- June 16-20: Be a Shelter Hero (ages 8-10)
- June 23-27: Wildlife Welfare (ages 10-12)
- July 7-11: Animal Protectors (ages 12-13)
- July 14-18: Pet Health Heroes “Be a Vet” (ages 14-15)
“There's always improvement, especially with this age,” Jimmy Gibbs commented during Poppy’s visit. “They absorb all that information, especially if you phrase it around animals, especially when we go to schools. I see that it's a family-by-family thing, especially in an area as multicultural as Yuma, you get all sorts of different ideas. And so some kids, they've already got it, and you can tell that they've been raised around people who have compassion for animals. Then there's some people who just don't have that privilege, which is, it's a privilege; it's how I see it.
“So a lot of what we talk about, like, if you're an animal lover, you're gonna wonder why I even bring it up, but there's just so many people who've just haven't been around animals or raised by people who come from a culture where they just see animals differently.”
For these five weeks of the summer, Gibbs is focused on the summer camp, which he designed, but the rest of the year, he runs HSOY’s Be Humane program, where he visits schools with a volunteer and a dog and they fundraise while teaching children about animal welfare. For parents who couldn’t enroll their kids in the summer camp this year but are still interested in this type of education, Gibbs recommends they reach out.
“The first place to start is to talk to your principal of your kid's school about the Be Humane program,” he said. “We only have so many slots for a year to do the entire fundraiser, but if your school is unable to do an entire season, just tell them to contact the Humane Society and we can set up private seminars.
“We're even trying to break into doing seminars for adults because, again, in this area, there's just so many different cultures. There's so many areas of people who just don't have this information, never thought about it, you know? ‘Why would I care about what a dog thinks?’ I run into that a lot. So, you know, I believe that education is the way that we change the world, and we just want to reach as many people as possible. So contact the Humane Society, ask for Jimmy the education director, and we'll see what we can do.”
For more information, visit https://hsoyuma.com.
This reporting is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
