June 18, July 9, and July 30, 2007

Haven Humane Society, located at 7449 Eastside Road in Redding, CA sponsors three day camps each summer for children ranging in age from 10 to 15 years of age. There are about 20 children participating in each camp. The camps, named Camp Love-A-Pet are designed to match a dog with a child for two weeks, with the child learning to train the dog, groom and feed the dog, learning responsibility. The dog benefits by learning new, positive behaviors that will greatly enhance its adoptability.

Strike Force was invited to participate in Camp Love-A-Pet this year by performing a demo for each of the three camps. The demos lasted approximately one hour each.

In addition to racing our experienced dogs for the children, we also introduced some of our beginning dogs so the campers could see how the sport is trained, and worked with one of the shelter dogs to see if the dog had the aptitude for the sport. One of the campers would boxload for us, and we had some of the campers actually handle one of the experienced racing dogs to see what it is like. We enjoyed our visits to this camp very much, and hope that perhaps we may have instilled the thought that there is so much more you can do with your dog than just have him live in the backyard.