A nearby town is showing signs of success for a pet education program, and it is chewing a hole in hospital visits.
The Lakes Animal Friendship Society (LAFS) announced on Friday that they had studied the numbers from Northern Health and they were thrilled to see a big drop in one key area of their concern.
Northern Health "went through all the emergency room records to verify the numbers of dog bites" at the Burns Lake & District Hospital said society co-founder Valerie Ingram.
"After we started our animal care, compassion, and dog bite safety programs, as well as spaying and neutering and pet food programs, there have been about 23 dog bites per year at the emergency room," Ingram explained. "Before our programs, there were 36 dog bites per year - 58 per cent more dog bites."
Ingram added that the emergency room visits were, according to Northern Health, the "tip of the iceberg," so to speak. The estimation of actual dog bite incidents, extrapolated from the reported visits to the hospital, was in the neighbourhood of 130 actual bites. Reducing that amount by 58 per cent would be a significant improvement over and above the verified victims.
"A dog bite traumatizes the victim and their family, and often leads to the dog being killed," Ingram said. "The average hospital visit for a dog bite costs taxpayers $4,000 to $5,000. Please join us in celebrating this big change, and thank you for your support as we try to bring the dog bite number down to zero."
In addition to direct intervention programs like the spay-neuter campaign, fostering and adoption efforts, the LAFS is also the conveyer of classroom visits to teach children directly about responsible dog and cat ownership, public information initiatives to reduce the numbers of feral dogs and cats in the Lakes District, a community movement to build animal shelters for pets in need, and most famously for the popular children's books Out of the Cold, Nobody's Cats, and My Happy Dog-My Happy Cat all written by Ingram and LAFS co-founder Alistair Schroff.
