Pet Life Magazine, New Zealand Pet Life Magazine Issue 6 Autumn 2018 | Page 9

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In January 2017, Kids Safe With Dogs
was granted charitable status. It’s one
year on and so much has been achieved
by the charity.
When Laura Purkis and Joanna Clough decided that they
needed to help reduce the number of dog bites in New Zealand,
they did not realise how much they could achieve in one year!
Their programme, Kids Safe With Dogs, has so far:
•
•
•
•
Educated over 11,000 children
Been run through 41 separate branches of Animates in the
country
Received over $12,000 in funding
And it works closely with Armourguard who looks after dog
control for Whangarei and Kaipara district councils.
The charity has also just been accepted as a finalist in the
Trusts Million Dollar Mission, where every vote they get earns
them $5. Kids Safe With Dogs wants to make enough money
from the competition to get a programme into every daycare,
primary school, intermediate and college in the Waitakere
district.
“It’s amazing how much we have done in just one year,” says
Joanna, who is up to the challenge of lowering New Zealand’s
grim dog bite statistics.
She and Laura came up with the idea of Kids Safe With Dogs
after yet another horrific dog bite to a young child in 2014.
Joanna got reports from ACC to study the dog bite statistics
and discovered that the figures “were staggering and
increasing every year”.
“In 2017 we had over 14,600 dog bites and in the last 10 years
we have spent over $39 million dollars and it has affected over
125,000 people.”
The two researched what prevention or awareness
programmes were available in New Zealand and it became
obvious that something new was needed.
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“We could see that what was being delivered was not reaching
enough people and in some situations we saw that the way
children were interacting with dogs in a meet-and-greet could
get them bitten.
“There was one formalised programme offered to every
primary and daycare facility by Internal Affairs but it was 20
years old. While it covered some very important safety aspects,
it needed to be updated to recognise new research.”
So Joanna and Laura decided to put a programme together
based on teaching children to use empathy with dogs. The
programmes gets kids to understand how it would feel if a
stranger came up to them and touched them, cuddled them or
took their food.
“We put together 3 Golden Rules and various scenarios, all
based around a fictional rescue dog called Jelly.”
They delivered their first school holiday programme in January
2015 and have not looked back since.
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Joanna Clough