Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Louisa: Vanessa Redwell joins me now who is a puppy socialising trainer.
What does your job involve then Vanessa?
Vanessa: Basically, in a nutshell, my job is to support our full-time socialising volunteers…
Throughout the whole process which would include doing home visits to them every 6 weeks.
If there are any problems with the dogs then I’m always at the end of a telephone or I can always come out and do more frequent visits.
Louisa: One thing that I would find incredibly difficult…
I would love to have the puppy.
I’d love to look after the puppy and see it grow and get bigger and learn all these skills…
But you have to hand them back don’t you. That must be quite hard for people.
Vanessa: I’m not going to lie. It is hard for some people…
But I think the main thing that people do have to remember is that they are doing it in order to help somebody else.
Some of our socialisers say that “I want to hand this dog back” and then they get a new dog just to overcome that real tie that they’ve got.
And like I say, again, it’s what the dogs are then going on and doing.
Louisa: Can puppy socialisers stay in touch with that dog and find out where it goes on to help somebody?
Vanessa: Once the dog actually goes into training, they are allowed to come a visit the dog after 6 weeks.
After that they are told, not where the dog is going, but they can keep in contact through myself and we can give them a rough idea of how the dog is doing.
Louisa: If somebody wanted to do this then what kind of skills, what kind of attributes are you looking for in a puppy socialiser?
Vanessa: The thing that we mainly look for is the commitment side of things.
You don’t actually have to have any dog experience because that’s what I’m here for.
And really you can’t work full-time.
Louisa: So it would suit maybe somebody who has either got a young family or somebody retired?
Vanessa: Yes we have quite a variety of different socialisers.
We have retired people, families with children at school.
So there is quite a lee-way of what we would except.
Louisa: And finally, in terms of locations for puppy socialisers.
Presumably, they have to be quite close to where we are now, near Chinnor?
Vanessa: Yes, currently we are looking for socialisers in the south of Oxfordshire, sort of Wallingford, Thame way…