Animals feel pain; animals feel fear; animals experience confusion, just like the rest of us. At the DSPCA, we feel it’s important to educate our pre schoolers that cruelty towards animals is not acceptable.
We do this through our bespoke age and ability designed programmes. Using specially commissioned toys, (lifelike cats and dogs), we visit crèches, community programmes and family project centres and speak to children at their level.
We do this because we understand that children, like animals, are special and unique. Caution should be used when discussing cruelty with young children.
Two year olds – at this age they begin to learn how their actions can have an affect on others. Children begin to understand basic moral concepts, like kindness and fairness; they will know to be kind to an animal because that animal, like themselves, deserves kindness.
Three to Five year olds – at this age they can speak to us and tell us how they would feel if they were hurt. They can discuss their own experiences and through this we can encourage them to relate how their actions, good and bad, happy and sad, can impact on the animals in their lives. We also encourage them to relate what makes them feel happy and secure will also make their animals secure.
Our Programmes - We can come and talk to your kids about these programmes or you can download them and teach them to your children, you can contact Gillian Bird by telephoning her at (01) 4994705 or email firstname.lastname@example.org for more information and support. Please keep an eye on this page as we are working to add more programmes.
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