Once service starts this would be my fourth year being a member of the Care for Paws service group and I’ve participated in a lot of different projects we’ve run both online and in person.
The fist initiative I was part of was our first ever Anti-Animal Tourism Pledge. This was essentially an agreement we sent out to the school where people could agree not to participate in any tourism where animals were harmed or exploited. We were creating this pledge with thoughts about the treatment of elephants in Sri Lanka, the ongoing conflict between elephants and farmers, as well as issues of abusive treatment towards captive elephants.
And we had decent success with this getting about 70 signatures I believe from our community.
The most recent initiative I was part of was an activity that got delayed because of Covid but that we got to partake in during the brief window in April when we were back in school. The idea had been to sell tie-dyed Care for Paws shirts at the 2020 Food and Fun Fair, obviously that didn’t happen and after a year of waiting we were finally able to start the process splitting into groups and meeting up to tie dye the shirts. The process was really fun and it was a good collaborative experience trying to figure out patterns and colors.
Hopefully this year we’ll finally be able to sell the shirts and also hold more events we usually do, like our annual sterilization and vaccination camp.
Learning Outcomes:
LO4 Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences: This would be my fourth year being a member of care for paws and I made the decision to stay with the service group for all the time so that I can continue to work towards the issues we focus on.
LO7 Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions: I think the anti-animal tourism pledge was a really good exercise in looking at the actions we make and how they effect the things around us. Looking at how captive elephants may be awesome to be around or to take rides on but the ethics of this are questionable as the elephants are subjected to cruelty.