Last week Emanuel Primary School coordinated a food drive for the homeless dogs at Monika's Doggie Rescue and Randwick Dog Rescue.  We called it "Give A Dog A Bone" Week and collected over nine cartons of food.  Both animal shelters, Randwick Dog Rescue and Monika's Doggie Rescue, are very grateful for these donations and would like to pass on their sincere thanks to everyone who participated.  In fact, Randwick Dog Rescue had almost run out of food and the shelter's coordinator, Mrs Evelyn Hopkins, was overjoyed at the timely gift.  The entire Primary School was involved and our pre-school, the Kornmehl Centre, also sent a small contribution.

Our Animal Club is going well.  The kids really like their membership cards! So far we have had an introduction meeting where we explored the Animal Club website and discussed personal experiences with animals and why we should be concerned for animals' welfare (because animals have the capacity to suffer). We then watched the video, Share the World, and discussed the golden rule to treat an animal as you would like to be treated if you were the animal.  Our next meeting was focussed on dogs.  Due to the recent mass slaughter of dogs in China, we explored Animal Asia Foundation's website, read about the massacres, then jointly wrote a simple email to the Chinese government imploring them to stop killing dogs.  Through this activity, the club sent a real message to the Chinese government and the children experienced empowerment and felt that they could really make a difference by taking action.

I'm Simone Fisher, a teacher at Sunshine North Primary School, and leader of our new Animal Club.  We have 25 members in the club ranging from grades P-6.  We are trying to raise money for a great organisation called Save a dog scheme.  At the moment we have just given each grade a money box so that they can put any extra change into it.  This money is collected every Friday and the grade that raises the most money gets a certificate at assembly.  Assembly is also a time for our Animal Club members to get up and share their ideas on looking after animals responsibly e.g. microchipping their pets.  The children really enjoy coming to Animal Club and learning how to be responsible pet owners.  They are also great at sharing this with the other children.  Our next job is to make animal badges and homemade dog biscuits to sell at recess and lunchtimes to raise even more money.  I would also like to get someone to come in to speak to us about our native animals.

On Wednesday 9th August we set up our 1st Education Stall in the cafeteria. With the help of club leader Karen Vincent and 8 student members we distributed flyers and educational material on various animal issues. Some of these flyers included information on: factory farming, Free Range Canberra – the state of battery caged hens in the ACT (a project run by Animal Liberation ACT), animal testing, vegan and vegetarian alternatives, and information on the Save Babe campaign. We also ran a petition to ban the production of battery caged eggs in the ACT and sold stickers and vegan cookies. The aim of our stall was to introduce some of the many issues associated with animal rights into our school community. All money raised from these stalls and future projects will go towards our goal of raising $1000 to befriend a bear in China at the Animals Asia Sanctuary.