National Take Your Dog to Work Day: When it is and how to get involved
National Take Your Dog to work day is fast approaching, coming up in the UK on Friday 23 June.
Established in 2014 by pet product company HOWND®, this year money raised by the initiative will be donated to three charities, All Dogs Matter, Animals Asia and Surge Sanctuary. If you’d like to get involved by donating and sharing images of your dog at work, all the information on how to – for businesses and individuals – is here.
The idea is also to encourage and help us to connect with our co-workers better, as everyone loves it when a dog is around in the office bringing some light relief and it encourages laughter and joy.
Millions of dogs per year are sent into adoption, and the issue has become worse since the pandemic, when many people got puppies but then didn’t properly train them and are now handing them into care services.
It’s a topic close to the BBC Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox’s heart, who spoke to City PM about how we can all support dogs better.
Right now dog owners can participate in the National Dog Survey (by clicking that link) in order to help the UK’s experts better understand the challenges facing dogs. Care centres and charities can then plan better support for dogs and their owners, so click here to feed back about your dog.
“Any pups that were bought and rehomed during the pandemic may have spent twenty-four hours a day with their humans, they wouldn’t know that at some point their human would have to go back to the office and life would get busy again,” Sara Cox says. “So I think it’s great that Dogs Trust are trying to help ease that.”
“We never got a puppy, we’d always get a rescue dog. I always wanted a puppy but when our dog would pass away, we’d get them at an average age of seven or eight so we didn’t have that long with them and they’d die of old age or illness.”
What about the subject of letting dogs kiss you? “They can have my chin,” she says, laughing. “I think that’s quite enough. “You just have to be quick. You offer them the chin because you’re trying to get your mouth away from them, they’re trying to give you little kisses which are obviously cute. But we all know how animals clean themselves…”
National Bring Your Dog to Work day is this 23 June, get in touch with your employer to find out if they will support the initiative
Read our interview with Sara Cox about her life with her dogs