After 4 long months of uncertainty, in a very much changed world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can finally announce that we are back in business!! Enve Canine Services will be re-starting their weekend dog training classes on Saturday 8th August at Minster and Sunday 9th August at Thanington (provisional dates). We cannot tell you how much we are looking forward to seeing each and every one of you and getting back to some thread of normality!
Our reopening will be phased to enable us to make sure the new health and safety measures are working. We will start by reopening the weekend classes to those that were attending at the point that lockdown was implemented. We hope that many of you will be able to return but appreciate that for some, circumstances may have changed. Please keep an eye on your email and what’s app messages and get back to us ASAP. After that we will offer places to anyone who was attending on a weekday (as those classes will not resume until September). We will then start offering places to people from our weekend waiting lists. Please be patient, we will try to get everyone into class as soon as we can.
As with everything, your experience with us will need to be slightly different to before COVID-19 came along. As well as precautions to safeguard everyone from the risk of contracting or spreading coronavirus, we have had to make changes to the content of the training syllabus. These changes are made in accordance with our risk assessment (which you will find on our website new.envecanineservices.co.uk/covid-19-risk-assessment/ ) and in line with Health and Safety directives, government guidance, kennel club advice and the Canine and Feline Sector Group (who advise DEFRA). We hope that these changes will not put you off returning. We promise that the training content will be just as fun and just as challenging as before. The main change is that all dogs (with the exception of puppies in puppy class) will need to remain on lead at all times in the training areas as we are using public spaces. That means that exercises that would have previously been completed off-lead will need the dog to be on a long line instead. With this safety precaution in place we can still carry out virtually all of the exercises. Hopefully as the pandemic eases so will these restrictions. If you are at silver or gold level we suggest that you purchase your own long line for use in the lessons if you do not already have one. This will enable you to simulate the dog being off lead but remain in complete control. (This is one of the ones we use in class (7m long) https://www.cannyco.com/shop/canny-recall-lead or you could look at horses lunge lines or canine tracking lines).
In order to be able to go ahead and reopen we need to ask everyone to abide by the Enve COVID-19 rules. These rules are in place to protect both your health and ours. They are also mandated by the venues we hire and the law. Anyone not following the rules below puts our livelihood at risk. We have made it through a forced 4 month closure – we cannot afford to do that again. These COVID-19 specific rules have been added to our terms and conditions which can be found in full here: https://envecanineservices.co.uk/training/terms-and-conditions/ . By accepting a space on a course you are agreeing to abide by these conditions.
We appreciate it is a lot to take in and this new normal will take time to get used to. We thank you for your ongoing support. We look forward to hopefully seeing you at class very soon.
Emma, Ve and the rest of the Enve team