You’re passionate about ensuring the highest standards of animal care and wellbeing. You thrive in a role where you can support the physical and mental welfare of dogs in a specialist environment.
As a Breeding Dog Wellbeing Technician, you’ll play a crucial role in ensuring the specialist care, health, and wellbeing of breeding dogs and puppies at a Guide Dogs site. You’ll provide high-quality husbandry, monitor behaviour and health, and support the development and socialisation of puppies, preparing them for their future roles.
You’ll be responsible for the daily care and welfare of dogs, ensuring their routine husbandry needs are met, including those requiring specialist care such as convalescing stock, whelping bitches, and neonates. You’ll monitor physical and mental wellbeing, identifying any health concerns and taking appropriate action where needed.
Working in collaboration with the Breeding and Puppy Wellbeing Specialist and Training & Behaviour Consultants, you’ll lead on developing behavioural responses and ensuring positive early experiences for puppies. You’ll also coach and mentor colleagues and volunteers, providing expert knowledge on dog wellbeing and breeding care.
Additionally, you’ll oversee the accurate maintenance of records, tracking health, behaviour, and development to ensure informed decision-making and trend analysis.
You’ll thrive in this role if you have experience working in a kennel environment (paid or voluntary) and a qualification in animal care, training, or behaviour (or equivalent work-based experience). A strong understanding of animal care principles and behaviour is essential. Effective communication skills are crucial for liaising with colleagues, volunteers, and external partners. The ability to problem-solve and make decisions in non-routine situations will be key to your success. You’ll need a reasonable level of fitness, stamina, and mobility to meet the physical demands of the role, along with emotional resilience to manage the challenges of working with breeding dogs and puppies.
Flexibility is essential, as the role will require early mornings, evenings, weekends, and overnight duties as needed on a rolling two week rota.
A qualification in animal care, training, or behaviour (or equivalent relevant work experience) is required. You must be able to meet the physical demands of the role, including handling puppies and large dogs over 24kg. A full UK Manual Driving Licence is essential, or you should be able to demonstrate an alternative means of fulfilling travel requirements.
No two people with sight loss are the same, and none of our people are either. So, we are proud to offer a range of person-centred benefits that can support each member of staff in ways that really mean something to them – and show them how much they mean to us. We offer a flexible benefits package, discounts and cashback scheme, a generous holiday allowance and matched contributory pension scheme to care for our people.
We value in-person collaboration with our teams and those we support, so the ability to travel to our sites is needed for this role.
This role will be based at our National Centre. A typical day starts at 7:30am and finishes at 3:30am but also includes weekends, evening and overnight duties on a rostered basis including Bank Holidays.
Assessments are due to place during week commencing 7th April 2025
This is a non-disclosure role.