Published: March 23, 2007 12:36 am      

COACHING KINDNESS: Sabres forward, wife pitch in at SPCA

TOWN OF TONAWANDA — A Sabre came to town yesterday to talk paws and snouts instead of pucks and shoot-outs.

Buffalo Sabre Adam Mair and his wife, Alli, took some time Thursday to speak to children at the SPCA about teamwork and animal care.

The children are taking part in an after-school program called Teaching Love and Compassion that teaches all sorts of animal-related lessons, from proper care and training for pets to how ecosystems work in the wild, said SPCA director of humane education Beth Shapiro.

“We learn to treat animals and other people with respect,” said Dejanae Brooks, 12. “We learn our responsibilities to animals, like if we see a stray we should turn it in to the SPCA.”

The children also learn what kinds of behavior constitutes abuse and how laws are applied to animals.

“We learn to treat animals with care, and the other day we learned that if we ever get caught at a dog fight, we can go to jail,” said Keneshia Benton, 13. “We train dogs to sit and roll over, too.”

The children told Mair about how they train pets to get them adopted faster and showed him the wall where they put pictures of pets they’ve placed with families.

Mair focused on the importance of teamwork in achieving success, whether the task is training dogs or scoring points. Peers need to be supportive even when members of a team don’t succeed in individual tasks, Mair said.

“You should never get mad at somebody for trying their best,” Mair said. “Just because someone missed a shot is no reason to be mad. We’re competitive and we want to win, but to do that we have to work together.”

Conflict is a part of sports, but there are rules to how far things should go and how situations should be resolved, Mair said.

“In hockey, like in boxing or wrestling, there’s an allowance for some rough playing,” Mair said. “But if you go too far, you do get penalized for it.”

Mair then participated in a conflict resolution activity where the children displayed their knowledge about how animals interrelate in human communities and in the wild by picking which 10 animals to save out of 15 available. The children focused on creating a self-sustaining ecosystem and examined how their choices might have been improved by considering benefits of animals like snakes and rats that most people are afraid of.

Contact reporter Daniel Pyeat 693-1000, Ext. 158.