July 24 2015.


Newhaven’s sea safety and fundraisers organised a small dog owners coffee morning at the Newhaven lifeboat boat house last Saturday. The event was arranged as part of the RNLI’s Respect the Water and community incident reduction program to reduce deaths around UK and Ireland Coasts by 50% by 2024.

The Newhaven team, including crew, organised the Dog Owners Coffee Morning at the station to promote some of the dangers that owners of dogs face locally. The participants gave feedback on a survey to find out more about their views relating to dogs and safety. Some interesting insights were gained as none of the owners realised how many times the lifeboat had been launched to dog related incidents. Most of the females said they would risk their lives to save their dog, whereas all the males said they would not put themselves in harm’s way and would call for help via the HM Coastguards.

There are plans for another dog owners coffee morning in the future, as this small pilot meeting proved to be a great success.

Coxswain Paul Legendre said: “The more we can work together with dog owners and educate them about the dog related shouts, hopefully over time the number of dog related call outs will reduce.”