Last week I looked on Petfinder and found over 100,000 dogs in need of new homes and loving families. Friends and family laugh at me knowing that there will always be foster dogs in my house even though the task is almost insurmountable. They ask me, “Why rescue?,” “How can you let go of these dogs once they come you’re your home?,” “Aren’t all dogs in shelters Pitbulls or ex-fighting dogs?” I once even heard someone say that shelter dogs are nothing but trouble. “If they had been good dogs, they never would have ended up in a shelter in the first place.”
Overwhelmed, I thought about the 33 rescue dogs that had come through my home in the past year. These were good, loving animals and newborn puppies whose only flaw was being born into a cold and uncaring world. Let me tell you a few of their stories.
A family in LI buys a female Golden Retriever puppy. They decide it would be a great experience for their children and a nice financial return if their female had puppies A year later they move to a newer, nicer home with the female dog and one of her puppies. They feel they can no longer tolerate dog fur in the house and poop in the yard. So they crate the male in the garage in a crate that is painfully too small and they attach their female to the crate on a two-foot chain leash. They leave them there with a self-feeder and self-watering bowl.
According to police reports, every few days these dogs were allowed to run freely through the neighborhood to relieve themselves on someone else’s lawn. After more than six months of keeping their dogs in their garage, the family surrenders the two dogs to rescue. A young couple with an eight month-old baby lost their beloved dog to cancer. They are depressed and long to give a home to a pair of dogs who would otherwise be separated. The couple drives five hours to LI to meet these two dogs and immediately fall in-love. The dogs go home that day with their new family and spend the remainder of their lives playing in a big house with a backyard.
In West Virginia, a woman who runs a half-way house for animals out of her own home goes to the local store to get milk. Upon her return she finds a box of five puppies sitting at the end of her driveway. No note, no information, no food or financial support. After a few weeks these puppies are moved into foster care. Four of the five pups are adopted out to loving homes, most of which have small children. The fifth remains small and sickly. After extensive tests it is found that she is diabetic and has an enzyme deficiency that will not allow her digest normal food. She is placed on Insulin injections and special food that costs more than $80 a month. Who will adopt this dog?
A woman in Southern, NJ watches this puppy for a weekend while the foster family is away. She and her husband fall in love with the pup and decide they will keep her regardless of her astronomical medical expenses.
An unaltered female Black Lab is turned in to a local shelter in West Virginia. When the owners are asked why she is being surrendered, they state that the dog had the nerve to get pregnant for a third time. The dog is spayed even though she is pregnant at the time. Thanks to rescue, the dog is moved into foster care in NJ where the home already has a litter of puppies that were separated from the mother far too young. These puppies are practically inconsolable. The Lab comes in, comforts and cares for this litter that is not even her own. She weans them even though she has not nursed them. She teaches them even though she didn’t deliver them.
After several weeks she is placed with a new family of her own where there are children to love and care for her and a yard for her to play in. It’s winter and a female Boxer/Lab mix is in a shelter in the mountains of WV, pregnant and ready to give birth. The shelter she’s in has no heat. She is pulled into rescue on Dec. 20th. On Christmas night she gives birth to 13 puppies in a nice warm house with towels and blankets to keep her newborn babies warm.
Without rescue, none of these pups, and possibly the mother would have made it. After the pups are old enough to be adopted out the mother goes to a young man in MA who had fallen in love with the dog on Christmas Eve. They now spend every weekend together running through the woods in the mountains of MA. In KY a family kindly brought a beautiful Golden Retriever to the shelter after they watched him thrown from a moving car. How will this story end up? Thanks to rescue, there is hope.
You ask me, “why rescue?” and I ask you “how can you not?” |
