tigerswood
Well-known member
People who adopt senior/health-challenged dogs are saints. I don't think I could handle it.
People who adopt senior/health-challenged dogs are saints. I don't think I could handle it.
Waiting at the house right now for the call from the vet who is coming here to put our dog down. Man, this sucks. The dog doesn't even really like me and I'm still a big puddle of emo... She's been part of the family for almost 14 years, you know?
Waiting at the house right now for the call from the vet who is coming here to put our dog down. Man, this sucks. The dog doesn't even really like me and I'm still a big puddle of emo... She's been part of the family for almost 14 years, you know?
Waiting at the house right now for the call from the vet who is coming here to put our dog down. Man, this sucks. The dog doesn't even really like me and I'm still a big puddle of emo... She's been part of the family for almost 14 years, you know?
Congrats birdman! Rescuing a dog is one of the most rewarding feelings in the world. Our two rescues are monsters (in the best way) but they live the absolute best lives and I couldn’t imagine them in a shelter or back on the street.
Yeah definitely. My wife started a dog rescue in Alabama in our county where up to 2000 dogs and cats per year were being euthanized by animal control because there are way to many strays and there was no funding. They saved and shipped >500 dogs to NY and PA in about 18 months and we fostered about 70 of them for a week or two each. Really amazing operation she set up. Calvin was one of the last dogs she pulled before we moved to Florida.
That is amazing. One of ours came through a similar operation taking dogs from Arkansas and relocating them to the Boston area.
I currently run a rescue in NC, and this is a really common practice. Basically red states have a strong “animals are property” political mindset and don’t do anything of substance to regulate spaying and neutering your pets. Result is an overwhelming stray population in areas woefully under resourced resulting in super high euthanasia rates. The inverse is true where in the northeast especially with their “burdensome regulations”, they have almost no strays available to adopt. So you have like an Underground Railroad of cats and dogs being shipped up north.
We would pull the dogs find short term fosterers then drive them over the Georgia or Montgomery to meet the transport van. There were two different "companies" that did the transport, Grateful Doggies, and the other I can't remember. The guy had this van that was jury rigged to blow AC or Heat into the back where he dad stacks of dog crates up to ceiling. He could probably fit 25-30 dogs in individual crates in there. He'd depart in the evening and drive all night to PA or NY and deliver directly to the adoption agencies; he'd make the trip twice a week. I always felt good about driving the poor dogs to their freedom. The dedication and effort that the people who organize this stuff are amazing. It is stressful exhausting work that never ends. We started by going to County Commission meetings to try and get them to change the system and invest a little money and effort into saving these animals, but they stone walled us, so my wife just started pulling the dogs herself and trying to find rescues. The more we learned about it I was pretty amazed by the extent of the problem and the amount of effort that quietly goes into saving and shipping these animals north.
If southern states would just charge more for animal licenses if dogs/cats were unaltered, then thousands upon thousands of animals would avoid euthanasia, but I guess that’s treading on someone’s freedom too much.