Here's help for shelters and individuals struggling to cover their vet expenses! –Kim
ALSO, Top Online Fundraising Web Sites.
Here's a great video that shows the amazing intelligence of dogs! –Kim
This is disastrous legislation for Illinois...please get involved and help us stop it! –Kim
Senate Bill 648 is a disastrous bill for shelter pets. It would prohibit animal shelters from accepting stray dogs or cats unless they were released from animal control. Any strays who come in would have to be transferred to the county or city pound, greatly increasing the number of animals housed at local government facilities. Some of these facilities don't even have adoption programs. This is a huge waste of lives and also a waste of tax dollars.
One of the sweetest stories I've read...hope you'll pass it on! –Kim
Standing there, I had all the answers I would give another adult: "Piece of scum owners...not caring for their dog...letting it wither away to nothing..." All words of anger from seeing too many beautiful animals treated like garbage. But this was an innocent, sweet child with a pure heart. She hasn't seen the side of humanity I've seen. So I swallowed and said, "I really don't know, baby, there's a lot of bad people in the world. And..." She cut me off and said, "We can just feed her and she'll get better, right?" Then went on to tell me we would just feed them and they would all be better and nothing bad would ever happen to puppies like her. I looked down at her and said, "Of course."
I arrived with two packages of treats, Kelly brought treats and her dog, Mia, in case we were successful in reaching the testing stage. We walked back to the kennel and there she sat: still labeled as Unknown. Cowering in the corner of her kennel. I opened the door, sat down on the floor, and opened the first bag of treats. I reached one out to her and she growled. So I tossed it her direction. She snapped it up. Over and over, I tossed treats, eventually getting to the point they were closer to me than they were her. And each time she cautiously came to get them. Then I held the treats out in my hand and she gently took them from me. Each time, my hand came closer and closer to my body until she was standing right next to my leg and was letting me touch her with one hand while she ate from the other. The first time I touched her, she flinched and froze. I knew someone's touch had not been so kind and she remembered it. So when she came close again, my hand brushed her body again. After the third time, she no longer flinched.
Here's some great information that I thought I would pass on...it just makes sense! –Kim
Here's a great article that I thought I would pass on...hope you find it inspiring! –Kim
As I drove into the parking lot for the first time as the agency's new chief, I was met at the front door by a truck driver with five kittens he didn't want. Spaying his cat was not a priority.To him, the kittens were no longer "his problem." Whether they lived, died, or anything in between was not his business. By handing them over to us, in his estimation he had done his duty. He had brought them to the Tompkins County SPCA, the animal control authority for the entire county, and they were now our responsibility.
For most shelters, this is the point at which the breakdown that leads to killing occurs. The current view is that killing the kittens is, in large part, a fait accompli, and that the fault for the killing belonged to the truck driver at the front door. It was his failure to spay his cat, his failure to make a lifetime commitment to the kittens. But this view, while endemic to the culture of animal control, is not accurate.First, it is because of this irresponsibility that shelters exist in the first place. Second, it is often the practices of the shelter itself that lead to killing. If a shelter does not maintain adequate adoption hours or has poor customer service, refuses to work with volunteers, foster parents, or rescue groups, fails to treat and rehabilitate sick, injured, or traumatized animals, or does not offer TNR as an option, the shelter is not doing much to prevent killing.... These problems plague shelters nationwide, and the Tompkins County SPCA was no exception.Thankfully, on June 11, 2001, the truck driver did not live in a community whose shelter still subscribed to those views. On that day, the Tompkins County SPCA explicitly rejected the policies legitimized and championed by most shelters nationwide. Having been director of operations for the most successful SPCA in the country, I knew what worked and what didn't work. Clearly, killing those kittens was not going to be an option. Not surprisingly, we found all of them homes…Like so many shelters with animal control contracts, the Tompkins County SPCA had relied on the fiction that the only solution to the influx of homeless animals was killing. Staff would shake their heads and continue to blame "irresponsible owners" for the fact that so many animals would go out the door in body bags rather than in the loving arms of families. Like so many other shelters, the team that made up the Tompkins County SPCA upon my arrival never once saw the killing as its own failure to find solutions, meet its real mandate to be an animal welfare organization, or live up to the very real but often ignored shelter credo that "every life is precious."
The Humane Society of the United States' (HSUS) favorite misnomer "euthanasia" has lost its cache. Rescue groups and animal advocates have stopped using it and other HSUS euphemisms such as "putting them to sleep" to describe the abhorrent practice of systematic shelter killing. People are more aware of widespread mistreatment of animals in shelters. And they are less tolerant of the poor care and the killing, the excuses built up over the decades to justify it, and the legitimacy that groups like HSUS give to it. This has put the large national humane groups on the defensive, trying to take credit for the decline in killing nationally even as they opposed and in some cases continue to oppose the programs responsible for it, and by softening their anti-No Kill positions.[The No Kill movement] debunks the myth of pet overpopulation and puts the blame for the killing where it belongs: on the shoulders of the very shelter directors who find killing easier than doing what is necessary to stop it, on the local governments who continue to underfund their shelters or place them under the regressive oversight of health and police departments (and even under sanitation!), and on shelter managers who protect uncaring and even cruel staff members at the expense of the animals.More than all of that, average people are now aware that shelters kill. And they are aware that there are some shelters and communities that do not kill. [...As] one animal lover in Los Angeles, California, told me: "At least now we know what – or more accurately, who – the problem is." We also know how to make them stop. And in more communities nationwide, we have.
All I did was to create the framework in which they could do so – and ensured that staff supported, rather than impeded, those efforts. Volunteers not only helped us care for, adopt out, and place the legions of kittens and puppies who made their way to the shelter every spring and summer, they helped us save blind pets, pets missing limbs, animals hit by cars, and those with behavior problems.The animals who came to us also found homes because we were supported just as passionately by the public: adopters who took home older pets with special impediments because they believed in our lifesaving mission, donors who helped us double the average gift, and the media who told our story 406 times in one year alone.
Here's a great article that I thought I would pass on... Happy New Year! –Kim
Airline Workers Give Grounded Pooch a Home for the Holidays
By Renee Nadeau Algarin
December 24, 2011
Continental Airlines customer service reps have opened their homes in the spirit of this season of giving to a little dog that flew cross-county with his owner only to be barred from a flight to Spain.
Jane Bossi of Wakefield, a 28-year employee, said she was boarding customers on a Madrid-bound flight Sunday as a colleague tended to a Lake Tahoe woman and her 4-month-old puppy, Whopper.
The woman paid to have the pup fly under her seat from San Francisco to Boston, but she hadn't secured a health certificate from a vet to fly the pup out of the country. Hopes of placing the pup in a pet hotel went bust since he is too young to have had all his shots.
That's when Bossi opened her home to the pooch, offering to care for Whopper until his tearful owner returned from her trip to visit family in Spain.
"You just have to reach out and follow your heart and do something nice. She was out of answers. She did not know what else to do," Bossi said.
Bossi has emailed photos of the brindle Shar Pei-Boxer mix to his owner daily.
"I'm in love with him now because he's so beautiful," Bossi said.
Whopper will not be able to tag along on a surprise trip to New Hampshire to visit Bossi's mother, but luckily Bossi's co-workers have hearts as big as hers.
"The mother in all of us just took over," said LaDonna Evans-Ampadu, a fellow customer service rep and longtime foster parent who will pick up Whopper at the airport today to bring him to her Worcester home for the holiday. She plans to use the experience to teach her two daughters about caring for a dog before they get one next year.
Bossi said she has gotten more out of the experience than she imagined.
"This puppy was almost given to me as a gift," she said. "You do things sometimes and you get more back than you ever felt you deserved."
Source: http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2011_1224airline_workers_give_grounded_pooch_a_home_for_the_holidays
© Copyright the Boston Herald and Herald Media
Stray Pit Bull Saves Woman, Child from AttackerNovember 5, 2008
A dog came out of nowhere and stopped a knife-wielding robber from accosting a mother and her young son.
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – The wandering 65-pound Pit Bull mix might have seemed menacing to some passerby, but one woman will always remember him as her "guardian angel."
The dog, which authorities think is lost and not a stray, successfully thwarted a robbery attack on a mother and her 2-year-old son, who were held at knifepoint Monday afternoon.
The Florida woman, who has been identified by authorities simply as "Angela," was leaving a playground with her toddler son in Port Charlotte when a man approached her in the parking lot with a knife and told her not to make any noise or sudden movements.
Angela didn't have to do either to protect herself and her child – a dog mysteriously ran to the scene and charged the man, who quickly fled.
"I don't think the dog physically attacked the man, but he went at him and was showing signs of aggression, just baring his teeth and growling and barking. It was clear he was trying to defend this woman," Animal Control Lt. Brian Jones told Pet Pulse.
"I don't know what this man's intentions were, but it is very possible this dog saved her life."
The exceptional part of the story, Jones said, is that the dog had never met or even seen the people it quickly jumped to defend.
"You hear about family dogs protecting their owners, but this dog had nothing to do with this woman or her kid," Jones said. "He was like her guardian angel."
After the alleged thief ran away, Angela quickly placed her son, Jordan, in the car and tried to drive off. Before she could, though, the dog jumped into her backseat, waiting with her for the police and animal control officers to arrive at the scene.
The dog was transported to a local shelter and if his owners don't step forward within five days, Jones said, Angela and her family plan to adopt the savior she named "Angel."
Animal control officers and shelter workers believe Angel is lost, and not a stray, because of his good health, sturdy weight and mild temperament.
"It's funny, that someone's irresponsibility could have saved someone's life," Jones said of Angel's possible owners.
For Angela, it doesn't matter where the dog came from, just that he was there when she needed him most.
"I don't know what his [the thief's] intentions were – I don't know why he did it, but I'm glad that – we call him Angel – I'm glad that Angel showed up because I don't know what would have happened," Angela told NBC2 News.
For a small town with a population of 46,452 animal control officers were kept busy Monday afternoon. Jones says they department also responded to a report about a boa constrictor in a church parking lot.
The snake found its way into a car engine and was able to be removed without being harmed. It took three people to move the massive, seemingly random placed snake.
"It's funny, because we aren't a big place," he said of the Gulf Coast town. "And we can go for four or five months without the media contacting us about a story. It's been a busy week."
Officers from the responding county sheriff's office canvased the area and were unable to locate the suspect described as being in his 20s, tall and dark haired.
Source: http://www.dontbullymybreed.org/StrayPitBull.php
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