February 2011
What’s the most important thing in rescue? Volunteers. We couldn’t do the job without all those people who drop what they are doing to go look at a dog in a shelter, or provide a ride to get a dog from a bad place to a safe place. We thank all of you daily for the things you do to get dogs into good homes.
Surprisingly, there’s another thing that’s important in getting the job done and that’s paperwork. The bane of our life is also critical in getting the job done. E-mails are saved and indexed, applications are printed and filed, and each dog has both an electronic and paper folder with records. Everyone who has ever had a disk crash can understand the need for paper backup. For every hour we work directly with a dog we spend many, many hours with the computer.
Sometimes the records pay off. This month we were contacted by a woman who said she had a five year old male who needed a new home. She lives alone and is having to work two jobs, and her dog was beginning to rebel in his loneliness, chewing on things in his boredom. She realized he needed more human contact and reluctantly asked us to help. Her name sounded familiar, so a search through e-mails showed a series of communications beginning with an application to us in late 2005. Following that we learned that she had put a deposit on a breeder’s puppy, and she told us who it was. That means we could call the breeder right away and have been working with her since. With luck we will transfer the dog from his current home into rescue, and because we have several applicants who have had home visits and are approved, his stay with us should be brief. By the time you read this we hope he has moved on to his forever home.
We also heard from someone else asking for help with their son’s dog. He was moving to an apartment and couldn’t leave his dog there all day, so we said we would help. Then their son’s friends heard what he was doing and convinced him to keep his dog. They said they would help, and his boss said he could bring his dog to work. We still have all the information in case it falls through, but we’re hopeful things will work out.
The best part of doing rescue so long is all the happy dogs and happy people we’ve met. The other side of the coin is that the first dogs we placed are getting old. It seems every month brings news of another Sammy over the rainbow bridge, but we have to keep in mind what great lives they had. This month we heard of a dog we didn’t place, but he was the brother of Eddie, one of our rescues. Sam lived in Troutdale with Jennifer, Rick, and Taylor. When he came to the rescue picnic the first time we could hardly believe that he looked so much like our girl Katie. He had the same sweet temperament, too. Here’s a picture of Sam and Eddie.
