A Very Puppy Success

Six weeks and three days ago, eleven dogs came into our rescue who have won hearts and warmed souls around the globe. Lena the mommy, along with ten little bundles of cuteness, yipped and yapped their way through quarantine, vaccines, deworming, and finally a trip to the vet for health certificates. Tonight, they will board a van bound for Vermont, on their way to new homes and wonderful lives they could have never found here in Southwest Virginia.

Relocation programs like ours have one goal: to save lives. We have an overwhelming saturation of strays in this region, while other parts of the U.S. have so few that volunteers can manage the cases they do find, eliminating the need for municipal animal shelters. Instead of killing the unwanted dogs in my area, and opening the door for production of more puppies in other areas, groups like mine transport as many as we can from high volume/low demand zip codes to low volume/high demand zip codes. This strategy does a lot of good for thousands of needy animals, but it has one major drawback: it takes a lot of money to make it happen.

Fuel isn’t the primary cost of transport. Each state has very clear laws about importing domestic pets. Some have minimum requirements, which are rabies vaccine and health certificate. Other states are very strict and specify core disease vaccines in addition to rabies, as well as impose a quarantine after the dogs arrive, even if the dogs were quarantined by the sending party.

The reputable receiving rescues that we deal with as partners have other requirements as well. Most require not one but two in a series of core disease vaccines—the initial and booster for adults, and at least the first two puppy shots, administered a minimum of two weeks apart. They also don’t want to receive puppies with external parasites like fleas or ticks, or internal parasites like hookworms or coccidia, and the dogs must have tested negative for heartworm within five days of transport. Most expect dogs and puppies to receive a bordatella, or kennel cough, vaccine. Some even want all dogs--even puppies--to be sterilized and microchipped before transport.

A breakdown of the basic vetting we’ve invested in this litter of puppies gives a good idea of how much it costs to rescue the dogs that irresponsible owners have thrown away. These puppies were all healthy. None had to receive treatment for any injury or disorder. Because I am trained to administer vaccines (other than rabies,) we buy from a reputable supplier and vaccinate in-house.

This breakdown doesn’t include the cost of transport (typically between $100 to $150 per crate with professional transporters (this trip will require five crates—one for Lena, then four with two puppies each.) It also doesn’t include the cost of spay/neuter surgery or microchipping, or the cost of feed for these puppies while they were in rescue. They ate ten pounds of Pedigree Puppy Formula each day.

Many people have probably never seen a health inspection certificate for domestic animals. Here is the first page of ours for this transport. It lists each dog, their destination, and the examining veterinarian’s credentials. This certificate helps ensure that no communicable diseases are spread across state lines.

This is one of our in-house medical records that we send along for each dog. It includes information about all the vaccines each animal receives in our care (with stickers from the vial attached to the page with expiration date, lot, and serial number,) as well as the deworming schedule while they were here and any other pertinent information.

Transport for these eight puppies will follow “no paws on the ground protocol.” This means the puppies will not be allowed to come in contact with any surface except the inside of their crate during transport. Professional relocation teams have someone on board who keeps the crates clean as they travel. This protocol is to protect incompletely vaccinated puppies from exposure to disease such as canine parvovirus, which can remain alive in the soil for years. Two vaccines provide puppies with some measure of protection, but not sterile immunity. Puppies have immune systems that are still coming online, as well as antibodies from the mother dog that can render vaccines inert. This is the reason puppies require a series of up to six vaccines before they're considered "fully vaccinated." We take extreme precautions with puppies, and will only work with other rescues and transporters who abide by the same rules of thumb.

Over the weekend, look for more photos of the puppies boarding transport, and hopefully some of them with their new families in Vermont as well!