All The Sweet Doggies (Even the Hairless Ones)

Gosh at the new dogs we have in rescue! From Boomer, who was dumped on the side of the road, to Surfie and Tangle, dumped in a field in an isolated neighborhood, to Cleo (pictured above,) Charlotte, Candy, and Miss Daisy, whose owner was hospitalized and the property manager threatened to put them out in the snow—these guys are looking for homes and all the attention we can give them!

Rescue in rural areas can be tough. More often than not, while progressive communities all around become no-kill and people think more and more about animal welfare, pockets of resistance exist where shelters kill more unwanted pets than they adopt out, where pet owners don’t spay and neuter routinely, and dumping or abandonment of animals is commonplace. We operate in such an area. Sadly, locals often expect animal welfare agencies to provide a service of convenience, without any understanding of what rescue organizations actually do.

Local rescues like TARC seldom qualify for grants from organizations like the ASPCA, the HSUS, and Best Friends, or even Maddie’s Fund. Those organizations look for larger, successful brick-and-mortar shelters to invest in. They like to see solid donation histories and the ability to grant-match. So what do you do when you’re a small, home-based rescue who does the work of a large rescue without the donor base or the community support? You beg. And you plead. And you throw yourself on the mercy of animal lovers who will understand how hard it is to do this kind of work in an environment that’s unwelcoming to downright hostile.

Through all of these challenges, the dogs never stop trusting. It’s the ones rescued from the worst situations who seem to appreciate it the most. Puppies are great, but dogs like Miss Daisy will tear a heart to shreds. She’s at least twelve and has clearly lived a rough life. Her teeth have never been cared for, and we all know that with these small breeds, dental health is not a minor issue. She has a cataract in one eye and is nearly hairless from some kind of untreated allergy. Yesterday she received a spa treatment at the vet and the employees said she really loved both her baths and even the haircut. They scrubbed away scabby, crusted skin, clippered away matted hair. When looking at the before and after photos below, it seems so easy to see the grief on her face in the first one, and the tentative hope in the second one. Today she is even more cheerful, although she will probably mourn the owner she lost for the rest of her life.

What we’ll do now is finish the vaccine series needed by these dogs, make sure they’re all thoroughly dewormed and free of both external and internal parasites, heartworm test anybody over six months, and have them spayed and neutered. This takes herculean effort, creates huge expense, and we always long for more hands-on volunteer help and more funding. Everything manages to get done, but the stress can be immense on the people who work tirelessly to make it happen.

Boomer is the only one of the newcomers who’s made it through intake quarantine. Surfie and Tangle have another week of it, and the four from the rental property have eleven more days. We quarantine each new dog with an unknown vaccine history for fourteen days. This is to make sure that any diseases they might be incubating don’t infect other animals in our rescue. We handle them as little as possible during this time to reduce the risk of cross-contamination. It’s a hard fourteen days, but by the end of it, they’ve had at least two core disease vaccines and are very unlikely to become ill with contagious disease.

Rescue is exhausting, often thankless work. It’s not for the squeamish or faint of heart. People can be cruel to the point it makes one ashamed to be human. But at the end of the day, when those little faces are looking up at you from warm, dry beds and you know every tummy in the house is full, it’s a feeling rivaled by no other. We hope to keep doing what we do until there are no dogs left to rescue. Steemit community, thank you for your support of our efforts and Steem on!