Hello friends, welcome to Rough Life. I don't know if you're going to be able to hear the
dogs barking in the background, but just in case you can, I want you to know that they
are my neighbor's dogs. My dogs are being good little babies and they are asleep on
the couch right now. Anyways, I have got quite an episode for you today. So many of
these stories are so wild. I wanted to make sure you got the full story with all the details.
So I think this is going to be a longer episode. But before we start, several of these animals
were pulled right before, during, or right after the storm that we had a few weeks ago.
And just so I don't have to say it for every story and drive you crazy, I want to make
sure you know how truly terrible the storm was down here. Our weather went from 60 degrees
to like low 20s overnight. We had a ton of rain that froze. And then we got eight inches
of snow piled on top of it. Like we don't ever get eight inches of snow. A few days
into the week, everything started to thaw, but then it froze again that night, turning
our nice cushy snow into just solid ice. We had multiple days where the temperature did
not get above two degrees. And we were stuck in our homes for over a week. People died
in their homes because they froze to death. So the animals that we're about to talk about
that were outside during this should have absolutely died. Okay, let's jump into the
stories. It figures that I would make that whole speech about the snowstorm and my first
few stories are not even about the snowstorm. But anyways, Hans was found as a stray here
in Alabama and I am so excited that we were finally cleared to pull from the Alabama shelter
again. We have missed our friends so much. Hans was picked up by someone in the community
who saw him being attacked by another dog. They took him to the shelter and the shelter
posted him on their Facebook page and waited several weeks for an owner to come forward,
but no one ever did. Gail was found in a neighborhood in a nearby town. The finders
stopped to ask around to see if she belonged to anyone. The neighbor said she had actually
been roaming their neighborhood for a few weeks and no one had claimed her. The lady
that lived at the house agreed to foster her and work with her on learning trust because
she was a little skittish. Pabby was found on a back road in another county. Someone
posted him on Facebook looking for owners and no one claimed him, so they reached out
to our rescue partners to take him. Jarvo? Do we think it's Jarvo? Maybe it's Harvo?
I'm not sure. The J single puppy. Someone found this tiny puppy all alone on a county
road. They looked around for other siblings, but they didn't see any. So the finder posted
him on Facebook as free to a good home. Y'all, why do I do this to myself? I could have named
these animals anything in the world, but instead I named them things I have no idea
how to say. I even googled how to pronounce this and like the internet was divided. So
we're just gonna say Vooley? Or just call her like Vooley Julie or I don't know. Go
with that. She was posted on Facebook by her family as free to a good home. The husband
had just passed away recently, so the mom had to go back to work and the puppy was created
all day long and she was used to having the full run of the house previously. So the lady
said she and her kids sat down and they made the tough decision to just go ahead and let
her go to a family that could spend more time with her. They had actually found her in a
ditch when she was a small puppy, so she might not actually be a labradoodle and so I tell
you guys all the time we have like group names that we call them down here before they actually
get their names and she was posted on the Facebook post saying that she was a labradoodle.
So we've been calling her a labradoodle since we got her. Oaken wandered up as a stray to
an elderly man's house. He was posted on Facebook and no one came forward. The man is actually
good friends with my parents and he knows I do rescue work so he asked if I would take
him. This was actually over Christmas when we were closed for several weeks. I told him
I could take him in January but he would have to keep him until then and truth be told I
actually forgot about the dog for a while. But when my parents reminded me about him
we actually had a foster leaving the jail the next day so I told him I could take him
the following day. That ended up being the very last day of January so by the skin of
my teeth I kept my word to this man. They have loved having him at the jail and the
old man loved having him at his house but he had two other dogs and it was just too
much to take care of but he is definitely a very sweet, very laid back boy. Worth melting
for otherwise known as Chloe down here is our very first ever liver shunt dog. Usually
any time I ask Dr. Burton if I can pull a liver shunt dog she tells me absolutely not
like no questions no we're just not and in her defense they're usually super sick and
super symptomatic. But when she heard Chloe's story she knew we had to help. Our bottle
feeder foster that I talk about on here so much was asked by another rescuer to take
Chloe when Chloe was eight weeks old. Yes eight weeks old this dog that is about a year
old that I'm sending to you today we've had her since she was eight weeks old. Our foster
agreed to foster her thinking it would be a few weeks to a month or so before she went
to that rescuers rescue. The rescuer told her that Chloe was a purebred lab. I don't
think she is. That was dumped at a shelter because she wasn't gaining weight and she
was having seizures. They suspected it was a liver shunt and they intended to have her
tested and have surgery done to correct it. Apparently when the rescuer or maybe the rescue
that she was sending the dog to realized how much both of those things were going to cost
on top of the special liver shunt food that they were having to buy for her every few
weeks that was well over a hundred dollars a bag they backed out and by backed out I
mean they cut all contact completely never said another word about the dog ignored any
message our foster sent them and just ghosted. It cost our foster so much money just to buy
the dog food that she ended up looking up how to make homemade liver shunt friendly
foods for the dog so that the dog didn't die and she didn't lose her home from bankruptcy.
Our foster asked us if we could take her and that was about five months into fostering
so Chloe was about seven months old at the time. I told me the story and because we never
even really had an actual diagnosis and Chloe was doing great at the time we went ahead
and had her taken to the vet for a liver shunt test. Apparently she failed the first test
but our vet couldn't believe it because he didn't think there was any way she could really
have a liver shunt because she was just so healthy so he asked if he could keep her overnight
and do a more specialized test on her the next day. Something about a bile test? I don't
know. He called us with the results the next day and he said it was the absolute worst
numbers he had ever seen in his entire career. He could not believe that the dog was as normal
and healthy as she was based on her numbers. He advised us to just take her back home slowly
transition her from the homemade meals to a low protein regular dog food diet so not
the liver shunt diet food that was a hundred dollars a bag but not just full blown you know
old red dog food from Walmart so she is on Rachel Ray's something or other. She did fantastic
with the transition. She hasn't had any seizures since she was just a few weeks old. She spent
a couple months at doggie daycare and she was perfect the whole time there as well. I just
cannot believe that a rescue or rescuer would turn their back on a dog that they committed
to like this but I sure am glad that Chloe ended up being a wolf trap dog after all because
she has stolen all of our hearts. Elsa is the final litter mate of the tea litter of
four puppies from the January 27th Alabama Transport. If you remember in that episode
I told you that these are the grand pups of Eliza orange juice from the November 11th
Thanksgiving Transport. We were able to trap and catch the first four puppies but Elsa
was too stubborn. A day or two after we got the four puppies was when the terrible ice
storm hit. See here we go, the ice storm. Elsa was living in a dilapidated home with no real
structure at all and hardly any shelter from the snow and the wind. All of the windows
were broken. There was hardly any walls. It was pitiful. We pretty much knew she was
dead. There was no way she couldn't be dead. The day that the ice melted, Jessica drove
out there just to see and sure enough she heard the sweetest meanest little bark coming
from inside the house. It took quite a few more days but finally the owners called us
that she was in the trap and Jessica raced out there to get her. She was pretty ticked
off the first few days of her captivity but Elsa eventually realized it's not so bad being
an inside dog with cozy beds, squeaky toys, endless food, and real shelter from the elements.
We love, love, love this girl and we are so happy she survived and we cannot wait to see
the videos of her reunion with her litter mates. Oh and Elsa is the reason that this
week's theme is frozen. Jessica named her Elsa because the cold never bothered her
anyway and I thought it was just too perfect to change it to anything else. And frozen
was the perfect theme for. Frozen and her two siblings were found ashtrays during the
terrible ice storm that we had. The finders were four wheeling in the snow and they saw
them sitting in a ditch. The girl couldn't carry them on her four wheeler so she went
back to the house and told her husband and her husband was like there's absolutely no
way that we can leave them out there. They're going to freeze to death. So they went back
out there and they were in the exact same spot and in the exact same position as when
she first saw them. When they got up closer to them they realized that they were literally,
physically frozen to the ground. One of them was on a garbage bag so we think that they
were thrown out in that and just crawled out of it. It took them a long time to get
them loose from the ice where they could carry them home. They had frostbite on the
bottoms of their feet and their tails. When the roads were drivable again they took them
to their vet to make sure there wasn't anything that they were supposed to be doing for the
frostbite that they weren't. They had two friends that they gave the two other puppies
to and they posted frozen on Facebook as free to a good home. No one was interested so she
ended up contacting us directly to take her and y'all. I do not mean this ugly at all.
I love all puppies. I think all puppies are deserving of the best home ever. You know
it's usually the ugly pitiful ones that I love the most but so often we see people give
away the cutest ones first and then they ask us to just take whatever is left. But the
two puppies that she gave away were just plain Jane puppies and the one she gave us is gorgeous.
It is so fluffy and it is so cute. I could not believe that that was the one that she
got quote unquote stuck with. Regardless I am very thankful that they saved all of these
puppies. They would have absolutely died a terrible and horrible death if it weren't
for them. Marshmallow is another crazy story. We got a call from Animal Control a few months
ago who said he was called about three dogs stuck in a crate outside at an abandoned house.
They seem to have been in there for quite a while. Someone said a week. I don't think
it was a week but it was definitely more than a few days judging by the amount of poop that
was in the crate with them. It was out in the county so there was nothing that Animal
Control could do. We were working on a plan to get them when apparently the owners came
and got them. We forgot all about them until a couple weeks later when Animal Control got
a call about them again. This time they were in a crate inside a home abandoned. Luckily
it was in the city limits so the Animal Control officer could help. He seized them all and
he took the puppy to the vet because of how sick it was. One of our fosters knows the
owner and the owner was super worried about charges being filed and she told our foster
that they were planning to go back and feed them when they could but they don't even have
a vehicle and they have no way to go back and forth to feed them or even just let them
out of the crate that they were stuck in. Anyways, the puppy was super sick as you can
imagine after being left in a crate for days to a week at a time with no food or water
and shoved in there with two larger dogs. He was very malnourished but he did make a
quick recovery after spending several days at the vet. We actually don't totally know
what's happened or is happening with this case. To our knowledge, the owner surrendered
the puppy and that's why we were able to send it on transport already. Either that
or she tried to claim that it was a stray and it wasn't even her puppy. We're not sure.
The two adult dogs though are definitely her dogs and I guess she didn't want to surrender
them or it didn't matter if she surrendered them or not because of the impending trial.
Because the puppy lived, she can't be charged with a felony but she is still going to have
to serve some jail time. The two adult dogs are still at the shelter and in the custody
of the shelter so I don't know if she gets them back when her sentence is up or if the
shelter can turn them over to a rescue once the trial is concluded. I don't know. This
is the first time that we're taking dogs from a legal battle without being the ones pressing
the charges and being at the court hearings so I'll let y'all know when I know. Yelena
or something that looks like it would be pronounced similar to Yelena was found as a stray by
someone who knew someone who knew we take homeless animals so she reached out to us on their
behalf. She was just found as a stray. The Duke of Wesselton and the Sea Litter of Two
were found together here in Alabama. My sister-in-law actually called me on the way home from the
last transport and said her co-worker found three little puppies in the county and needed
someone to take them. If you're fostering any of these three, you know there are many
things that you could use to describe these dogs but little puppies is not something
I would use to describe them. The girl who found them said she just saw them on a back
road and when she got out of her car they came running to her as fast as they could.
She kept them overnight for me because I was dead tired when I got home from transport
and then she even drove them to Mississippi to give them to the foster for me. The R
Litter of Two are owner-surrenders and listen, I broke one of my own rules but I don't even
care this time. These are half Rottweiler and half Labradoodle puppies. The owner was
selling them on Facebook which if you don't know is against Facebook rules. So I kept
reporting her posts and I kept getting removed because she's actually a friend of mine. She
reached out to me a few weeks later when two of the puppies didn't sell and she asked me
if I could take them and the mom, the Rottweiler. Now I love a roddy. I think they are great
dogs. I would definitely own a Rottweiler one day but they are definitely the kind of dogs
that you need to ask a few questions about before you just blindly pull them. And the
answer she was giving me were kind of red flag answers. She would say things like, well
she's great with us. We've never had a problem with her. Things like that. So I did something
I rarely ever do and I told her we would spay her mom for free even though she did not surrender
the whole litter and she actually sold the majority of the litter. But they said if she
wasn't reproducing all the time they wouldn't have a problem keeping her. And I felt like
that was the better and safer option for the mama than for us to pull her and her potentially
be aggressive in a new setting and have to be put down. Regardless, if nothing else,
I bought us a little more time and if they decide they can no longer keep her and they
surrender her down the road, at least she's already been spayed for us. Anyway, back to
the puppies. My mom got there to pick up the two boys and they told her, oh we just sold
one. So it's actually only one puppy that you're getting. Which is ridiculous. But there
was nothing that we could do about it. Coincidentally, someone who bought one of the girl puppies
the day before sent me a text the next day asking if I would be willing to take her puppy.
She is a senior in high school and she bought a puppy thinking it would help her be less
stressed. Let's all let out a collective awe for this sweet little dumb high schooler
who had no idea how hard puppies are to take care of. She was supposed to drop it off at
my mom's house the next morning but then she didn't because her boyfriend that she lives
with promised to start helping her more with the puppy. We all know how that goes. But
then she called me two days later and basically said, take this puppy now. She really did
try to be a great dog mama and she even kept the dog in the house the whole time. So she
is by far the worst dog owner we've had on this podcast. We are very thankful that instead
of just giving it away to anybody that she knew, she found a rescue that would take it
and give it a good home. The end letter of three have a weird story. One of our fosters
was waiting at her son's house for the cable guy to show up when he showed up they started
talking and he told her that he had taken three puppies from his neighbor because the
neighbor told him he was going to shoot them. But he really didn't know what to do with
three puppies and she asked if we had any room to take them. We told her we didn't write
them but in a few days we probably would. So she had him send her pictures in the meantime
and two days later we got a call from the shelter in town that three puppies had been
dumped in their play yard overnight. When they sent us pictures of them they were identical
to the cable guys puppies. We pulled them a few days later. The K letter of three are
owner surrenders. The woman who surrendered the M letter of six from the January 27th
Bama Transport called our rescue partners a few days before transport left and asked
her if she would take three puppies from her stepdaughter's dog as well. She had lost
her home a few weeks before and moved in with the stepmom. She moved into a new house just
before the ice storm hit but she left the puppies with the stepmom so they wouldn't
be out in the cold but apparently she never came back for them. Now I have absolutely
no reason to think this other than one picture that I saw but I am wondering if the daughter's
dog and the mama of the M pups are related because they look similar. I would love a
DNA test done on both these litters. Oh and the rescuer said that these puppies were the
best puppies she has ever fostered and they already know how to go potty on the potty
pads in the house. Yay. The L letter of three were found with several litter mates on a
back road. The finder gave a few of them away and then she posted on Facebook that she was
willing to foster if her rescue could take the last three so we were very happy to help
out. The B letter of three were pulled the day before the ice storm hit. A foster for
a rescue partner of ours was driving around giving away straw to anyone who needed it
for their dog houses. She drove by a house out in the county and she saw a dog house
and just decided to stop and ask them if they needed some straw. When she stopped three
little black and white puppies came running out the owners were very thankful for the
straw for their dog and when the foster asked them what they were planning to do with the
puppies they said they really didn't know. So she loaded them up and she took them home
with her. The A letter of four are owner surrenders. The owners took the mama to have her spayed
and quickly realized she was already pregnant. So they brought her back home and they let
her have her puppies. They are so thankful that Wolf Drap will be paying to have her
finally spayed so she will not be having any more puppies. The S mama and her 10 puppies
were found on a county road during the terrible ice storm. There is no way that they would
have survived the night before so they were definitely dumped out there after the storm
hit and it was so insanely cold. Someone who lives on that road saw them and took them
home. She started asking around for someone to take them but then we all got snowed in
for over a week and no one was going anywhere. Thankfully she still kept them safe and warm
until things thought out. We got them set up at the dog house as soon as the roads were
passable again and she has been the very best little mama. You can tell she is just so
relieved to be indoors and warm with real food. The I letter of kittens were posted
on Facebook as free to a good home. The owner agreed to hang on to them for us until transport
and is very happy to have his mama cat spayed. And that's all the stories for this week.
We have one more transport coming up February 22nd before we take several weeks off so make
sure you sign up to foster so you don't miss out on any puppy snowballs. Plus with us taking
such a long break you know I'm going to need to send as many animals as possible on that
transport. Okay I'm off to transport now to see how many of these animals really show
up and actually get to leave today. It's a rough life but someone's got to do it.