Hello friends! Welcome to Rough Life. Today I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk
about why what I do works, because if you're in the South you probably don't understand
why we're sending animals as fast as we can up North, and if you are up North you probably
don't understand why we have so many animals to send you all the time. So I have a unique
perspective because I was actually born and raised up North. I grew up in the suburbs
outside of Chicago, so it was a lot like the area in Virginia where we send the majority
of our animals. You did not see stray animals. Our shelters were not overrun. If you saw
a dog running around your neighborhood, you caught it and you held onto it because you
knew even if you didn't know who the dog was, if you didn't know it was your neighbor's
dog, you knew someone was looking for it because there just were no stray dogs. You never saw
homeless animals walking around. So when I moved to Mississippi, I thought it was the
cutest thing that when you would go to the dollar store, go to the gas station, there
would be three, four, sometimes six random dogs just hanging out there. And I'm like,
oh my goodness, this is so fun. You get to get gas and you get to pet some puppies while
you're there until I got closer to these animals. And I realized they're actually covered in
mange. They're scratching nonstop because they're being eaten alive by fleas. They have
ticks the size of quarters hanging off of them. They're skinny, they're sickly, no one's
taking care of them. And then, you know, a few weeks later, you'd be driving by and
one of them would be dead on the side of the road because it was run over by a car. So
it very quickly became not so cute. And I realized that this is totally normal to people
down here. They don't think anything of it to drive by and see random dogs at whatever
store they're going to or to see a random dog walking through their yard trying to find
somewhere safe and dry to sleep for the night. It doesn't face them. And for me, I'm like,
well, we need to catch them. Like, obviously, someone's looking for them. This has to be
someone's pet and we'll reunite them and it'll be this wonderful story. No, literally, they're
just homeless dogs that are living everywhere. So this is why a lot of people up north don't
understand why we have so many animals down here. And that's primarily because there are
very few places in the south that have leash laws. So leash laws are basically just laws
that say your dog has to be confined to your yard unless it's on a leash and you're taking
it somewhere. You cannot just let your dog run loose all through the neighborhood or
through your town. So because no one down here can enforce a law that doesn't exist,
you have some people that have dozens, literally dozens of dogs. And they just let them roam
free. No one is spayed or neutered. No one's up to date on vaccines or dewormer. They just
go wherever they want to go whenever they want to go. And if you know anything about
dogs, you know that they can reproduce very quickly. It's not uncommon at all for a mama
dog to have 10 or more puppies in a litter. So those six dogs that are hanging out at
the gas station parking lot, even if just one of them is female and she has, let's say
four puppies, which it would absolutely be more than that. But for the sake of easy math,
let's just pretend it's only four. You're now up to 10 dogs in that parking lot. All
of them are mating. And in six months, that mama dog is going to be pregnant again. And
any of her puppies that were females in that litter will be pregnant by the time they're
six to 10 months old. In one year, your six dogs at the gas station parking lot are now
well over 20 dogs, depending on how many of the puppies are females. And this is happening
year after year, litter after litter and multiple parking lots and multiple fields in town and
multiple backyards all over the south. You also have battles between the city and the
county. I, I actually don't know if it's like this up north too, but I do know that down
here, it's very common to have an animal shelter in the city limits. What that means
is if you live in the city limits and there's a stray dog in your yard or even just your
own dog that you decide you're done with and you no longer want, you can call animal control
and they will come pick it up. But if you're in the county, there's no one that can help
you. You cannot take a dog to the, to the shelter if you live in the county. There are
so many instances where people who live on the very first road in the county will have
a dog wander up to their house and just refuse to leave and they can't do anything about
it. But if the dog would have just stopped at the house right before theirs at their
neighbor's house, they would have been in the city limits and they could have taken
it to the shelter that day. But the shelters are not always the answer to the problem down
here because first of all, not every town even has a shelter and most of the shelters
are very small because most of our towns are very small. So like this isn't some huge building
with wall to wall stainless steel kennels. It's usually a small metal building with 10
to 15 cages, no heating, no air conditioning and like one animal control officer to oversee
everything. So when someone at the gas station gets fed up with the six stray dogs that are
harassing their customers for scraps of food, they can call animal control and he will come
pick them up. But those six dogs are now taking up about half of the cages at that shelter.
And this can go one of two ways. If it's a kill shelter, which they almost always are
down here, that means whoever has been there the longest is euthanized so that that kennel
can go to one of the new gas station dogs. Some shelters have a seven day hold. What
that means is at the end of seven days, whether there are new dogs needing to come in or not,
they're euthanized. That's it. You have seven days for someone to come get you or you're
dead. Now, some shelters have the seven day hold, but they won't euthanize until they
have to for space. So you could be there for two months, you could be there for a year,
but they aren't going to kill you until they need your cage for another dog. And seven
days is actually pretty generous. I know of some shelters that have a three day hold.
I think five days is actually pretty standard, but I just went with seven. So that's what
would happen if your town's shelter was a kill shelter. If you happen to live in a town
where they have a no kill shelter, which is rare, but there are several of them in the
south that have them. No kill shelters operate a little differently. No kill does not mean
that no animals are euthanized at these shelters. That's actually a common misconception. You
can still euthanize animals at a no kill shelter. I think it's like 10% or something. So as
long as you're not euthanizing more than 10% of the animals that come into your shelter,
you're able to maintain that no kill status. Basically, no kill shelters just don't kill
for space like the other shelters. Instead, they're building that was made to house, let's
say 50 animals will actually be stretched to hold upwards of 150 to 200 animals. They'll
have cages lining the hallways, doubling sometimes tripling up on dogs and kennels,
putting kennels outside in the back with tarps and dog houses. They'll have a play yard
where they stick 10 to 15 dogs at a time and just hope they all get along and no one picks
a fight. But even still, there will come a time when they just absolutely cannot fit
another animal. So when you call animal control to come pick up those six dogs at the gas station,
they may just flat out say no. If they don't have room or they cannot or will not euthanize
for space, there's nothing they can do. And now you're just stuck with six dogs at the
gas station. I keep saying gas station because that's a scenario I gave you in the beginning.
But this could be anywhere. You could have six dogs show up in your yard one day and
refuse to leave. It could be your elderly mother's house. It could be your apartment
complex where you're not even allowed to have dogs. It could be your small businesses parking
there literally everywhere. Okay, so that's a little bit about what it's like in the south.
A lot of people in the south don't realize that this is a problem that only the south
has. They assume it's like this up north to so they don't understand why we're spending
the money taking the time going to all the effort to send so many animals up north. I
cannot tell you how many times I've taken a litter of puppies for someone and they'll
be like, now what are you going to do with them? And I'll say, oh, we're going to send
them up north. Well, where they're going to be adopted. And almost always they say they
don't have dogs up north. And quite literally no, they don't. Not like this, because they
have leash laws and because they enforce breeding licenses and permits. Obviously,
this is not the case for every single town in every single state up north. But for the
most part, it's far more common than it is uncommon. You don't see backyard breeders
like you do down here. And okay, there's a difference between backyard breeders and puppy
mills. But that's a whole different episode for a different day. But basically, a backyard
breeder is someone who just has one, maybe two dogs that they breed. They're generally
taken care of to the extent that they're at least comfortable, they're fed, they're able
to move around. But by no means are they well taken care of. But more on that in a later
episode. But anyways, you don't see a lot of those up north. Up north, you usually have
to have a license or a permit to breed your dog. A lot of states also require you to spay
or neuter your dog unless you are a licensed breeder. So that means you cannot let your
dog wander around the neighborhood because of the leash laws. And you cannot have your
dog unaltered, you have to spay or neuter your pet. Because they're able to enforce
all of this, you don't have many or even any unwanted litters that are born. Whole towns
could go a full year without a single litter of puppies being born. That's crazy. That's
my dream for the south one day. So anyways, that's just a little bit about why we do what
we do and why it's even able to work the way it is. It's a rough life, but someone's
got to do it.