Hello friends! Welcome to Rough Life! Today I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about
what it is that I actually do down here in Mississippi. I primarily focus on intervening
before animals even get to the shelter, because so many shelters are overrun with animals
and have such a hard time keeping parvo and cocksidia and other deadly illnesses away,
it works best for everyone involved if the animals we send were never even at a shelter.
And most of the time, only people that live in city limits can even send their animals
to a shelter, so most people that live out in the county have no resources available
to them except for animal rescues.
So what does this look like? As I mentioned in another episode, when people know you're
involved with animals in any capacity, they will hunt you down. People at church, neighbors,
random people on Facebook you're not even friends with, they will find you and they
will beg you for help. Because we operate out of foster homes and because we have so
few foster homes, we usually ask if the people are able to keep their animals until the
day of transport. So conversations usually go like this. Hi, I have a dog that got pregnant
and had eight puppies. They're six weeks old. Can you help me? And I will say absolutely.
Are you wanting to surrender your mama too? Or would you like to keep her? No, we want
to keep her. Great. Are you able to keep the puppies for two weeks until their transport
day? If they say yes, we ask them if they need any supplies to get by in the meantime. Things
like food, potty pads, play pens. If they say no, they're not able to keep them safe
until transport or if it's a situation where puppies are just found and there is no owner,
we move them into a foster home until transport. All of our animals are vaccinated, dewormed
and seen by a vet prior to transport. However, we're in a unique situation because the rescue
they're going to is run by a veterinarian. A lot of the other rescues that send animals
from our area up north have to have them all spayed and neutered prior to leaving the state.
Most of the time, the animals are sent from Mississippi and they go straight into the
arms of their adopters. There is no foster period and there is no quarantining period.
So anything those animals have to have done before getting adopted, things like microchipping
or recovering from surgery or anything like that, it has to be done before they're sent
on transport because they're going straight to the adopter. And that can really back up
your foster homes down here if you're having to keep all of your animals for upwards of
a month before you can send them. So we're really lucky that they go into foster homes
up north where they can spend a minimum of three weeks after they're spayed and neutered
and whatever else they need. But that's not always spent our time doing down here. When
owners surrender puppies to us, but decide to keep the mama dog, they're given a spay
voucher. This means they can call our veterinarian partners and make an appointment to have their
dog spayed. And when it comes time to pay, they hand over the voucher card and we're
billed instead of them. But a lot of times, even though the surgery is free, people can't
afford to take off work and take their dog to the appointment or leave work early and
pick them up. Some of the owners are older and aren't physically able to load the mama
dogs in their car to take them. So we often end up going back to the homes and taking
the dog to the appointment for them. If a mama dog happens to be a feral dog that just
lives out in a field somewhere, we will trap the mama and have her spayed. If it seems
like she can be rehabilitated and domesticated, she'll stay in a foster home with us until
she's friendly enough. Like the dog I have right now. Her name is Peanut Butter because
the first time I ever saw her wag her tail was after she had been with me for over five
days and I let her lick some peanut butter off of a spoon. Her five puppies were easily
caught when they were about seven weeks old and they went on transport a few weeks later.
PB though had to be trapped and caught and she was by no stretch of the imagination ready
to be put in a foster home. So she's staying with me until she gets more used to people.
Right now she is absolutely loving indoor dog life. But she's still a little shy around
new people. So for Peanut's situation, she will stay here until she's adaptable and
then go on transport. But let's say she never comes around and she's never considered an
adoptable dog. As long as she's an aggressive and actively attacking people and other dogs,
we just find her a home down here as an outside dog. Kind of like a barn cat but a barn dog.
Speaking of barn cats, we actually do a lot of TNR too. TNR stands for Trap Newt or Release.
So if people call us and say we have 27 cats at our house and we don't know what to do,
we'll help them trap all of the cats, pay to spay and neuter all of the adults, and send
any adoptable or rehabable ones on transport. This is usually the younger adults or the
kittens that aren't totally feral. And then we just return the rest. A lot of time, people
don't have issues with a bunch of cats or a bunch of dogs living at their house. They
usually aren't causing any problems and the people usually have a lot of land that the animals are
living on. They just don't want them reproducing all the time. And it's so expensive to have that
many fixed that they just can't do it on their own. They're always so grateful that we come in and
pay to have it done so they can continue caring for the animals without having to worry if there's
going to be double or triple that many animals by the next year. And I know I've been saying mommas
during this whole episode, but that's primarily the only situations we see. Usually an unaltered
male dog is just roaming around and you never see him knock up your mama dog. But in cases where
the owners have the mama and the daddy dog, we absolutely pay to neuter him too. We would much
rather you keep your adult dogs that we have made sure are no longer reproducing than surrender them
to us and turn around and get a puppy or two a few months later who will be reproducing before
you know it. And of course, these are all examples of people who take good care of their animals.
Cruelty and neglect cases are a whole other story. Unfortunately, that's a story you will hear about
fairly often in my episodes. It's a rough life, but someone's got to do it.