Hello friends, welcome to Rough Life.
I want to tell you about the critters on our transport today.
My plan, or well, my hope, anyway, is to do a transport podcast on transport weeks to
tell you anything we know about the animals on the van that week.
Then, on weeks we don't have transports, I'll tell you about some of my all-time favorite
pulls from over the years and do some Where Are They Knows.
So on today's transport, we had four of the seven German short hair pointers we pulled
from a cruelty case.
If you haven't seen the video about their story yet, I'll give you a quick summary.
Another rescue group went to the owner's home last September.
At the time, there were at least 13, possibly even 16 German short hair pointers living
there.
The owners were getting divorced and the wife was willing to surrender them all, but the
husband was not.
Fast forward to January this year, they were finally able to press charges on the husband
for animal abuse because the dogs were living there with no food, no shelter, and only rainwater
to drink.
There were only seven left, the others had died.
The rescue group reached out to us and asked us if we could take them.
We were more than happy to help out and we were so grateful that they put in all the
hard work making sure these dogs got the justice they deserved.
Four of them are on this transport and we're planning to send the other three on next week's
transport.
There's also a litter of two puppies on this van as well because so many people in my area
know that I do something with animals.
It's not uncommon at all for people to dump animals around my house.
It's like they don't know exactly what house is mine, but they figure as long as they dump
the animals close enough to my house, I'll find them.
And that's what happened with these two.
We got a call from a neighbor that there were two puppies in a ditch on a gravel road on
the road next to mine.
We were already completely full, but obviously we couldn't just leave them.
Thankfully a foster stepped up and has kept them the last few weeks until we had room
on transport to send them.
There's also a litter of 11 puppies on this transport who were posted on Facebook as free
to a good home.
This is one of those times where I'm convinced it was a bait and switch.
The video was of 11 tiny six week old puppies.
Nice, clean, adorable, small.
We agreed to take them and ask for any information she had on them.
When she told us their birthday and we did the math, these puppies were already over
three months old.
That's not usually a big deal.
I mean, a puppy is a puppy.
Not when you're sending all 11 to one foster and now they're twice as big as you thought
they were originally.
That's a deal breaker for some people.
When we went to pick them up, there were dogs all over the yard that looked just like these
puppies.
I asked the owner which ones were the mom and dad and she said she had no idea who the
dad was, but that the mom wasn't even out there at the time and that all the dogs I
was seeing were her puppies from a previous litter.
She just kept them all instead of trying to find homes for them like she was these.
Unfortunately, that's not unusual down here.
Anyway, we left her a spay voucher for a vet in her town to give that poor mama spade
and we offered to give her any help or supply she needed.
When she was bringing the puppies out of her home, we were absolutely horrified.
She had been keeping them in a room inside her home their entire three months.
And if you know anything about puppies, you know they poop and pee a lot.
These puppies were absolutely covered in dry poop and pee.
To the point we had to drive home with the windows down because it smelled so awful.
They were greasy, they had hair loss, it was terrible.
We got them back to the house and threw all 11 in the bathtub to hose them down immediately.
After some deep cleaning and some next guard, they are looking and smelling so much better.
There's also a litter of nine on this transport.
They have a super weird story.
The owner of the mama dog actually took her to the vet last year to be spayed.
The vet opened her up and decided her female parts were too deformed and she would never
be able to get pregnant.
So they just sewed her back up, charged them for a spay anyways, and sent them on their
way.
The owners were shocked a few months later when she ended up delivering puppies.
The owners actually just went ahead and got the mom spayed themselves after the puppies
were weaned so I'm very happy to say she will absolutely not be having any more puppies.
There's a two year old mama husky and her five puppies on this transport too.
Their story is sad.
The owner's son bought the mama when she was just a puppy.
But soon after he moved away and he just left the dog with his mom.
But because the owner's mother is very sick right now and she's had to move her mother
into her home and spends all her time taking care of her, she doesn't feel like she can
give the mama husky the time and attention she deserves.
So she's spent the majority of her life living in an outdoor kennel in mud.
So we're very thankful that she surrendered her with her puppies.
There's also four cats going on this transport.
I don't typically know a lot about cats that are on transports just because most of the
time they're outdoor cats that just show up in someone's yard or outdoor cats that show
up in someone's yard and have kittens.
But today there is a mama cat and her two adult kittens that were surrendered to us
when we went to pick up a litter of eight puppies.
Those puppies will be coming next transport.
So I'll tell you more about them then.
This is a little bit of a smaller transport that we normally do with only 35 animals on
it.
But we're getting some big old puppies and five adult dogs moved out on this one plus
those three adult cats so they all needed the extra space.
Make sure you tune in next week to hear about everyone's story on the next transport.
It's a rough life but someone's got to do it.