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Archive for fostersaveslives

An Extraordinary Dog

By Denise Boehler
Monday, June 7th, 2021

As published in A Sheltered Life, Issue No. 13, June, 2021, (Destiny’s Paws, Littleton, Colorado)

It was on a sun-dappled, frigid January morning that I first saw him. His eager expression conveying the golden light of hope shining in the deep auburn pools of ocular love. His foxlike caramel ears perked in attentive interest. It was only on my eighteen-inch digital screen, but his alertness broke through my world to express his enthusiasm for a life awaiting.

I wanted to know more about him.

I didn’t know of his plight, nor of his friends’. He hailed from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas (the Valley, as called by locals), a region where the challenges of any one dog’s life are a daily uncertainty.

The caption read:

Willie is a special needs dog in search of a home.

He was saved by Red Fern Rescue, a Denver nonprofit concentrating on saving as many dogs and cats from the Valley as possible. Since July 2019, they have saved nearly six hundred dogs and one hundred forty cats, many of which are special needs.

What special needs meant in rescue dog parlance, I wanted to know more. Two years into life, Willie is crippled and incontinent after he encountered a speeding and distracted motorist who left him for dead by the side of the road, with his back legs paralyzed. For two excruciating weeks he crawled around on just his front legs in search of food and shelter until he was found.

Like our fifteen-year-old Shepherd mutt Sheba, Willie needed help with all things biological.

Thus, we come to the story of an authentic Texas survivor. It’s also of the good people who saw the value in saving his and his friends’ lives, for rescue is a more often an effort made by a tribe of dog-loving women and enlightened men. It is offered as a teaching of forgiveness and strength, of joy and pure love, a statement that despite the wanton cruelty visited upon his small body, he has forgiven humanity for all their trespasses again him. It’s also his prayer for his homeless friends left behind and struggling to survive in the grasses and reeds deep in that Valley, that they may make it out alive to ride on Red Fern Rescue’s next transport and into a willing foster home to ultimately find their own loving forever homes.

***

Willie’s second chance at life began when an enlightened Good Samaritan discovered him in the dark of night near the roadsides. Pursuing him through the brush, he ran as fast as his two legs would carry him to escape yet another harmful human. Unbeknownst to him, she had kind intentions of helping save him and bring him to a vet. With this in mind, she followed him through the brush, caught him and cradled his broken body into her arms. It was likely the second time he’d been in a car in a while, the first not winding up in his favor. His ride from there to San Antonio would be a gamechanger and the beginning of his opportunity for life anew.

From the shelter in San Antonio where his wounds were treated and toddler camouflage pants were adorned to protect his wounded legs, Melissa McAllister and Gregg Patterson of Red Fern Rescue pulled him to come to Denver. He was driven with a dozen other friends from the Valley to the safe haven of a foster home. Willie, however, was going to need a special kind of foster, one with sufficient time, ability and willingness to take on a special needs dog. As with most nonprofit rescues, Red Fern is foster-based. Fostering is thus the critical and selfless step in saving any one dog’s life. It’s not for the faint of heart. There’s a reason rescues say:

Fostering saves lives.

Without fosters, rescues cannot pull a dog from a shelter and find him or her their forever home.

Jude, a student who fosters for Red Fern Animal Rescue, was the foster Willie’s doctors ordered. Just days after his arrival in November, she and her family took him to his first appointment, which necessarily turned out to be an MRI at a local veterinary hospital. Images on the screen confirmed what those in contact with him already knew. His spine was severed:

He can live, but he’ll need manual expressions of his bladder several times a day. He’ll never use his back legs, they were told. And, he has small bullets or pellets lodged in his chest.

Willie returned home with Jude and her family. They opened their hearts and home to him, giving him a place to rest and heal. All the while they knew they were his temporary resting place, as vital to him as the Good Samaritan, yet not his final destination. As Willie slept alongside their French bulldog in Jude’s bedroom, she attended high school classes remotely. Somewhere between AP college prep and Facebook, she and her family raised funds from dog-lovers for veterinary fees, wheelchairs and handicapped harnesses. Understanding the temporary nature of their fostering relationship, Jude persisted with finding him a home through social media, posting photos, posing for photographs in The Denver Post, and taking him to adoption events. For two months, she and her family trotted him along the concrete sidewalks of Denver, and loaded him into the family car for ski trips to the high country along groomed trails with their pack.

And of course, expressed his bladder four times daily.

All the while, Jude knew her daily task of preparing pumpkin-kibble diets and his following her up and down the hallways of their Denver home would one day end.

It was then that I found her. I had been helping rescue dogs find their forever homes on social media since the pandemic began, sharing, organizing, communicating and donating. I know Texas in particular was a region where spay and neuter is an unpopular practice born of more liberal, educated or economically sufficient regions. The San Antonio region itself saw over twenty-nine thousand animals between October 2019 and September 2020, only a portion of which made it out alive to find their forever homes. Even more telling was a recent statement from the San Antonio Shelter, asking that if an animal was found on the streets, either Take it into your own home or return it where it was found.

Knowing this, I felt compelled to send Jude a DM chat:

He’s adorable. We have an incontinent elderly dog in diapers in our home here, and I love his wheelchair!

Her response was Gen-Z quick:

He’s only two, and he sleeps A LOT…and then, Would you ever adopt?

I looked back at Willie’s images. His special needs screamed for my help. I turned to my husband, Frank:

Do you think we can take on another incontinent dog? I handed him my smartphone. It’s been ten years since Sheba’s stroke that rendered her incontinent. Ten years of daily Prazosin and Bethanecol, Vet’s Best Diapers, washing beds and expressing her “pipeline” (I leave the  doggie biology up to you, dear reader).

He glanced down, then scrolled. Looks like the little guy needs some help…Yes, I think we can, he smiled.

Let me think about it overnight, I responded back to Jude.

I retired to bed that evening with not a small amount of anxiety and hesitation. It was going to be twice the work to take on another incontinent dog – the diapers, the bladder expressions, the special sweet potato/pumpkin diet – much less having a dog in a wheelchair. Would our mountain environment, with blasting winds rolling off the Continental Divide and drought-afflicted summers with stalky, itchy grasses prove too brutal for a vulnerable, handicapped dog? We had no gentle Kentucky bluegrass lawns, no fenced yard in which to roam, but a ten-acre high altitude mountain valley with woodlands and open pasture, occasioned by mountain lions, moose and bears. We also lived in an area where responsible, talented animal care was in short supply. Would I ever be able to find someone I trusted to care for him if I wanted to travel after the pandemic?

The next morning, I called someone who understands my propensity to help animals (and my husband’s) but with a more objective opinion: My ex-husband.

You already have three dogs. You need another one like a hole in the head. Are you really going to adopt THAT dog?

I thought of my former’s propensity to travel about the planet and our struggle, now over, to find common ground amidst my want to care for every creature I encountered. I felt the relief that we no longer had to have such arguments, but could now have amiable philosophical conversations about our respective lives, and I took joy in the fact that I had found a new husband to love animals alongside me. I looked again at Willie’s expression in the photographs, his foster Jude kneeling alongside him in The Denver Post article in his wheelchair. I scrolled through images of him trotting alongside her French bulldog on the groomed ski trails. I could feel his vulnerability, sense his struggle to survive. He made it out of the Valley, I said to myself, this dog is a survivor.

I wanted to help him. In that moment, my uncertainties and worries for the future fell away. What remained was his special needs and our ability to meet them.

Yes, we are, I finally said.

***

On another brisk January morning, Gregg’s van pulls into our driveway. I can see Willie on Jude’s lap from the pasture where I’m standing with our young rescue dogs, Smudges and Charlie. I wait on the creekside trail while they climb out of the van. As Jude lowers Willie into his wheelchair, Smudges and Charlie strain at their horse-lead draglines I employ to control them in the presence of migrating moose.

Let’s take a valley walk, I suggest. Forward momentum disperses energy and creates pack mentality. If the cool indifference of our meet-and-greet a week earlier was any indication that we had work to do to settle Willie into our lives, I wa intent on starting off with a walk on our trails.

The day was blessed with the quintessential azure sky, black-capped chickadees calling in the willows and nuthatches scampering up Ponderosa pines. Life with our new differently abled dog had begun.

***

Two months along and Willie is learning the art of fetch. I suspect he learned it before he came our home, back when he was someone’s good dog, until the day he wasn’t.

In the Valley, Melissa shared, throwing a dog out of a car is a daily occurrence. I had no idea growing up in San Antonio this was happening until I began rescuing dogs.

I gave Willie a long hug when she told me.

Willie’s choice for love of life shows up in our every moment. This morning, he wakes me by waddling over to my bedside, chomping on Mr. Squeaky. A high-pitched noise emits. He sits, little-boy fashion, then drops it. He stares up at me. And waits.

I get up and toss Mr. Squeaky ball down the hallway. Willie swanks after it, then returns for another round. We could do this a while, but now it’s time to wee everyone. We traipse outside, Frank rolling Willie in his little red wagon, his back legs stretched straight out in front of him.

Sheba waddles behind. Smudges and Charlie sniff around to detect traces of moose and elk from the evening before as Frank and I roll Willie to his favorite wee spot on the west side of our home. Bending down, we express his bladder as he kneels on the dry winter grass, staring out onto the valley beyond. Our resident red-tail hawk, Reggie, circles above. It’s a crisp twenty degrees. Shivering, we all retreat back to the warmth of the wood stove in the house for chicken jerky treats (dogs) and a fresh pot of coffee (people).

Later in the morning after the sun has warmed the valley, we’ll venture out for a woodland walk. We’ll put baby knee-crawling pads and hock huggers on Willie’s back legs, Ruffwear booties on his front paws, a fleece coat on his torso (for those Divide winds) and strap him into his wheelchair harness. We’ll control him on his Extend-a-Lead for when his vulpine impulses lead him deeper into willows, brambly rosehips and low-hanging pine branches than my preferences tolerate. Once and again, his enthusiasm will override his limitations and he will land turtle-like when he hits a boulder at a precise angle, lands in a squirrel hole or rolls up on a tree root. We try hard not to allow such unfortunate circumstances for reasons manifest, but I struggle with allowing him freedom to roam and explore the nature of our mountain valley.

While we’re out on our woodland walks, Willie follows closely behind Smudges. Charlie trots behind him; occasionally the onset of squirrel chatter will attract the pack, causing a rollover incident of a different kind. Smudges is learning that being alpha doesn’t prevent her being run off the trail by her differently abled brother who’s in hot pursuit of all things furry.

The other afternoon, we took Willie for a walk up the mountainside trail bordering the southern edge of our valley. He raced alongside the shelf trail, peering alongside Charlie over granite rock edges and sniffing out chipmunks with reckless abandon.

Hold his wheelchair by the back, Frank warns. It’s good to have my cautious spouse in tow, lest Willie’s enthusiasm override our topographical edge.

We trot along with the pack for a mile to an overlook. Pausing to oversee Sheba resting on the front porch of our home, we then turn around. On the return trip, Willie catches a scent of something wild on the trail. He races down with the fervor of Dale Ernhart. He fishtails around the corner as I dash back up the mountain, catching him just as a wheel leaves the ground. I think of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, who says to Richard Gere,

This baby corners like it’s on rails.

***

If I had any concern for Willie’s suitability to live in our mountain environment, it evaporated with the cloudless days intrinsic to high altitude living. Two-mile walks are a breeze for him, and crossing bridges poses no challenge, for he trots over as though they were simply a part of his terrain. When I worry that he will tire on our walks, he shows me why I need not, by ducking under the fencing surrounding the gate bordering our valley. His forward momentum occasionally hangs up when his wheelchair catches on the smooth wire fencing, and we sometimes use that as an opportunity to turn and head back home. It takes him a while before he decides to join us, and I cast a backward glance for the eight minutes in between our turn around and his decision to rejoin the pack.

Then, he races up to us with all the enthusiasm of a Thoroughbred crossing the finish line, and I give him a huge,

Hurray, Willie! And a big hug.

When it snows, we switch out his wheels for skis, and he sails along the deep, heavy snowpack in the valley like Peek-a-boo Street on the slopes. When it comes to doorways, we are learning to pay careful attention. On not just a few occasions I’ve been seen in my slippers and camisole or Frank in his boxers and boots early in the morning by locals riding the N Route to Boulder carrying our handicapped dog back across the valley to our front door after a successful escape.

I’ve promised the family to sign up for more dog training after the pandemic abates.

 

Article by Denise Boehler, M.A.,

Writer, Ecopsychologist

Nederland, Colorado

 

Categories : Of Dogs
Tags : Animal advocacy, animal welfare, Animals are sentient beings, Colorado dog rescue, Consciousness, dogs, fostering, fostersaveslives, high kill shelters, Homeless animals, homelessdogs, Mutts, rescue, rescue dogs, San Antonio Animal Care Services, shelterreform, SpayNeuter, Texas

Loving Animals means Loving Ourselves

By Denise Boehler
Monday, August 31st, 2020

I woke this morning to the blasting cacophony of gravel trucks on the highway and the screaming cries emanating from the flock of magpies invading our valley. After a restless night of graphic nightmares of dogs in the San Antonio shelter for the second night in a row, I felt as beleaguered as the magpies felt predatory on our barn swallow nestlings.

It’s been feeling impossible to help in situations over which I have no control, from which I feel removed geographically. And yet, I feel affected. Like all women (& enlightened men) in this rescue dog advocacy movement, my own love for dogs isn’t limited by loving just my own. Tapping into and being open to their love and vulnerability in a world at constant odds is what drives people into advocacy. In the process, while the heart and all its potential for wounding is at stake, the intrinsic risk and tormenting nightmares plague our realities.

Will the dog in harm’s way be saved by one of the seemingly endless rescues stepping up to save him or her, or will they fall victim to the ill-conceived policies born out of the cold constraints of our economically-driven, utilitarian society?

Quite simply, advocacy can be a painful place to live. One feels they are waiting in a kind of purgatory with a vulnerable animal condemned to die through no fault of his or her own. If we could crawl into the kennel and sit whining and barking along with them, I’ve no doubt many of us would. Being subject to the will of others who have fallen deaf to the calls for compassion or ignorant to new ways to see and treat a homeless animal can feel an exasperating pull on the tendrils of an aching, tender heart. What’s more, its effects are irreparable traumatizing to a mind already overwhelmed with a deluge of sociopolitical chaos and cultural turmoil.

The mind can only handle so much. Taking a break, however, can feel as essential as drinking a glass of water – just not for too long. Leaving off to tend to other needs in life, like relaxation and quiet, self-care and sustenance, can feel as though one is abandoning a helpless victim in the hour of need.

And yet, the need for a pause or a longer break is imperative in this movement. The heart needs time to process the emotional residue intrinsic to this kind of advocacy. The passion and love driving one through the front door, the frustration and helplessness in the waiting, the disappointment, anger and angst intrinsic in the loss. The stress and contempt arising for the people creating the situation, enforcing barbaric laws, or the sheer ignorance or worse, abuse, in which animals are nothing more than helpless victims.

I recently heard a dog trainer familiar with the dog shelter situation in California and clearly hardened through his own experience call women saving dogs at all costs psychologically disturbed. It’s the remark – delivered in the course of a Q&A for this trainer’s promotional video – that I felt deeply offended by. Not only for myself, but for the hundreds of women (and enlightened men) in this movement who feel nothing less in their hearts than love for animals in peril and an authentic need to save them. What’s more, having been at the receiving end of similar types of such misogynist insults, I felt the misunderstanding inherent in such a statement.

Affording him the benefit of the doubt, I understand what he was trying to say. That saving dogs must come with limitations and perspective. For certain, there is wisdom in observing such protections, for they expand our awareness of the possibilities for an older, overlooked, quieter dog in the corner, who may not get a chance when our attention is drawn to the more dramatically intense ones. Who speaks for them, then?

I believe there are enough people paying attention that they too, will find an advocate.

I digress. The point is, the heart gets tired, the mind, battle weary. When advocacy starts to feel like we’ve gotten into a civil war, it’s in the better part of our interests to take a health break and let the movement go on for a bit without one’s presence. Just for a little while. There are others – and there is also, let’s toss this one in – the phenomenon of faith. It feels severely absent in this movement, albeit for good reason. There is more harm and injury being done to the innocent and unprotected than any of us can remember.

Quite simply, it’s hard to do our best work when we feel beleaguered and assaulted by the deleterious effects of advocacy. We also stand the risk of incurring burnout and meltdown, not to mention an unhealthy dose of PTSD. When we feel so close to the edge, we must do everything we can to give ourselves the unconditional love and nurture that we heap upon these dogs in peril every day. We deserve such self-love, and our own voices of unworthiness must fall silent as we woo and coo ourselves into a more soothing, self-sustaining state of equanamity and peace of mind. To do anything less is to guarantee we will run out of the emotional and psychological wherewithal to sustain for the long-haul. And that becomes a loss not just to the movement, but to the dogs in need themselves.

Loving animals is, as anyone with such tender propensities will tell you, a blessing and a curse. Always, the same sensitivity opening us up to their needs travels the same road as the one that may deliver pain. There are times when it can feel like a head-on collision. And when that happens, we just have to step out of the car, look up at the expansive azure sky, and thank some divine presence for being here to help and lie witness to it all. We can thank fate and serendipity for uniting devoted hearts in the movement. Loving animals makes us more compassionate people sensitive to the needs of others, the trick of which is to always, first and foremost, love and include ourselves.

Namaste, and thank you for reading.

Categories : Help Save Animals, Of Dogs
Tags : Animal advocacy, animal rights, animal welfare, Consciousness, County Shelters, fostering, fostersaveslives, high kill shelters, Homeless dogs, homelessdogs, Mutts, rescue, rescue dogs, shelters, SpayNeuter

Just say No to Kill Shelters, and Yes to Foster-Based Rescues or Sanctuaries

By Denise Boehler
Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

What we do to the animals, we do to ourselves. I don’t offer that up as some lofty ideal. I don’t share it from any perch of moral judgment.

I say it because I believe it needs to be said. I say it because my heart aches just a little bit more today, to hear of the death of yet another homeless animal in the Downey, California Shelter, a gentle pitty mix named Pirate. He could have gone, as foster advocates were crying on his behalf today, to one of them.

Instead, he was put to death by lethal injection at the hands of the shelter’s policies. A petition is circulating on his behalf, should you feel so moved to sign it; it’s available at the end of this essay.

Back to the subject at hand, as I am reluctant to drop down to a level of intellectual justification steeped in the quicksand of statistics – though we who love on and advocate for the lives of animals know where the numbers lie – we also know that the remedy to the long-term problem of homeless animals is spaying and neutering, education and outreach. (And if all you breeding animals could please stop to consider that for each life you bring to earth, you deliver a death sentence to a life already here, it would be appreciated on a whole ‘nother level.)

There is all that. And again, not as pressing as promoting the higher ideal of creating a more compassionate culture, because I believe that advocating for a change in ideology, philosophy, paradigm shift, consciousness or whatever term you prefer, is what is being called for in our present culture.

Isn’t your own heart feeling battered enough these days?

Let’s call for a more compassionate culture for shelter animals, who through no fault of their own, are put to death DAILY at the hands of man-made policies. (Yes, the number is 2,000.) The domestic short-hair three-year old cat, the wandering pit-terrier mutt, the Labrador mix, have an hourglass on their head from the moment they are dragged off the impound truck and brought through the shelter doors. Depending upon the shelter, it could be a matter of days – for others, months – before the pinprick of death is administered. (A good friend from NoKill Colorado once informed, a shelter animal has a 50/50 chance of making it out alive.)

Even more brutal (and still happening in certain states), are the practices where they are thrown like leftovers into a dark gas chamber to their unimaginable horror, struggling helplessly until they breathe their last breath. (Activists in Shawnee, OK successfully staged a sleep-in to end such practices for that city’s shelter in 2017.)

Whether one is a policymaker invested in the pragmatics of space and resources and economics, or a beleaguered shelter worker whose heart breaks just a little bit more each time they must hold a homeless dog or cat, look them in their pleading brown eyes and say,

Today’s your day to die,

we are reducing our humanity – and our culture at large – to a brutal, ego-centered, economically driven culture, indeed.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s happening in our patriarchal, capitalistic-oriented society these days understands just how those of us on the lower rungs are being treated. It’s the same for the homeless animals – even worse, I would argue, if so inclined.

Think it has to be this way? Think again.

I’ve been looking for the alternatives to such outdated, inhumane practices for years now.

Miley, a Paws and Effect Rescue pup, available for foster

I have found – and keep finding – more foster-based rescues nationwide, than ever before. (See list below, for a few of my personal favorites.) It makes my heart feel light – and hopeful for our culture – for every foster-based rescue I learn about. There are scores of people in every state who feel the lives of dogs and cats are worth saving. Animals who get to share the homes of foster parents relax into their environment, are spared the stress of being caged up among dozens of other stressed animals, and their authentic dispositions are allowed to unfold. From there, a foster parent can communicate to potential adopters about the true nature of the fostered dog or cat before they are ushered further into their forever home. (It happens all the time!) Some become foster fails – and that’s okay, too – but it doesn’t have to be the rule. Sometimes, the dogs and cats just need a soft place to land for a while.

Don’t we all?

Our culture needs to see the foster-based rescues in existence, better support them in all ways essential – through our own fostering efforts, by donating or fulfilling a wish list – by sharing the photos and stories on our Instagram or other social media feeds – until they can find their furever homes.

When we support the efforts of others to care for the homeless lives already here, we support the higher ideal (if I now may say,) that these lives have value. They deserve the life given to them through some divine force; because, after all, what right, beyond relieving real physical suffering, does anyone have to intervene?

We honor the being before us, be it a scruffy street terrier, an abused pit-bull, a mangy shepherd mix or an elderly family dog cast out onto the street for no other reason than failure to amuse a busy family. We also say no to an outdated shelter system that treats homeless dogs and cats as inventory aging on a shelf that must be rotated in order to make room for more.

The time has come for us to reconsider what a more compassionate culture can look like – and find, create or support alternatives. It will make all our animal loving, tender, aching hearts, ache just a little bit less today.

Pirate, an unfortunate victim of shelter circumstance at the Downey Care Shelter

In memory of Pirate, and all his friends in equal peril – JUST SAY NO TO KILL SHELTERS, AND YES, TO FOSTER-BASED RESCUES.

Namaste, and thank you for listening.

To sign the Downey, CA Petition:

https://www.thepetitionsite.com/182/644/876/demand/

Some of my personal favorite foster-based rescues:

https://pawsandeffectrescue.wordpress.com/, a foster-based canine rescue in the Denver metro area

https://farfels.com/, a foster-based Colorado rescue pulling dogs from high-kill shelters

https://dooverdogs.com/, a foster-based rescue pulling dogs from Colorado & Wyoming from high-kill shelters

http://www.sparpets.org/, a foster-based rescue in Shawnee, OK

https://www.pawsgivemepurpose.com/, a sanctuary for difficult to place dogs, in Southern New Jersey

https://therescueproject.net/, a Kansas City, MO foster-based rescue, providing education & resources to the community on the needs of spaying & neutering

https://bestfriends.org/, a Kanab, UT animal sanctuary dedicated to helping end the practices of killing in America’s animals shelters through building community programs & partnerships across the nation

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Categories : Help Save Animals, Of Dogs
Tags : Adopt, Adoption, dogs, Downey California, Downey Care Animal Shelter, foster, fostering, fostersaveslives, homelessdogs, rescue, rescuedogs, SpayNeuter

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