As we walked through several municipal pounds in Tennessee, I kept thinking, “Thank God for Amber.”
Truly.
She and her husband Brandon and their rescue Halfway Home are the only hope for too many animals whose lives could so easily be snuffed out, unknown and uncounted.
As far as I can tell, ‘animal control’ in Tennessee is Read more
After our day with All 4s in Memphis, we were dirty and tired but we still had one more stop—Horn Lake Animal Shelter.
We were headed there because of a woman named Julia who had contacted me shortly before we left on this trip asking if we had time to squeeze in a visit to Horn Lake. We didn’t, but Julia was compelling, so at 4:30pm on Wednesday, we found them just past the dump, sharing space with Read more
Only an hour from Corinth where they are struggling to raise money for the shelter by sitting outside the supermarket collecting donations is a beautiful, brand-new 2 million dollar shelter teeming with staff and resources.
Tupelo-Lee Humane Society is blessed with Read more
So much of our rescue efforts are focused on the rural south, as well they should be. That’s where the majority of dogs are suffering and dying, where shelters are overwhelmed, and money runs short, but recently I participated in a rescue that wasn’t in the south. It was actually four hours north of my home in Pennsylvania.
It happened because of a connection I made through my book, Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs. Katie, a reader from Seneca, PA contacted me through Facebook after finishing my book, and we struck up a conversation, as kindred spirits do when it comes to dogs.
Six months later, she contacted me regarding a dog who Read more
Now that we are home and settled and sifting through all that we’ve seen and learned at our latest shelter visits, I am embracing every opportunity to share all that we learned visiting southern shelters.
Nancy and her dog Edith Wharton (my fiftieth foster dog who signs books with me) accompanied me to a speaking engagement last week. The wide eyes and the occasional tears in the audience told me that Read more
Our next to last shelter visit was actually two visits in one. We would visit the Giles County Animal Shelter, and also meet with some of the volunteers from the Giles County Humane Association, a foster-based rescue that supports the shelter.
This Humane Association/County Shelter partnership model is fairly common and usually turns out to be a good one for the dogs. While County shelters can’t fundraise and are limited to the budget they are given, a Humane Association isn’t and they can provide immediate support in areas where it is needed most – like veterinary services not covered in the budget, supplies, foster care, and when funds run low, collect donations of essentials like food and dewormers.
Giles County hadn’t been on my original list of shelters to visit. It was the Giles County Dog Pound back then, when a woman named Daphne, reached out to me through Facebook. “You have to see what is going on in Giles County,” she wrote.
I was intrigued and began looking into it. I was shocked by what I discovered. Read more
So many shelters, so many dogs.
I knew at the start of this trip it would be a lot and that keeping all the dogs, directors, and shelters straight might be a challenge. Having Nancy with me helps. I badger her with questions interrupting her work (she spends HOURS editing pictures not just for me and this trip, but to send to directors to use in their efforts to get dogs adopted).
“Which shelter was the one with that cool blue dog with the Catahoula spots?”
“Do you remember what the director said about whether they give Bordetella vaccines?”
“Was there a school bus parked in the yard behind the shelter?” (I actually asked that question more than once, vehicles seem to factor largely in rural southern shelter spaces.)
Nancy doesn’t always have the answers, but sometimes she does or sometimes her pictures provide the clues.
Maybe it was easy to mix up the shelters, as we visited two of four shelters/rescues that are literally within a few miles of each other in a county southeast of Nashville. Clearly, there are many people who care about animals in Bedford County, TN, but from an outsider perspective, I wondered if they were duplicating efforts and whether working together and pooling their resources might be a smarter solution, at least for the dogs. There wasn’t much time to examine that idea as there were dogs to meet and stories to hear.
We started at Shelbyville City Animal Control, arriving late because Read more
