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(page
2 of the media section / return to page 1)
Meet Your Match--Adopt a
Shelter Dog! Diversity abounds at your local animal shelter. Dogs mature and youthful, active and laid back await new homes. Making a great match is as easy as one, two, three. One: Hold a family meeting to discuss everybody's canine expectations. Two: Read up on the breed types that catch your interest. Three: Go to the shelter. Adoption counselors will be happy to play matchmaker. All pets at the shelter are spayed or neutered prior to adoption, fully vaccinated for their age, fecal tested, vet checked, provided with a bag of food, a FREE leash/collar or cat carrier and a FREE veterinary post-adoption check-up with one of the VCA Vet Hospitals in MA or CT. There's a place in your community where the hungry are fed, the homeless are sheltered, and the abandoned are given care. Its your local animal shelter, right here in Sterling, MA. Where we provide comfort and care for our community's unwanted, abandoned and abused animals. We offer many other services too, for pets and their people. To do all this, we rely on the support of people like you. Here are a few ways you can help animals, especially those in our care... Give a little bit... Donate food or towels or old blankets and other needed supplies to us. Lend a hand and become a volunteer. Find that special someone here waiting for a home - ADOPT! Help spread the word about our program. Be a responsible pet owner. Vote for the animals. Support legislation that protects animals. Report animal cruelty. Teach your children respect for animals. See our Story about the Satos published in the National Newspaper BARK!
Page
3 See the CBS Story that ran on Wendesday September 3rd about our Puppy Rescue Program
(CBS) At 4 o'clock each and every Monday morning, Sandy Wyatt greets some of her favorite clients at the Southside SPCA in Meherrin, Va. She tells a puppy, “It's going to be fun.” "Fun" might not be the right word. "Lifesaving" is more like it. The Early Show resident veterinarian Debbye Turner reports. Nationwide, there are millions of stray puppies, but according to Wyatt, the problem is much worse in poor and rural areas. “They just roam the roads; they are not altered; they are breeding with everything. And that's why we've got this overabundance of puppies,” Wyatt explains. But the overabundance in the south is an opportunity for one shelter up north. That's why, each week, Wyatt, her driver Lynda Conrad, and a host of volunteers transport about 40 puppies up to Massachusetts. Conrad notes, “They are good dogs. They deserve a chance at a good life, which more than likely they would not get here.” The official name for the program is Homebound Hounds. But some jokingly call it “the puppy underground.” While driving, Conrad notes, “People say, ‘Oh, that must be a horribly noisy ride.’ It's not. Sometimes it gets to be a little smelly, though.” Along the way, Conrad picks up other fostered dogs, and then, in New Jersey, they switch vans and drivers so when the puppies arrive at Sterling Shelter in Massachusetts, they arrive in style. They're photographed for the shelter's Web site, checked by the vet, evaluated by the trainer and generally doted upon. Leigh Grady says, "Fortunately, our turnover rate is so high and they are adopted so quickly that we don't have time to get attached." In less than 24 hours, most of the puppies will be going to their new homes. Before that happens, they will all be spayed or neutered so as not to perpetuate the problem that brought them there in the first place. People arrive from all over New England - just like little Nomari Lopez, who after a short wait gets to choose her dog. She promises she will love him forever and take good care of him.
She says, “I really, really love him.” And it's that kind of love that Wyatt and Grady hope to give each and every one of these once homeless, now homebound, hounds. Together, Grady and Wyatt have now rescued more than 3,000 puppies. © MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
from the July 16, 2003 edition By James Turner | Special to The Christian Science Monitor STERLING, MASS. – On a sunny September afternoon, a
reunion is being held in Sterling, about 30 miles west of Boston.
But these aren't middle-aged high school alumni swapping tales of
school days. Instead, half of these attendees bark. Welcome to Homebound
Hound Day at Animal Shelter Inc. Today, former strays will become
reacquainted with the people who helped find them their new homes.
As a result, area residents who are trying to find a young dog often have a frustrating experience. The experience of Lorri Novotny of Nashua, N.H., is typical. "We looked ... all over the place, and we could not find any puppies," she says. Yet while there's a shortage of puppies in Massachusetts, there's a glut of homeless canines in parts of Virginia. There, some people claim that unspayed dogs are more effective hunters, and the number of unwanted puppies has traditionally been much larger than local citizens could adopt. As a result, puppies were routinely destroyed by town pounds. This led a few creative animal advocates to ask the question: Why not relocate the puppies to areas where the demand exceeds the supply? "It's a win-win situation for us," says Leigh Grady, director of Animal Shelter Inc. "We have a chance to place them in loving homes here in New England, and it helps [the Virginia shelters] alleviate some of their problems, as well." Each Thursday about 6 a.m., a van leaves Virginia with 30 to 40 puppies. "Everybody's in a cage, except every once in a while I do have [a puppy] riding shotgun, up front with me," says Lynda Conrad, treasurer of the Southside SPCA in Meherrin, Va., who is usually the driver. "It's very quiet - people find that hard to believe - but once they get in there and the air conditioning gets turned on, they just lie right down and go to sleep. " About noon, the van will rendezvous in New Jersey with a vehicle that has traveled south from Massachusetts. It will take the puppies the rest of the way. Once at the shelter, the puppies are neutered and then they go though a sort of canine assembly line. "It's mass chaos," says Ms. Grady, "there's just puppies everywhere. Usually all of our staff members are here for the day, and we're cleaning ears and spraying them with Frontline [flea control] and checking their toenails and making sure their incision sites are clean. It's like a chain. They go from place to place to place to place." After the dogs have been cleared, they are ready to meet their new owners, some of whom have been waiting for hours. "Our earliest was 3:45 in the morning," says Grady. "They slept in their car with pillows and blankets. People come from as far away as New York and Maine." "It went very smoothly," says Ms. Novotny, the New Hampshire woman whose family adopted a dog from the shelter. "We had all of the information we needed online, so we knew when to be here. We knew which batch of puppies we wanted to look at, [so when] we walked in, they directed us to the right pen, and we just took it from there." Once the new owner and puppy have been matched, the shelter provides a 30-minute training class on basic puppy care, a dog collar and leash, and a veterinarian visit in return for the $250 adoption fee. As a result of the program, Conrad has seen a dramatic change in the 12 Virginia counties her shelter services. "We've also gotten in touch with [other] local dog pounds, and they will now call us when they have puppies, so we'll go and get them and save them, and keep them from having to be euthanized, because that's what would happen if we didn't." The dogs' new owners couldn't be more appreciative of the shelters' efforts. Loretta Smith of East Taunton, Mass., adopted a collie-chow-keeshond mix. "I can't thank them enough," she says. "We got a wonderful dog, it took a lot of pain away from losing my other dog. He's been nothing but a joy. Everyone says what a wonderful dog and how intelligent and how beautiful he is." The Massachusetts shelter, which also flies in stray dogs from Puerto Rico, is funded entirely by surrender and adoption fees. These cover the roughly $25,000 a month it costs to run the facility. More Puppies Travel to New Hampshire On December 2nd Roy Bossons and Steve Donahue made the final run of the "Midnight Express to the US" for 2003. On board they carried 16 puppies to Aguadilla, PR for their journey to New Hampshire and Puppy Angels. Puppy Angels was assisted this time by the Sterling Animal Shelter in Sterling, Ma. The puppies were delivered by Puppy Angels directly to the shelter upon arriving at about 5 am. They were all spayed/neutered by noon time and listed on the organization's web site for adoption. As of this date, all puppies have great new homes and we await the pictures of the adoptions from Sherry and John.
Our many thanks to Puppy Angels, The Cargo Company, Ronda Cates Moren of Second Chance Rescue, Roy Bossons, Steve and Suzan Donahue, Amy Williams and Sterling Shelter for helping with this rescue. You made a Happy Christmas for 16 puppies and their new adoptive families. How OUR Shelter Helped Save
Lives of Other Neglected Shelter Pets
Case Report The alternate animal control officer Anne Eddy became involved when Audrey Illhardt, who visited the shelter regularly, became concerned that the dogs were getting thinner. Illhardt arranged to adopt one of the dogs, but when she and Eddy went to the shelter, LeBlanc brought the dog out and would not allow them inside. Eddy then returned with Margaret Bennett, the animal control officer in Ashburnham, who had a key to the shelter. Once the two women saw the conditions inside the shelter and made the horrific discovery, called police to the shelter on Sunday, February 4th, 2001. The Mayor, Daniel J. Kelley and Police Chief Rock Barrieau were called to shelter and immediately closed the shelter and relieved LeBlanc of his duties, after notifying Health Agent Bernard Sullivan. LeBlanc then turned in his resignation. The Health Agent said he visited the shelter about three weeks ago and conditions were adequate but it now appears that no cleaning had been done since his last visit. The other dogs had cannibalized the Rottweiler. All that was left of the dog was a partially eaten head face, spinal column and paws. The only water found was that from a drip from a heater that had broken and the filth covered the walls, dishes and the floor of the shelter. There were 2 dozen dogs in the shelter. All the dogs are under veterinary care and are expected to survive. One puppy had a bite on its foot and other dogs had various illnesses and bite marks indicating they would most likely have suffered the same fate as the Rottweiler. Some of the dogs have been taken to the Sterling Animal Shelter for recuperation. The Animal Rescue League has taken the rest. The Gardner Police filed six counts of cruelty to animals and two counts of willful neglect on Monday, February 12th. The case had been under investigation for about a week before the charges were filed. LeBlanc was the former dog officer in Hubbardston and Templeton, MA and became Gardner's animal control officer in 1998. References (page 2 of the media section / return to page 1)
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TAKE ME HOME: Tina
Lemay snuggles her new puppy, Dobby, which she adopted from Animal
Shelter Inc., in Sterling, Mass. The shelter brings puppies from
Virginia, where there are too many unwanted dogs, to Massachusetts.
