The 4 horses arrived at Mt. Peale Animal Sanctuary Monday afternoon. Teague said that when they were put in their respective (large) areas, and the hay and feed was there for them, the humans could see the horses visually relax – they knew they were home. Noelle, from Norwood, and I delivered the sacks of grain today, and spent an hour brushing the old boys. I don’t think I ever saw 2 horses love being groomed so much. We probably pulled off at least 50 ticks, and a pile of burs and old, old hair. Friday, the other 3 horses will be delivered – an injured weanling and 2 fillies (in poor shape the last I saw them). A story with a great ending. Thank you all for your concern and help. 

The girls – Pepper & Lassie settling into the sanctuary.

In partnership with For Pets’ Sake in Cortez, Traci with Wag between Barks, and a group of volunteers we are happy to announce that Bandit and Little Girl are now free of their backyard lives of isolation.  TAF was excited to sponsor their training with professional trainers in Durango, and they picked up the tricks of the trade with ease.  So well in fact that Little Girl was adopted!  Bandit is still looking for his perfect family.  If you are interested in Bandit, you can contact MaryJane with For Pets’ Sake: mjgosselin@gmail.com.

Bandit Pre-Rescue…

Bandit Post-Rescue, Such a happy boy!

Sweet Little Girl is a little confused by the camera, but she sure is happy she found her new family!

Juneau the 4 month old Border Collie mix and her brother Luka found forever homes too, and we have had reports that both are fitting in wonderfully in their new homes.

Juneau and her mom

Luka soaking up the sun at the event.

Perhaps the stars of the show were brother and sister duo MacTavish and MacDougal, 1.5 yr old Westies.  We were shocked that these little outgoing cuties weren’t snapped up at the event, but that just means they are still available!  If you know of anyone looking for a low-maintenance pair of small dogs, then contact Debbie at debbie@blackcanyonanimalsanctuary.com.

MacTavishMacDougal

It was a wonderful day, thanks to all the volunteers that worked so hard to exercise the doggies and keep them entertained.  Here is a list of the dogs that didn’t find their perfect homes that day, contact the rescues if you are interested in adopting any of these cuties!

For the following dogs, contact Cathy at Running Dog Ranch: chris633@centurytel.net

Bayla, a 4 yr old mixed breed that is an absolute DOLL!

Archie, a 2 year old Red Heeler.  Archie is beyond sweet and LOVES to cuddle!

For the following dogs, contact debbie@blackcanyonanimalsanctuary.com.

Prius has been adopted since the event!!!

Tank is a 2 year old Schnauzer mix who has lots of energy and can snuggle like a champ!

Kalli is a 1 yr old Calico.  She is a petite little girl and has the cutest meow and the LOUDEST purr.  Contact her foster mom Nikki at 615-881-3465 if you are interested!

We would love to continue to provide this service to the community, as we expect hay prices to remain unusually high for the next few years.  Click here to support this program so we can help more families and the horses they love!

This is just another way your donation dollars are being used to help animals!  Stay tuned for more photos as the project nears completion…

We understand, spaying or neutering your pet can be expensive.  That’s why we support places like Animal Birth Control in Grand Junction.  We have a voucher system there for low-income families so they can be responsible pet parents and have their pets spayed or neutered at little to no cost.  So far we have sponsored 35 surgeries through this voucher program in 3 months, and we are excited to continue this program with ABC and other veterinary facilities.

Your donations help us keep this and other programs going, and we appreciate all that you do to support TAF in our mission to reduce the number of homeless pets!

Here are some pets who were sponsored by TAF:

Tank

Annie

Pinky

Sadie Mae

Animal Birth Control

In February of 2011 I lived in Tennessee and volunteered at a local shelter.  It was there that I met Bert, a 2 YO pit mix that came into the shelter as a cruelty case. When Bert first arrived he had a chain embedded in his neck from living on the end of a chain since he was a puppy. Needless to say, he was rather unsocialized and not highly adoptable. He was in the shelter so long that he developed the pitiful habit of spinning in circles for hours on end – to put it bluntly he lost his mind.

I sat one day and watched him spinning, and I knew I had to do whatever it took to get him out of there.  Bert came home with me that day, and our long journey began.

I took Bert on as a foster and quickly learned that he and my male dog were never going to see eye to eye. We had to keep them separate at all times, which was a challenge in a 1 bedroom apartment! I slowly saw the toll that 2 years of abuse had taken on Bert. He was petrified of men and wouldn’t go within 10 feet of my husband. He was socially awkward with other dogs, and even fearful of walking through doorways!!

I worked with him daily and networked like crazy to find the perfect fit for my boy Bert. Months went by with no luck. I decided to get him enrolled in an intensive 2 week training program with the trainer who had turned my dog from completely feral to a well-behaved cuddling machine!  Thanks to numerous angels along the way, Bert emerged from training a much more well-behaved and confident dog!

With his new-found skills I took Bert back to the shelter for some exposure. I was spending the summer in London, and was so sad to leave Bert behind.  The shelter staff promised to take great care of him and to work with him on his new obedience skills.  When I returned from London I was overjoyed to hear that Bert had been adopted.  Since he had finally found his happy ending I decided to foster Daphne, a pitiful white Pit mix who had been in the shelter the longest of any resident.  *Who ended up becoming a permanent member of our family*

Three weeks later Bert was found wandering the streets with no collar.  His owners never came to claim him, and it was back to waiting and spinning in the shelter for Bert.  Since I had already taken on another foster I decided to dedicate all my time to networking Bert and trying to find him the perfect home.  We put pics out on Facebook, Craigslist, Petfinder…everywhere and anywhere.  And it worked!  Bert found his match, a SAINT of a man named Barry who was looking for a new best friend.  He and Bert would live alone together and be each other’s constant companion.

As Barry was guiding Bert into his home, Bert managed to slip his collar and he was gone.  When I heard this news I was in utter disbelief, I had just finished sobbing about Bert’s happy ending and now it seemed as if Bert was destined for a difficult life.  We spent 4 days canvassing the neighborhood and plastering flyers up everywhere.  On the fifth day I got out of my car at Barry’s house and decided to shout for Bert, I knew it was a long shot but I was desperate.  Amazingly, I saw his head pop out from around the neighbor’s house.  I sat down on the ground and called for him, and thankfully he recognized me and made a b-line straight at me.  What a joyful reunion!  I am happy to report that this is where Bert’s dreadful saga ends.  After he was reunited with Barry it was all smooth sailing.  It has been over a year since I have seen Bert’s smiling face, and I was overwhelmed to find this letter in my email a few days ago from Barry:

I just wanted to give an update to those that remember a dog I adopted in November last year. His name is Bert and he was a rescue with a chain embedded in his neck and severely emaciated. He was in the news and papers when he was discovered and a lot of people I talk to remember seeing articles or hearing about him.

I couldn’t be happier that Bert and I are together! He is my best friend and I can’t even remember what life was like before him. He is such a well behaved dog and that just came naturally it seems. I don’t worry in the slightest about him getting into anything he’s not supposed to.

He stays inside but enjoys his time in the fenced in back yard. He loves to roll onto his back on a hill in the yard, kick his back legs up and down in the air, causing him to slide down the hill on his back. He loves to go for rides in the car, even if we’re going to the vet. He enjoys the vet or any other place there are other dogs. He has a girlfriend that lives next door that he likes to show off for. They enjoy playing together, even when it’s through the fence.

He likes to sleep on the couch next to me when I’m watching tv and next to me in the bed at night. He looooves getting his belly scratched every chance he gets! When he’s sitting or lying next to me, he wants to be touching me in some way – usually with a paw on my leg. He definitely wants human contact as often as he can get it and he gets plenty!

I am so thankful to everyone that gave Bert the chance for a new life. I know there were people from the shelter, at clinics, a foster home, and others that devoted time, money, and love to him and I want to give all of them a huge ‘Thank You!!’. I also want everyone to know that he is very well taken care of now and very loved too. I’m not sure if it’s Bert or me that is the happiest, but I would bet it’s probably me.

And he lived happily ever after.

This story begins as many shelter stories do. An owner was moving and couldn’t take his dog, so he dumped it at the shelter like it was an old cast-off piece of furniture.

Except in this case it wasn’t just one dog, it was two. And as difficult as it is to get one dog adopted from a shelter, getting two adopted together is a mountain to climb, especially when one of them weighs 93 pounds. But these two dogs – Tiberius and Jaeger – were so compelling that countless people came to their aid.

I tell this story in the hope that people will truly understand what it takes to get a dog rescued, and how close each rescued dog comes to being reduced to ashes. I also hope people will realize that a rescue isn’t the work of a single person, or a pristine, miraculous event, but takes an enormous network of volunteers who give their time, their money, their hearts and souls to make sure abandonded animals get the loving forever homes they deserve.

Rescue work is complicated, it’s emotionally draining, but when it works out and the stars align, it’s the best feeling on earth. Because you’re not only saving the life of a dog or a cat, but you’re changing the lives of adopters too, giving them a new family member to love and cherish and learn from.

A couple days before Halloween, I went to the North Central Shelter near downtown Los Angeles to liberate a dog whose time was up. Paco, a big, sweet pit bull mix, was heading to a home in Indiana to live the rest of his life with a wonderful man named Jim.

But while I was there, the outreach director for the shelter had an huge, handsome Shepard mix dog leashed beside her who was agitated and panting. When I petted him, he calmed and was lovely, a true gentle giant. I asked her about him and she said he’d just been left behind at the shelter the day before and she wanted him to be the featured dog on a morning news show adoption segment, but she felt he was too anxious to handle it. When I asked her more, she told me his name was Tiberius and he’d come in with a chihuahua who was his best buddy. Of course I asked where Tiberius’ best buddy was, and I was told that they were kenneled apart.

That just broke my heart. This dog had just lost his home, AND his brother? And they could have comforted each other in this strange and scary place? Too painful. Of COURSE he was agitated.

I said that if the shelter would kennel the dogs together they’d both be a lot less anxious and would probably get adopted sooner. I mean, who doesn’t love that visual? A dog the size of a small pony and his sidekick who’d fit in a tote bag? But she didn’t seem to want to get into it with me. So I took Tiberius’ impound information sheet and told her as soon as I shipped Paco off, I’d start working on Tiberius’ behalf. Unfortunately his impound info didn’t have the name or the impound number of the dog he’d come in with. That would have been too easy

After Paco stayed with us, and I shipped him to Indianapolis and reveled in his happy landing and happy new home, I contacted another rescuer I know, Cynthia Dofton. I was heading out of town myself, so I asked her to contact the outreach director to ask again if there was anything she could do to get the dogs kenneled together. Cynthia called, and the woman said she couldn’t do it. It wasn’t her jurisdiction. It was up to the kennel director. And besides, she didn’t even know who Tiberius’ buddy was.

So Cynthia went through all the listings in the LA Shelters to see if she could find a male chihuahua who came into North Central on the same day as Tiberius – the needle in a haystack. Incredibly, she found two. When I got back to town, I went to the shelter with the two chihuahuas’ impound numbers, and asked a kennel worker to look both dogs up in the system and see which one was Tiberius’ best pal.

Jaeger. That was who. I asked the kennel director if they could be kenneled together. When I went to visit Tiberius in his run, he was despondent. The picture at the beginning of this post is him, refusing to leave his den, he was so depressed. I was told they would not kennel Jaeger with Tiberius because they feared food aggression, which was absurd, since the dogs were bonded. They’d lived their whole lives together, until now. But at least the shelter tagged them within the system as “best buddies.” It was a step in the right direction.

But both dogs had terrible intake photos, and were only listed on the city shelter website, which doesn’t do much to help get them a home. The next step was to get them photographed at one of the photo shoots run by Carolee Reiling, who started the North Central Animal Shelter page on facebook, and gives so much of her time and energy and income to helping shelter dogs and cats. Another rescuer I knew, Jody Paul, is one of the bio writers for the dogs and cats on the photo shoots, so I asked them both if they could try to get a photo of the dogs together. But that was a no go. Still, Debbie Zeitman took these two fantastic portraits of the boys, they were posted on the North Central facebook page and the photos and bios were directly linked into each other, identifying them as a bonded pair.

Already the boys had been in the shelter for three weeks, and now the REAL networking could begin. All the North Central networkers, rescuers and volunteers got busy, sharing, begging friends for pledge funds, a foster home, a rescue, a forever home. I visited the dogs whenever I could and every time a rescuer I knew went to the shelter, I asked them to check in on Tiberius and Jaeger. Yoko Furuno, took the incredibly sad photo of Tiberius in his cave, and everyone who checked in on him reported back to me that he was OK, but profoundly sad. He needed OUT. Jaeger, in the small dog kennels, at least had kennel mates, but they weren’t his bro, his bestie, Tiberius.

After another three weeks of everyone doing their utmost, it came down to this – the shelter was overcrowded and Jaeger was put on red alert. He had 48 hours before being euthanized.

Cynthia and I decided that if it came down to the wire, and no one would take them together, she’d go get Jaeger and foster him in her home and I’d go get Tiberius and foster him in mine, and hopefully we could reunite them in the future. But Cynthia had an ace up her sleeve. She called a young actor named Lou Wegner, a well known animal rights activist who has inspired teens nationwide to help animals in need. Lou called in a favor at the shelter and Debbie Zeitman arrived once again was to catch these incredible images of Tiberius’ and Jaeger’s reunion.

The first photo is the first time they’d laid eyes on each other in six weeks, and the last photo is the one that went viral.

It lit up the rescue community, and was shared far and wide. But their savior ended up being close to home.

Mariah Greenburg Roncetti is the director of Hounds of Hope, a local rescue founded by Shelly Mack that’s not afraid to take on the Herculean task of finding homes for bonded pairs of dogs. She was contacted by a friend, Andrea Diamant, who had seen the photo, and by late morning of what would have been Jaeger’s last day on earth, Mariah swooped in, had the boys pulled from the shelter and had her local transporter, Rebecca Morley pick them up and take them to her vet, where thanks to the generous donations of many, many people, they could board for a while. The money pledged to them bought them time. Literally.

Here they are, their first photo out of the shelter and at the vet.

I’m not the only rescuer who cried like a baby that day. But even though they were safe, they weren’t yet out of the woods. Because pledge money only goes so far, and a boarding kennel is not a home. Rescue means rescue, not forever home. There was still more work to do. I promised Mariah I wouldn’t give up on these two and would continue to help her in any way I could.

Mariah went straight to work, reaching out to everyone she knew, and she knows a LOT of people. But the boys sat almost two weeks in boarding with no foster or forever home in sight. Mariah visited them almost daily, took them on walks, made sure they were as happy as they could be, and she kept networking. The money was running out, but not Mariah’s hope and faith – she has deep reserves of both.

Finally, she found a wonderful home for the boys where they could live the ideal life together – a woman who had been in touch with Mariah in the past regarding other dogs she’d rescued. She wanted Tiberius and Jaeger, and had the perfect home and family for them. But there was one complication. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, and we had to get the boys there.

I priced out commercial cargo flights, but we’d have had to raise even more money to ship the boys, buy their travel crates and their travel health certificates. So I reached out to a pilot I know, Sarah Todd, who not only flies for the U.S. Air Force, but for a wonderful charity organization called Pilots & Paws. Through an online message board, Pilots & Paws links pilots who own small private aircraft and are willing to transport shelter dogs with rescues and adopters in other states. Sarah posted our flight needs – 106 pounds of dog needing a flight from LA to Telluride, and miraculously one was available, most of the way.

Josh Rapaport and his wife Katja Wichland were visiting friends in Phoenix and had recently signed up with Pilots & Paws. Animal activists themselves, Josh and Katja founded the Telluride Animal Alliance and run the Telluride Thrift Shop to help fund the group. They happily offered the backseat of their airplane to Tiberius and Jaeger, and now Mariah had to get the dogs to Phoenix by 9AM on a Friday, which was only a day away.

She called a young woman named Carlee Alyssa who immediately agreed to drive the dogs in her little Honda Civic across the desert through the night. The boys were on their way! Arriving at the airport in the morning, Tiberius and Jaeger were introduced to Katja and Josh and loaded onto the plane. Here now, are Katja’s photos of their flight.

Tiberius crosses the tarmac.

The boys are ready to copilot.

A kiss mid-flight for Katja.

Tiberius and Jaeger find comfort in each other.

Throughout the flight, Mariah was sending photos to the entire rescue community as Katja was sending them to her, in real time, and at touchdown, the tears of joy flowed freely.

The boys have settled into their new lives and new home beautifully, and they now have boys of their own.

And snow! For a couple of Southern California dogs, that’s a big change, but a welcome one. Because how cold is snow compared to being abandoned? Is it colder than a hard concrete kennel at the shelter? Or colder than being separated from your best pal? Or colder than nights spent alone, listening to dogs around you whine and howl, aching for comfort?

Many might argue that the time and money and effort put into just these two dogs is a waste, and that those resources would be better spent helping the hungry or the indigent. But much more than these two dogs were saved. Every person named here who directly helped in this rescue, and all the others who shared Tiberius’ and Jaeger’s shelter listing, pledged money and advocated for them, they too were changed by this event. Not one of them will ever look at any task again and think, “No. It’s too much. I can’t do it.” Because now they know they can. As a community.

Every save is a miracle, made possible by people coming together, working as one, toward a single goal. In this case, it was a home for the holidays for two discarded dogs who will be the love of their new family’s lives.

From here on in, the story of Tiberius and Jaeger belongs to their new family. It’s now theirs to live and to tell. And there’s no better ending than that.

Tiberius and Jaeger, happily ever after.

The Telluride Animal Foundation is celebrating its First Anniversary, and we want to celebrate with the people who made our first year such a success: that’s YOU Telluride!

The Thrift Shop will have extended hours this Wednesday Dec. 5th, we will be open 11 – 8.  We will have warm drinks and plenty of fresh-popped popcorn while you shop!  Come take advantage of grab-bag discounts all day long.  And the best part of all?  All proceeds benefit animals in need!  Come celebrate the season with us at the Telluride Thrift Shop.

A few months back we sent boxes of clothing to Exile International, a nonprofit organization bringing rehabilitative care to war-affected, traumatized children in DR Congo and Uganda. The children they work with have been through unbelievably difficult situations, and we were happy to provide clothing for these deserving children.

To learn more about the work Exile International is doing to help war-affected children, click here.