Old Dogs Living Life With Dignity & Respect- a short series!

Old Dogs - PART 1

Well I guess the first thing I want to write about is adopting and fostering senior dogs. I have a whole pack of them laying around my bedroom right now, so they are a part of a No Kill solution that I am somewhat knowledgeable about.

Older dogs get killed in shelters all the time because they are supposedly "un-adoptable". Now I would say they are harder to find homes for, but not un-adoptable. Some people think that they are not getting as much for their money or whatever if they adopt a senior dog. Maybe they fear they will get this old guy home and he will die overnight and they will have to grieve and all that or that this older dog is going to need some geriatric specialist vet that will cost millions of dollars or something.

As far as financial cost goes, I have found the exact opposite is true. The older guys really do not need much. A warm soft blanket, good food, milk bones, rawhides, greenies, senior dog vitamins, supplements, clean water, a little exercise, love and companionship are the main ingredients for a happy old dog life, far as I can tell. Mine even like to squeak on a toy now and then. They love to pose for photos as well.


I think that old dogs, old cats and old human beings deserve to live their lives to the fullest til they die, naturally, if/when possible. Now don't get me wrong! There is no way in tarnation I would allow an animal to lay around and suffer and have a terrible and undignified life either. But there are dogs and cats being killed in shelters, because they are old and homeless or maybe they are missing some fur or have some old man fat lumps or whatever. This does not have to be a death sentence!


Just as a young pup still has the whole rest of his life ahead of him, so does an older dog!


When Bill and myself were volunteering at the shelter, there were several arguments about whether I would adopt some of the younger, cooler pups to bring home and add to our growing family. Today I am somewhat glad that I did not sneak any of those little whipper~snaps into the pack while he was out working/not paying attention. They surely would have been a lot more work than the older guys we ended up with and I am sure they would never have been as full of the wisdom, grace and peacefulness of the senior pack.

HOBO MY SHADOW HOFFMAN

The first guy that came home with me was missing a bunch of hair and he was stinky. His breath was stinky and his fur smelled like he had been laying around in a pool of pee. The shelter manager at our local Stroudsburg PSPCA Adoption Center, said the dog needed to be euthenized because she believed he had end stage renal failure. Well I am not a vet and I don't even play one on tv, but I could see that this dog had nothing wrong with him that called for his immediate extermination. I believed with all my heart that he deserved to live in a home where he would be loved and treated with dignity and respect til it was time for him to die.


Some clues about the life left in this dog were that when I went to the shelter to walk dogs, he would jump up and wag his tail when I would appear at his cell with some milky bones! When I would show him the leash and ask him did he want to go out and walk, he would jump up and down and be so excited. I would get him outside and he would walk with me and then if I sat down to spend some time talking with him, he would nuzzle close to me, tail wagging always, and you could just tell there was something special between us. He really cared about me being there and I was falling in love with him too. He still had a fine appreciation for walks, milk bones, hugs and kisses, nuzzling and snuggling. He was in no pain at all. He was just painful to look at with all his missing hair and his stinky fur and breath!


Since I was not totally sure whether this guy was sick or just not well taken care of, I believed that he would be with us for a couple of months or something and that I could give him the time of his life til then. It has been somewhere around 8 months since Hobo My Shadow Hoffman came home to live with us. Hobo is a very fast runner and he jumps up into our laps and thinks he is an old wienerdog and he is the pack leader of our dog family. Bossy as they come and happy as can be!


Here are some photos of how he looked when he first came home with me! He had hair missing. He was discolored (the color of urine) so I was not sure if he was jaundiced or what. His body was shaped strangely, skinny, yet bloated or something. But he had so much soul in his face, Can you tell?




















IN BETWEEN STAGE - These photos were taken after a few months with us. See how Hobo's hair began growing back with some good food, vitamins, glucosamine and brushing?!


















HOBO MY SHADOW HOFFMAN TODAY - Healthy, happy and pretending to be a wiener dog so he can get some of the eukeneuba - See how his hair is all in and his muscle weight has increased in all the right places, and he is looking like a sled puller for the iditerod? OH HOBO! COME GROW OLD WITH ME!

The No Kill Revolution

The No Kill Revolution
In the words of Nathan Winograd
“We have the power to build a new consensus, which rejects killing as a method for achieving results. And we can look forward to a time when the wholesale slaughter of animals in shelters is viewed as a cruel aberration of the past. To get to that point, we must learn from history and reject our failures. Whether we realize, appreciate, or believe it, as history marches toward greater compassion toward non-human animals, No Kill’s conquest of the status quo is inevitable. If we remain silent at this moment, however, an opportunity will be lost to speed that process along. Our silence, therefore, has a body count. The price to be paid for our refusal to seize this opportunity will be the lives of millions of dogs and cats needlessly killed in shelters next year. And the year after that. We have a choice. We can fully, completely, and without reservation embrace No Kill as our future. Or we can continue to legitimize the two-pronged strategy of failure: adopt a few and kill the rest. It is a choice which history has thrown upon us. We are the generation that questioned the killing. We are the generation that has discovered how to stop it. Will we be the generation that does?”
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If you care about companion animals, please read Nathan Winograd’s book Redemption.
Go here to read and sign the No Kill Declaration.
Go here to see how Philadelphia is blowing it.
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Fostering and Volunteering!

Fostering and volunteering are very important parts of the No Kill Equation. If you can foster animals in your home so that rescues can make room to take in and assist more homeless animals, eventually our network could grow large enough that there is never a homeless animal without somewhere to go.

To apply to foster or volunteer with Camp Papillon (all breed rescue), please contact Barbara Marinelli at barbaralgc@aol.com

If you are interested in working with, volunteering or fostering pit bulls, you can contact Christine Guttilla (For the Love of the Underdog) blueyeszz@aol.com

If you want to volunteer or foster cats, please contact Naomi Gauntlett (Animals Can't Talk) NGauntlett@KRAMERLEVIN.com

Together we can!!!

Welcome to No Kill Monroe County PA

Welcome to NO KILL Monroe County PA. We are citizens who believe that when the community works together to save animals, that we are capable of miraculous things!

No Kill means that homeless animals are given every opportunity to find good permanent homes. We will not kill an animal just to make room for more animals or because it is difficult to find a home for.

The city of San Francisco became the first no kill community in the nation in the 1990s by saving all healthy dogs and cats city and county-wide.

The Tompkins Co. SPCA in rural upstate New York, an open door animal shelter with the animal control contract for the area, now has a 93% save rate.

The animal control shelter in Charlottesville, Va., a southern, rural open door shelter, has a 92% save rate.

The Humane Society in Reno, Nevada has hired a new director committed to no kill. Between January 1, 2006 and January 1, 2007, the kill rate for dogs decreased by 57%while the adoption rate increased by 91%. During this same period, the kill rate for cats decreased by 45% while the adoption rate increased by 105%.

The state of New Hampshire became a no kill state when state funded low cost spay/neuter became available. The save rate throughout the state is 93%.
(www.saveourstrays.com)

The state of Utah is near no kill status. (www.bestfriends.org)

Central Pennsylvania Animal Alliance are working hard to reduce euthenasia in Central PA.

Our neighbors in the Lehigh Valley are all, with the exception of one killing place, working hard on No Kill.

Here in the Poconos, Camp Papillon, Animals Can't Talk, For the Love of the Underdog, Friends of Monroe County Homeless Animals, Dogs Deserve Better, Save a Dog, and a SLEW of hardworking volunteers are doing their best to save animal lives and things just keep on looking better for homeless animals here in Monroe County!

I have this dream that all these little no kill groups Nationwide, are growing, moving, stretching and spreading. One day, maybe in my lifetime, the killing will be a thing of the past!

I know that my own children are apalled that there are "shelters" that make money taking in animals and killing them to make room for more animals. I think that if we educate the youth and teach them loving and compassionate no kill strategies, we will change the way homeless animals are treated especially in our grandchildren's generation. But we have to hurry up! I am already a grandmother!

Let's do this!