Dog Situation in Arkansas

We just can’t take in any more! We already have our 90 lb, 12-ish yr old lab/shep mix & 3 indoors cats. Some have special needs; all are rescues. And we have the 2 outdoor feral cats that have adopted us. He (the boy cat, “Dennis” as in “–the-Menace”) just had 2 surgeries for an ear infection and now has a floppy ear. He was getting fairly friendly with me until I brought him to the vet 2ce. Now he’s very wary. And Momma Cat, Dennis’ mother & ‘lover’—having ‘spawned’ 4 kittens that took us months to spay/neuter and finally adopt out) is VERY wary…she will accept food, of course, but it better not be some shitty Wal*Mart cheap-o brand, either godammit!! The beagle mix puppies are a blur of energy and feeding frenzy, not to mention the poop quantities involved. The heeler is also a bundle & we don’t know how they will mix.

The adoption place in Fayetteville was a shithole and the woman who runs it is psycho. I mean a real mental case; vicious & vindictive. That’ll be another story…

So I brought the pups all the way back home; a waste of a day (12½ hours & well over 400 miles of driving on two-lane, twisty roads). We’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that the only way through this despair is to put the beagle pups down via our vet. We absolutely just can’t keep them & a humane euthanizing is better than to abandon them & leave them out to die.

We’ve called every shelter in a 200 mile radius. No one will take them. No one CAN take them. Every shelter is over capacity & with this heat the toll is rising. It’s 106 right now. Even that “haven” in Fayetteville had many dogs in outdoor pens w/access to shade but no centrally cooled common area.

There was an abandoned kennel found in western Arkansas yesterday that had 114 dogs w/no water or food. They estimate it had been up to 2 weeks w/o care. Apparently the kennel itself was well constructed and designed, but the people there shut the fkng water off to the self-watering system built into the pens, shut down the power to the A/C system and drove off without telling anyone. No one has yet been able to locate them; they even just left a lot of their shit in the house & disappeared. 30 animals have to be euthanized (or have been by now). One female ate her own pup. This is a ghastly situation; one that we never knew existed anywhere to this extent before.

Even the woman with whom we board Reno (he doesn’t do well at our normal groomer/boarder—Marilyn at “Almost Home Acres for Pets” keeps him inside with her & he follows her around w/his tail between his legs) says that she now has to shut her eyes and just press on when she sees a stray. She let herself get over extended and got into money and effort problems. She told us about her friends who opened a shelter in her area (she’s 20 miles away) about 4 years ago and within 6 months, people had dumped so many animals that they lost the business due to over-capacity, the unforeseen expenses, & extra labor, and stress; they even lost their home and the couple divorced within a year after shutting down!

Sorry for the depressing news, but Pam & I are at wit’s and emotion’s end & we have to face this event head on. So, we thought we’d share our misery w/you. (That means I have to vent.)
I wish I could find a smiley face to add to the end of this sentence…


We thought about buying a dog run. A 10x10x6 we found is $500 but A) we can’t get it for 9 days and B) every asshole in the area will hear about it and they’ll dump dogs & cats here.

**Addendum
Pam just got off of the phone. That heeler mix we have got away from us the other day and was gone for 2 days. Animal Control got her somehow and tracked her back to us via rabies tag. Well, they just called to tell us that they have her again. But they don’t. "Ours" is in the garage right now. This is yet another one. And she was picked up near where I found “ours”. Must be a sister.

S H I T