Trudy, a one-eyed beauty, found a wonderful home last weekend at the Rockwall Petco.
This New Year’s Eve, I’m reflecting on something that may seem utterly mundane to you. Every week throughout the year, a photo appears on this blog along with others in publications throughout our area. And every week throughout the year, that photo of an adoptable dog or cat results in an adoption.
But for something so subtle, it’s the culmination of a complicated process. To be precise: You make amazing happen every week.
To start at the beginning, our mission at Rockwall Pets is to stop the killing of healthy and treatable pets by municipal animal shelters. Shelter killing is the number one cause of death for healthy animals in the United States, according to the American Humane Society. When Pam and I first started working with shelters a few years ago, it irked us that our tax dollars were being used to kill innocent animals instead of “sheltering” them.
We decided to cut through the forest of excuses in order to find solutions. When we began, over 1,500 pets lost their lives every year in the Rockwall and Royse City shelters. That number is now less than 100 each year.
How do we do it? Our preference is to lead by example, but we’ll beg, plead and fight each shelter if we have to. That’s where it begins to get complicated.
The process begins when a shelter decides it doesn’t value the life of a homeless dog or cat. Sometimes the pet has a serious illness or injury, but in the great majority of cases, the dog or cat is perfectly healthy. After one of our volunteers agrees to act as a foster home for the pet, another volunteer goes to the shelter to fill out any paperwork necessary to rescue the pet.
The pet then goes to our veterinarian, usually Dr. Keith Webb at Pet Doctor in Rockwall, for a full round of vaccinations, a medical exam, a spay/neuter surgery and a microchip. If the pet is ill or injured, we schedule a round of medications or even a major surgery. There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes on behind the scenes, from paperwork and data entry to bill paying and food management. It’s not an exaggeration to say that each pet is backed by a virtual army.
Our team of incredibly hard-working volunteers then brings each adoptable pet to weekend events at the Rockwall Petco and at fete-ish in the Bishop Arts District in Dallas. Some of the pets get extra recognition through photos on this blog and in area publications.
And then each pet goes home to make a family very happy. It’s obviously a long and complicated journey from death row to a loving home. Amazing, isn’t it?
But that’s why we can’t do it without you. We need you to adopt our pets. We need you to join our amazing team of volunteers. And we need your financial assistance. None of us gets paid to do this. We do it because we love animals and we believe in them. We don’t have a building, so we keep these pets in our homes. We don’t receive any government funding. None of us is rich (darn it). We manage to do this strictly through individual donations from caring people like you. Our dedicated volunteer team supplies lots of effort, caring, muscle, love, time, tears and good ol’ hard work. So we need you to help with the one thing we don’t have: The necessary funds to make sure each pet is healthy (nearly three-fourths of our annual budget goes to medical care for our pets).
We think we’re upholding our end of the bargain. Leading by example, we’re demonstrating an effective way to get pets off death row and into homes. We’ve increased the number of pets we’ve adopted out by 90% over last year. And we want to do a lot more. But we need your help.
When you see a weekly photo of a pet sometime during 2014, you’ll know the whole story. We need you to help us make amazing happen.
Michael Kitkoski
Executive Director
Rockwall Pets
