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Date Posted: 08:42:47 04/29/10 Thu
Author: Ron
Subject: The closure of our rescue work.


Hey, all,

Right off the start, an apology: I over-reacted when the rescue stuff my family was doing was named (indirectly, but obviously) as being something to carefully avoid. I guess it hurt a little bit after all we have done to try to help dogs, upon seeing a big, obvious need of at least a way for people to connect up. That over-reaction I hope was somewhat understandable, I hope, but regardless it was a bit heavy handed. Sorry you all had to witness it. :)

As a backgrounder, we (my family and I) did light work with rescue here and on some of the other lists -- mostly I just advertised dogs I found as I had a website and didn't know what to do with it that was of use, and the rescue thing presented itself -- well, I found it pretty challenging, but rewarding, and I dragged the kids into it which they hated, but they learned a lot about how little it takes to save the life of a good dog (Maverick comes to mind).

We had too many failures, of course, but enough happy endings that everyone really learned a bunch of great stuff about sacrifice, situational dog aggression, and the great network of people who volunteer behind the scenes in spare time to pull dogs, drive dogs, and place dogs. Amazing people. I love them all. :)

However, the politics is tough: You find a dog, you know the breeder, you want to coax the breeder to help, but you don't want the breeder to bury the dog quietly, either. And you don't want to wrongly expose a breeder. You run into all sorts of people who want dogs for all the wrong reasons, too (note to those who take over that dog fighting is a new little twist for the Boerboel: I had more than a few obviously shady questions and website hits with respect to that) and now...

I am just am tired of it all, thanks largely to this crap: http://www.voy.com/95120/24470.html so I discussed it with the family and we'll just get out of doing that stuff, for a while at least. We have not been that active lately, anyway, so it's not a huge loss, and as I said I mostly just hooked people up anyway, warning those who are adopting out to vet the homes very carefully. I only can go on gut feel when I pass on an email, but as I often just get emails (rarely calls) people can sound perfect until you really dig.

If you have any rescue stuff on my site still, I'll leave it up if you want, but if you want it down, tell me via email, and if you need help placing or finding contacts, feel free to email me as well, but I'll likely just pass you a list of breeders/all breed rescue people (http://barlees.org comes to mind in the North East, as they really have a good feel for tough dogs).

The family loved saving the dogs, but it really eats at you to see people toss the animals away like garbage sometimes, and the politics can be just intolerable -- and occasionally just bizarre.

If anyone has any links or contacts for rescue people, please add them here, and I'll make a comprehensive page on my site this weekend.

Thanks a bunch to all that have helped out, there are so many of you and I was never organized enough to keep track, but I believe some 10+ Boerboels got saved from kill shelters thanks to all the twitter and Facebook and Yahoo mailing list leads everyone spread around. Well done, and really it just cost a few minutes a day of forwarding and posting. Time well spent, and I'm proud of it. Now it's your turn, dear reader. :)

All the best!
Ron

http://boerboels.ca

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