The wife and I made a short trip today to take part in a Good Deed that was only possible because of the Internet. It’s one of those things that cheap and easy global communications doesn’t make easier, but makes possible.
We drove one leg of a dog “transport” — Richmond to Fredericksburg. The point of these transports is to move dogs that are being held in “kill” shelters (and likely to be euthanized) to either other shelters that have room, to foster homes, or to permanent homes.
But we’re not talking about moving them across town. We’re talking from — in our case — from Tennessee to New Hampshire. Every weekend, dozens of dogs are moved, usually from the South to the North, via a well-crafted plan involving dozens of people who each volunteer to run a leg of the trip. They meet in rest areas or just off highways to pass their dogs onto the next driver.
Sometimes it’s just one driver meeting another, other times it’ll be a dozen of them in a Wendy’s parking lot, where a clipboard-toting coordinator makes sure the right dogs go with the right people for the next leg.
Interstate 81 is the main corridor, so dogs will converge there — Nashville, Tenn., to Knoxville, to Bristol, Va., to Roanoke and up I-81 to Pennsylvania, New York, or further. Ours was coming from Nashville up I-95. We picked him up from the house he stayed in overnight (another volunteer), and dropped him off at a Wawa parking lot in Fredericksburg.
Think of the coordination this requires. Every week you’ve got drivers and overnights in five, six, maybe even 10 states. Each driver has to be screened, as do the dogs. (Can’t have biters with kids in the car, and some dogs just don’t get along with others.) Every week the coordinators work with shelters in different states to see which dogs are in the most danger and who can take them. Then they have to figure out the most efficient route — if three dogs are all going up I-81, it makes sense for them to ride together until they need to go their separate ways.
Once each dog’s trip is marked, all those trips are broken into segments, and then the coordinator has to to get drivers for every one. They tap into their network via e-mail or through message boards to see who’s available: “We need someone to take two small dogs from Roanoke to Charlottesville. Meeting at such-and-such a place in Roanoke at 9:00 a.m., then in Charlottesville at 10:45.”
Without the Internet, this wouldn’t be possible — certainly not on this scale. Phone trees couldn’t handle it, and changes to a schedule would take too long to propagate down the line.
But we have the Net, so today we did our part to bring Opie (a 52-pound, three-year-old Catahoula Mix) one small step closer to a better home. He had been living in a shelter — in a cage — since March. Today he was stuck in a bunch of cars. But in a day or to, he’ll be home.
The Fray
Lionemom says:
Yay, yay, yay!!! This is EXACTLY how I got my dog Rogue! She was transported from a foster home for Almost Home Dachshund Rescue (http://almosthomerescue.org/index.htm) via a group calling themselves PETS (https://www.petsllc.org/index.php) They had a ventilated trailer full of dog crates with something like 2 dozen rescue dogs coming north from the southern states and I met them at a common drop-off point for a bunch of people who were picking up pets they had adopted from rescues. It was such a great idea!
Good for you for doing that! I would TOTALLY do it myself! I would be interested in the place you contacted (though I think a lot more pets come north from the south than the other direction as adoption rates are much higher in the Northeast.)
This totally makes my day! (even though I am catching up on an old post here…)
gnomic says:
Andrew,
Kudos to you and your wife. How do you find out about this stuff? And why does the south have so many more dogs?
We used to rehabilitate abused animals, something we won’t be doing again until the kids are much older. We have 2 rescue dogs now and its a challenge bringing a “new” dog with issues in as my dogs do not tolerate unknown dogs near my son. I hope the whole pack mellows with age.