Dog Rescue Holidays Weekly News

I’m very happy to be able to report that things have been rather quiet this week, or at least as quiet as having around ninety dogs on the premises can be! After re-homing fifty dogs in Germany a couple of weeks ago I was fully expecting to replace them very quickly with stray dogs from the surrounding villages but, until today, we still haven’t reached our capacity of 125 dogs. I’d like to think this is because there has been a paradigm shift in locals’ thinking concerning dog breeding and animal welfare in general, but I’m absolutely sure this isn’t the case; rather, we’ve just been lucky that for one reason or another, not many folks have phoned us to pick dogs up from the streets or to hand their own unwanteds in to the centre.

We’ve been able to take advantage of this relative calm by painting the kennels, laying down gravel and sand and just generally sprucing the “resort” up a bit for the dogs. It’s looking super-cool these days, that’s for sure!

We’ve said goodbye to a couple of the dogs who have headed off to other countries and we’ve received lots of heart-warming news and pictures from the new families of dogs that we have re-homed in the past. We all love getting these photos and updates and it shows us that what we are doing is worthwhile; happy souls, both canine and human, is what these relationships are about, after all.

Even the sad occurences, for example, finding that our little Teacup Yorkshire Terrier had died in his sleep, have a silver lining; he got to spend his last days in amongst friends rather than in a street somewhere, terrified out of his wits. As sad as it was to find his little body one morning, we know he passed in a safe and warm environment and this offers us a tiny bit of consolation that we could help the little critter move on peacefully. RIP Titchy lad.

Our work is being increasingly appreciated by the local community. I remember years ago when I first went to the centre to hand a couple of Galgos in that I had found abandoned in our village, nobody had anything good to say about the place other than that the foreigners there must be mad to dedicate their lives to helping stray mutts. Fast forward to 2014 and we’re receiving bottles of Emilio Moro (Ribera del Duero) red wine (over 15 euros a bottle!) from the dog-loving owners of the local shop to show their appreciation for our efforts. Little things like this (not that it’s so little lol, never having bought such an expensive bottle of wine in my life hehe) offer some evidence that things are changing amongst certain sections of society down here, and I’m hoping that by welcoming visitors from the UK, Germany and other countries we’ll be putting the spotlight on animal welfare and towards an awareness of how we can all change things in this world with a positive mentality and consequent actions.

Talking of visitors, we have Frank visiting us for ten days from Germany this week. He spends a week or two every summer helping out and here are a few photos of his latest Galgo, a rescue from our centre, thieving cherries from the tree!

The other big news for us is this girl, a Bodeguero cross, who we’ll be welcoming into our own house. She’s so easy going it’s incredible, so she should fit without a problem. She’ll be a running buddy for my Bullterrier, Faustino. I’ve got a feeling there’s some bull breed blood in her, so I’m expecting her to muscle up nicely after a few weeks of exercise up in the mountains.