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9:50pm

Our Dream Shelter

Hope. That is what I am feeling now since Zootoo came to visit our shelter today. After last week seeing so many animals depressed in the shelter, staring out from behind cage bars, I began to feel sad myself. I have so many dreams and plans to help the animals but suddenly I felt like all the energy had been sucked from me.
What we do is not easy. As many as we adopt out, there are a hundred more in our city that need rescue. I get Euthaniasia lists every night from the NYACC. Its heartbreaking. Our shelter can only hold about twenty five dogs. Our cages are small, our one room of cages tiny. We have no indoor space to show animals for adoption or to let them stretch on rainy days. We don't have an office.
We have no storage space. Laundry is taken away and done offsite every night. Our food supplies take up a cage space because there is no place else to put the dog food. Our outdoor runs are great but there are only three, they are small and animals are often agitating each other there because they are frustrated with being confined.
Despite these obstacles, Bobbi and the Strays manages to save hundreds of animals every year. They do quality adoptions that involve an application, reference check and home check to ensure no animal will end up in a dire situation again. We spay/neuter even more than that every year, preventing thousands of litters and thousands more from ending up in shelters. We transport our animals off site to see vets, to get groomed, for training classes, to parks for socializationa and exposure, for adoption events because the location of our shelter is so obscure. We work hard advertising on Craigslist, 1800saveapet, pets911 and petfinder.org. We make posters and flyers and hand them out everywhere. We are contstantly netowrking. We are always in a rescue state of mind. We are relentless. We are always brainstorming ways to save another animal though we are out of space. We scramble to find money for boarding costs, we beg for foster homes. Everyday its another emergency and our team works together to save another life.
If we can save so many with so little, imagine what we could do with a million dollar makeover? I dream of a shelter that has extra large cages that are like small rooms, with walls inbetween so the animals don't agitate each other. I dream of a seperate room for puppies and nursing mommies, a seperate room for sick animals so if one is sick they all don't get sick, separate rooms where cats can be cage free. I dream of an indoor playroom where the animals can socialize with each other and with people. I dream of a large outdoor area where the animals can really run free to play,sprinting across grass and rolling over to enjoy the sun on their faces. We could set up an agility course, have training classes out there, we can play frisbee and fetch and flyball. I dream of even simpler things like an office, or even better yet an office with a computer system that keeps track of all of our animals so we don't have to write everything by hand in files. I dream of a bathtub to give baths! If its not warm outside, our animals have to be transported to groomers to get baths which is time consuming and expensive! It would also be great to have a small store to help support our operating costs. We are a private no kill shelter and fundraising is always an issue. There are so many, many, many things we could have that would help our animals have a more comfortable, stress free stay and that would allow us to save so many more. And this one may seem far fetched but I always dreamed of having a shelter with a swimming pool for the dogs. So many dogs LOVE to swim and growing up my dogs favourite thing to do was to go swimming. It would jus tbe one more thing to make the shelter less like a shelter and more like a fun stop over on the road to finding a forever home.
But why do we deserve it? For one, Bobbi has started with nothing and built this shelter out of pure love for the animals. With so little, she has managed to save a lot. We are small group, but we have big plans to help NYC achieve "no kill" status. Would you believe that there is no Queens city shelter in NYC? Queens is a huge borough and there is no city shelter. There is a great need for a shelter here to alleviate some of the overcrowding in the Brooklyn Animal Care and Control where they euthanize daily for lack of space. So if there is a need for a shelter in Queens, why not let it be a great no-kill shelter with a rescue mentality? The saving potential is off the charts! New York City needs this more than anything right now. There are too many dying EVERY DAY.
We are just a small group. There were people who doubted we would make it into the top twenty but we didn't let that stop us. Out of thousands of shelters all over America, we made it into the Finals. If we can do this, I know we can do anything including help NYC become truly No-Kill. This is why we deserve the shelter makeover...