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In this Town Talk, our publisher Mike McCool speaks with Meghan Bowers and Wendy Kurtz from the Warren County Humane Society about fostering for the shelter.
What is fostering?
Fostering for the Humane Society is rewarding and challenging, and a huge part of our strategy to maintain our no-kill status.
Fostering an animal is taking care of an animal in your home for a period of time, without adopting it. Sometimes fosters are needed for a few days, and sometimes for months or years. We use fosters during kitten season for babies that need around-the-clock care, when an animal is recovering from an injury or surgery, or if an animal is uncomfortable in the shelter environment.
Not all animals need fosters, and many benefit more from being in the shelter where they will be in front of adopters. Check-in at the shelter to find out which animals are approved for fostering.
While an animal is in a foster home, they are still the legal custody of the shelter, which means that the Humane Society must oversee the vaccinations and care of the animals while they are in your home. Any medical procedures or vet visits must be approved in advance by the Shelter Leadership Team in order to get those expenses covered by the shelter.
The Foster Care Program brings caring individuals and needing animals together providing special care in a home setting until the animal is ready for adoption.
If you think fostering is right for your family, please fill out an application or visit the shelter for more information.
The new date for Rough, Tough & Scruffy is June 18th.
Town Talk is a series on the Royal Examiner where we will introduce you to local entrepreneurs, businesses, non-profit leaders, and political figures who influence Warren County. Topics will be varied but hopefully interesting. If you have an idea, topic, or want to hear from someone in our community, let us know. Send your request to news@RoyalExaminer.com
CARTER COUNTY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Less than a week after a pig wandering the back roads of Carter County made national news, one wildlife sanctuary took it upon itself to give her a new life.
Known to the residents of Judge Ben Allen Road as Petunia, the 300-pound sow spent her last days in Tennessee as she had any other — sleeping and eating. Little did she know, only hours later she would join over 100 other pigs at Harley June Farm and Sanctuary.
Petunia was a nuisance animal — one that trespassed and caused property damage throughout the areas she was known to frequent. After several calls from residents to local authorities scattered over months, the Carter County Sheriff’s Office put out a call for her owner. Petunia needed to be dealt with, and if her owner wouldn’t, someone else would. There was only one problem: moving a pig that big is a bit difficult.
“We have no way to transport a 300-pound pig; we have nowhere to put a 300-pound pig…safely,” Shannon Posada, director of the county’s animal shelter, said. “Unless we ask for a foster, and we’re happy to ask for a foster, but still, we have no way of transportation for that large of an animal.”
The shelter hoped a local farmer would pick Petunia up, but there were no guarantees that she would end up in a permanent home once the foster had her. In the meantime, she was still at large and enjoying a hearty diet of grasses and neighborhood property.
So, how do you get her out? Simple: an interstate effort from multiple people to capture and transport a 300-pound animal.
Enter Amy Mullins, owner and operator of Harley June Farm and Sanctuary. She was first made aware of Petunia’s predicament after CBS Mornings picked up her story.
With the logistics down, Mullins and company needed to figure out the nuts and bolts of Petunia’s pickup.
Pigs are notoriously stubborn creatures without the added independence of free-range wandering, so crews needed a way to figure out just how to get her from Point A to Point B without major injuries or damage. The solution is straightforward: let her walk in herself.
Using boards to her left and right and a blocker behind, helpers were able to guide Petunia into a livestock trailer without a shoving match that they would have lost. In a video, you can hear her grunting in protest but going along with the crew’s directions albeit slowly.
Part of that lumbering pace, it turns out, was because she was “Fat Blind,” a condition in pigs that occurs when forehead and cheek fat grows so large that it covers the eyes completely.
A pig being heavy isn’t altogether that surprising, but Petunia’s weight is a topic that Mullins plans to address at her new home in North Carolina.
Nowadays Petunia goes by another name: Ellie Mae. She’s living high on the hog in North Carolina, at an undisclosed location for her and her new friends’ safety.
In the short term, she’s living in a smaller pen as the herd gets used to her. Pigs have a pecking order much like chickens (yes, it’s a thing.), so throwing her straight in with new pigs could lead to fights and injuries. Plus, with her being temporarily blind, the stress of all the new sensations could prove to be too much for her.
That smaller space isn’t without its amenities: she has a pool, brand new straw pile bed and a chicken friend that likes to sleep on her back.
Ellie’s Carter County journey has come to an end, but her weight loss journey has just started. To get the medical care she needs like spaying, she’ll have to trim down quite a bit.
In my job, I receive a lot of emails. Some of them are about topics the Northwest Florida Daily News would never write about (like this press release I received, with the headline MANSCAPED™ to Participate in the Jefferies 2022 Consumer Conference), but that’s probably a topic for a future column someday. However, last week I received an email that just broke my heart.
Alaqua Animal Refuge officials sent an email that they were working with the Walton County Sheriff’s Office as three separate animal cruelty cases were being investigated.
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One dog had been tied to the bumper of a truck and dragged down a road for 8 to 10 miles. Alaqua is treating the dog, which was in critical condition at the time of this writing and was missing a lot of skin and toenails.
“Ironically, the dog is in good spirits despite the intentional cruelty inflicted upon him,” Alaqua founder Laurie Hood wrote in the email.
Another dog had been chained outside with a prong collar and had significant wounds around its neck.
In the third case, a Chihuahua was killed when someone fell on the dog during a stabbing incident.
I will never understand how some people can be so cruel to animals.
This news hit especially close to home for me as my wife and I adopted a dog from Alaqua that we later found out was abused by humans.
Jenny and I adopted Nick, a (we think) bluetick coonhound in September of 2018, but doing so was not our original plan. We had lost our Maltese, Mason, earlier in the year and we went to Alaqua to look at a group of Maltese mixes that had been brought in from a hoarding situation after the previous owner no longer was able to care for the dogs.
While we were on our way to look at the Maltese mixes, we ran into an Alaqua volunteer who was transporting Nick back to his kennel run after he had undergone surgery to remove his right eye. We were told that he and his two brothers had been brought to Alaqua from a farm up in northern Walton County recently and that Nick had been injured in a dog fight (not a dog fight organized by people, just two dogs getting into a fight). I gave Nick a pet that day, told him I hope he feels better soon and then went on to look at little white dogs.
We picked out a white Maltese mix that we named Phoebe to adopt, but Phoebe had heartworms when she was taken to Alaqua and had to complete her treatments before we could bring her home.
Since we couldn’t take Phoebe home initially, Jenny and I would drive from Fort Walton Beach to Freeport a couple times a week to visit with her. Without Jenny knowing, each time we would go to visit Phoebe, I would stop at Nick’s kennel to check on him. Eventually, I told her what I had been doing and we actually were able to bring Nick home before Phoebe.
It wasn’t until we took Nick, who we named after Nick Fury from the Avengers because they both have one eye, to our veterinarian that we learned what really happened to him.
He had a place inside his right ear that looked like a pimple. The vet moved it back and forth a bit, and eventually a pellet from a BB gun came out. After that, we took a closer look at him and found about half a dozen pellets all over his tiny body, including two in his head, one in his brow right next to his missing eye. We also noticed he has a scar on his front left leg where it looks like someone cut him.
Despite the fact that some monster out there tortured this dog and used him for target practice, Nick is the sweetest pup. I don’t know why, but he loves all people, especially kids.
We let Alaqua know what we found and that whoever told them Nick had been injured in a dog fight was wrong. I don’t know if they were able to work with the Walton County Sheriff’s Office and look into Nick’s surrender or not.
However, I will be forever grateful for Alaqua. Not only have we adopted three beautiful and wonderful dogs from there (we also got our Great Dane, Poe, from Alaqua during their big Great Dane rescue in 2016), but they and other agencies like them do so much to keep animals safe.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but please treat animals kindly. If you see or even suspect an animal is being neglected or abused, please call local law enforcement to let them evaluate the situation. And if you know someone who shot an adorable hound dog puppy with a pellet gun about four years ago, I would very much like to have a conversation with them.
Dusty Ricketts is the content coach for the Northwest Florida Daily News. He can be reached at dricketts@nwfdailynews.com.