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Tails of Bakersfield: $14,000 raised for unwanted pets, thanks to you
| Friday, Sep 5 2008 3:15 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Sep 5 2008 4:24 PM
Thanks to our community of givers, The Californian’s Tails of Bakersfield has raised more than $14,000 for unwanted pets.
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The family of former State Sen. Joe Shell, who passed away in April, is subsidizing a large portion of adoption fees Sunday in honor of his 90th birthday and Grandparents Day. The family has also refurbished two puppy play yards at the SPCA in his memory.
When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday
Where: Bakersfield SPCA, 3000 Gibson St.
Adoption fees: Dogs $20 (normally $76.50); cats $10 (normally $54.50)
Details: 323-8353, www.bakersfieldspca.org
Photos:
Sara Nilson, a volunteer at ALPHA Canine Sanctuary, rescued Stubby, a Sheltie/Lab mix that had been lost in the mountains near Pine Mountain Club.
Stubby lost nearly a third of his body weight while lost for a month in the mountains.
For an idea of how your donations will be used by local shelters, we offer the harrowing journey of Stubby, rescued by ALPHA Canine Sanctuary this summer:
The voice mail message sounded urgent: “I’m calling about two minutes after five. I’m up in Pine Mountain Club. I have been for most of the afternoon. We’re trying to catch a dog that we had adopted out about a month ago. Got away from the owner and it’s been lost in the forest.
“We’ve got our dog trap up here and it’s horribly emaciated but, thank God, it’s still alive. ... It’s life and death with this dog. We’re running out of time with him up in the forest, which is no place for a dog to be loose.”
Such was the anguish expressed recently by Marilyn Stewart, founder and director of ALPHA Canine Sanctuary.
Fortunately, the following morning all was well.
Stubby, the lost 4-year-old Lab-Sheltie mix, had been caught and was safely back at ALPHA.
“It took several hours for him to enter the dog trap,” Stewart said excitedly. “We had baited it with chicken.”
Stubby was hungry, disoriented and distrustful.
He had lost nearly one-third of his body weight, going from 40 to 28 pounds in the month he’d been missing.
And he didn’t know what to think of his buddy Sara Nilson, ALPHA’s best volunteer, according to Stewart, and someone with whom Stubby has a special bond.
“I was the one who took him up there to his new home” before he was lost, Nilson said. “He’s seen me (at the sanctuary) for three years. He trusts me.”
Nilson was the first to approach Stubby when he had finally entered the trap.
Stewart said the contraption has recovered many runaways like Stubby, making the $300 ALPHA spent on it one of the best investments the private nonprofit has ever made.
Stubby, described as extremely shy, ran away because his new owner had ignored ALPHA’s advice to always keep him on a leash.
“Sometimes they think they know better than we do and it ends in tragedy,” she said.
It was a concerned neighbor who spotted Stubby and alerted the pet’s owner. ALPHA was called to come get him.
“He’s been a month without food,” Stewart lamented of Stubby’s plight. “It’s just heartbreaking. If he couldn’t get squirrel, he couldn’t have eaten anything.”
Stubby probably didn’t have any scavenging opportunities, she said, because people living in mountain communities keep tight lids on garbage cans to keep bears and raccoons out.
Stubby probably owes his survival to timing, Stewart said. If he had run away during the winter, the outcome probably would have been much different.
Fortunately for Stubby, the 20-acre ALPHA Canine Sanctuary, which currently houses between 90 and 100 dogs, has a lifetime return policy on any dog that it adopts out, Stewart said, so now the wayward dog is back home — at ALPHA.
“He’s ours,” Stewart said. “He’s not going out from here ever.”
TAILS OF BAKERSFIELD
If you think the ALPHA staff and all other workers and volunteers of Kern County’s local shelters are heroes for the animal rescue work they do, you’re probably right.
And you should give yourself a hero’s pat on the back as well if you give to their cause — which you certainly did if you participated in Tails of Bakersfield, a showcase of community pets.
Between June 22 and Aug. 22, donations totaling around $11,200 were received on behalf of The Cat People, the Kern County Animal Shelter, the Bakersfield SPCA and ALPHA Canine Sanctuary.
Also, an anonymous local donor matched the first $3,000 of donations for ALPHA Canine.
Altogether, local givers helped Kern County shelters with more than $14,000 as a result of Tails of Bakersfield.
The program turned out to be such a tail-wagging success in the eyes of our publisher and editors, that it will return in 2009.