Road Dogs and Rescue

Feb 18, 2020 | Charity, Pets

I’m very excited to talk about an interview that I did with Alyssa Thai, Social Media Marketing for Road Dogs and Rescue at https://www.roadogsandrescue.org. I contacted Road Dogs via a direct message through Instagram wanting to know more about the organization and how I could help spread the word on saving the lives of these poor animals left starved, sick, and abandoned. Alyssa was so kind in answering my questions and provided links for more detail. She provided helpful links and a YouTube video that her and her fiancé put together of their trip to China where they volunteered to help slaughterhouse survivors. They brought back 5 very lucky pups to find loving homes and showed the compassion and love volunteers and fosters give. But I do want to warn you, this video can be hard to watch because they show the brutality of what these animals go through.

ABOUT

Road Dogs & Rescue was founded by bulldog-loving Brit, Nikki Carvey over 10 years ago. Road Dogs & Rescue rescues bulldog breeds, with their primary focus being complicated medical dogs, seniors and special needs puppies. They are the most likely to be euthanized. They are often dumped at shelters or abandoned at veterinary clinics. Some regard them as defective and shun them. They see them as just differently beautiful and differently abled and they deserve to live amazing lives!

WHY BULLDOGS?
Because although they are ‘cute’ and expensive, many wind up in the shelters or unwanted because people do not realize how expensive they can be to maintain. Eye issues, skin issues, joint issues – you name it, bulldogs get it. They are the Lovable Lemons of the canine world!

I want to thank Road Dogs Rescue and the compassionate and loving volunteers and fosters who are saving so many lives. They give their heart, their time, their money unselfishly without question. If you would like to help, please donate, volunteer, help spread the word of this amazing organization, or adopt a special needs dog!

1. What drives someone to foster a dog? The ups and downs? The passion behind this kind act?

The more people are educated about how much fostering can save a life, is what we believe drives the passion behind this act. There are a lot of dogs in shelters and unfortunately, many of those dogs get euthanized because they run out of time. In a foster home, they are allowed a loving environment that allows them to develop and learn how to be a part of a family.

Road Dogs & Rescue runs solely on foster homes at the moment. Meaning we don’t have a facility, yet that houses all of our dogs. Our foster community is what allows us to rescue more and more dogs each year. If interested in fostering, please check out our website and fill out an application. This is truly a selfless act that allows for people to save a life.

https://www.roadogsandrescue.org/foster-application/

2. What is a typical day for a volunteer at Road Dogs?

We have a lot of amazing volunteers that do a variety of different things! Whether it is transporting a dog from the vet, to screening applications for adoption or even helping answer questions on social media; our volunteers do it all! We would not be able to have the volumes of success that we do now without our volunteers, and we need volunteers for everything! We also have a volunteer application on our website. If you are in or out of California, we are sure that we could use your skills in some way!

https://www.roadogsandrescue.org/volunteer/

3. What obstacles are there to running an organization such as yours?

There are a lot of hurdles in rescue. We try everyday to do best by the dogs that we rescue but still occasionally receive negativity. There are a lot of people who get easily frustrated when we sometimes have a delay in response time or when we say no to being able to take a dog in. There is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes on that is not made public. We have lots of dogs that need extra special care and some medical dogs that we need to drop everything for.

We also do our best to advocate for things that we think are right. We rescue many dogs a year but there are still backyard breeders and people who sell special needs/neuro dogs on craigslist, just to make a buck! Another hurdle that we are trying to overcome is just the sense that people think dogs are just a means of making money; breeding and over breeding to get these toy breeds or unique colors, and then euthanizing those that can’t survive or have issues. Hopefully through our actions and our rescue, we will be able to stop this one day and dogs will be treated with the dignity they deserve!

4. What would you like the general public to know about your organization?

We rescue all sorts of dogs (not only bulldogs)! There are many dogs that cross our paths and we rescue as many as we have the capacity for.

We also adopt out all over the contingent US and Canada! Many people think that they’re out of hope when they want to adopt and find that we are from California, but for the perfect home we are always happy to work it out and figure out how to give our pups the best life possible.

https://www.roadogsandrescue.org/adopt/

5. What is the most important aspect of adopting a special needs dog?

Patience, love and understanding! Knowing that a special needs dog needs a little extra love and care or understanding that they might have a different mindset to learning and having the patience to provide that to them!

6. Can you tell me something about your organization that your website does not say?

(As I mentioned before, I’m also a volunteer 🙂 I would love to share my video and experience with Road Dogs & Slaughterhouse survivors with you! – linked below. You don’t have to use this or mention in anyway if you don’t want to, but I think something that is not on the website is the love and dedication that many of our rescue members have for these dogs. The passion and drive that people have to help innocent lives is breathtaking. But this could be my personal bias as well 🙂 )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GycbJkELJuM&t=

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