The Bastrop Rescue: An Overview
If you've been following AHS on social media, by email, or watching the local news you undoubtedly heard about the over 150 dogs rescued from a Bastrop County home by AHS and Bastrop County Animal Control over the past two weeks.
As you can imagine, having 150+ unexpected visitors put quite a burden on our shelter, but we were amazed and incredibly grateful by the generosity of our community. We asked for fosters -- we got more than we could use. We asked for crates and towels -- our cup began to floweth over with them very quickly. We asked for food to feed our wary, but upbeat, staff and volunteers -- we had pizzas, salads, cakes and cookies delivered by good samaritans and generous local companies like Austin's Pizza and Mr. Gatties. We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to each and every person that gave items, time, money and love to help these animals.
Getting these dogs ready for adoption was no small task -- there was a great deal of grooming, shots, spay/neuters to be done, in addition to the birthing of several litters of puppies. One dogs, Smokey, was covered in over 10lbs of feces-filled hair mats when he arrived to AHS, several careful grooming sessions later, our staff realized he was in fact a cocker spaniel, not a poodle mix as we had guessed. Seeing these amazing transformations really helped to energize the staff and volunteer force.
When the adoption event finally came on Saturday, the entire staff was eager to see these dogs (as well as the nearly 100 kittens we had at the shelter) find amazing new homes -- and we were so touched by the crowd that showed up to find a new family member. Lines wrapped around both sides of our building as people waited to meet with cats, kittens, dogs and puppies. By the end of the day, AHS had adopted out over 175 animals, setting a new one-day adoption record for our shelter.
We are pleased to hear about how successful these adoptions have been and how lucky these dogs are now -- it is truly a rags to riches story -- 150 fold.