I wonder if there would be any interest in starting a thread for Pet Rescue in different areas?

Perhaps we could start one for Pet Rescue - Canada, Pet Rescue USA, etc etc.. then members could share information for Pet Rescue's in their area that other members could check into if they wanted to volunteer, donate, adopt an animal or perhaps know of an animal that needs a new home.

If there is enough interest those areas could later be broken up into Eastern Canada, Western Canada.. etc..

I recently 'found' a Pet Rescue sponsored in part by one of the pet stores in Ottawa, and have just recently received the forms to foster for them. Because we have dogs already I didn't ask for dogs or cats, but I did sign up to foster birds, reptiles (we have geckos), and though the ship has sailed for me on the whole hamster, rat thing I would probably take on a few of those in a pinch as a temporary measure. I hate to hear about pets going homeless or being euthanized because they didn't get adopted in time.

When we were looking to add another Puppy to our family, after our puppy died unexpectedly of a seizure. We started checking out online and the shelters first, and it seemed that most of the ads I found at the time were older dogs -- by older I mean geriatric, and almost all of them had some kind of special need whether they were blind in one or both eyes (common in Shih Tsu), and it was so hard not to bawl my eyes out looking over some of these ads. Some were breeder's dogs that wanted new stock so they were dumping these pets after having them a few years. I was so upset -- I mean, would you throw away your 4 year old because you were having a new baby? Just makes me crazy..

We finally found a woman not far from here that had purebred puppies and we went out to meet her. Turns out that she's the same breeder my inlaws got their dog from years ago -- their dog is the mother of our first puppy so although they look nothing alike our two dogs are distant cousins..

In any case, I've been working my way around the boards excercising my chatterbox muscle and thought I'd pop in here..

Do any of you participate in any way with a local Pet Rescue? I've started watching our local freecycle for equipment that we can pick up and pass along to some of the local groups. Volunteering isn't about money it's about time, and if you can extend the effort to acquire something useful for an organization that's helping in your community it's a win win situation, isn't it?

Just be careful to check out the rescue before you start making big donations of time, effort and money. There are some out there posting as a rescue that are really only adding to their family of pets and looking for free stuff.. Not that looking for equipment is a bad thing, but misrepresenting yourself as an official pet rescue in order to fleece the community out of equipment is just wrong on so many levels. Reading that back that doesn't sound very good, but hopefully I was clear enough..

I'm a very WYSIWYG kind of person, and I would rather have someone ask for something saying they wanted it for themselves than to misrepresent themselves and say they are running a pet rescue, only to find out later they're stockpiling equipment and sometimes even selling the gifts they've received. Unfortunately there's a lot of that out there, not everyone is as honest as we might like them to be..

So what do you say guys? Would you be interested in sharing the pet rescues in your area??