Fri 31st March: Last day at Ap Lei Chau

The last day of the month meant the move from Ap Lei Chau, and it brought back memories of when we first moved there and opened our small Homing Centre at 21 Main Street.  It was an exciting time in an area that I was completely unfamiliar with, one of the last old-style Hong Kong neighbourhoods.  We subsequently moved into a bigger space round the corner, but Main Street stayed on as the Red Dog Centre, until today when that part of our history ended.  You can watch a video of the final moments of HKDR in Ap Lei Chau at hkdr_eagle, and I have to say it made me very sad.  The dogs are now staying at HKDR@Elgin, 22 Elgin Street, Soho, until the day when I hope we will find another perfect home for them all. 

As you must know by now if you read my blog, the previous residents of Elgin Street moved to 13-19 North Street, Kennedy Town, and I encourage the volunteers who were helping out at the Soho space to follow the dogs and puppies to continue with the cleaning, playing and walking.  Your help is both very much needed and appreciated, just as the regular Kennedy Town and Tai Po volunteers are. 

One of the volunteers made these collages of the current ex-Elgin residents, but as things change day to day or even minute by minute, there are already new names and faces to add.  Sadly poodle-ish Nettie was returned from her foster home so she will join her old friends she knew from Elgin Street, and we took in two new smaller-sized puppies today, both five months and really very cute. 

New puppy boy Samuel

New puppy girl Samantha

Asher is still a small size

I sometimes mention dogs and their stories and then don't give any follow-up, usually because the dogs in question just get swallowed up into the general HKDR population and may not stay at the forefront of my mind.  So while it's still a fairly recent event I'll update on the older puppy Asher, who was recently surrendered by his adopter due to his behaviour and apparent severe anxiety. I asked the Kennedy Town team how Asher was doing and how he was getting on with the other puppies, and he's doing really well considering what we were led to expect.  Although we hate to see adoptions fail in this way, if it's not working out then we would rather take the puppy back than to see things get even worse.  For Asher at least, he'll be fine.