Fri 22nd April: Planning ahead

Look at Chance's happy smile!

The big story of the day is that of Chance, the three-legged dog I wrote about in yesterday's post.  At that time we had a foster home lined up where he could stay whether or not he would be flying to Canada, because at best it would be two weeks before he'd be on a plane.  Of course we hadn't actually met him at that point, and with the first foster offer being withdrawn at the last minute a second temporary home was made available as long as Chance wasn't a big dog.  Nobody knew his actual size, so I was asking as many people as I could think of who would be the first to meet Chance in person to let me know, and was quite sad to hear from Acorn that he was just under twenty kilos, and that's not taking into account the fact that he is missing a leg.  That meant that he was too big for the second potential foster home (it's the resident dog, not the humans, that stipulated the acceptable size), and with nowhere else to go he had to share his space with puppies and poodles.

I knew Chance would be a sweet dog because that would have to be a given for him to have been put up for re-homing by AFCD, but he's more than just that.  He's a wonderful, happy, kind and gentle boy, despite what was obviously not a good first year to his life.  It's not just the fact that somewhere along the line he lost a leg, but he is thin and in very poor condition - and he has heartworm.  That was the biggest blow of all, because although he can and will be treated of course, it would mean delaying a move to Canada if he was lucky enough to be chosen.

Whatever happens we need a foster home, and you can see from the video that was posted on our Hong Kong Dog Rescue Facebook page just how happy Chance is, and how little it matters to him that he only has three legs. (If you go to our Facebook page to watch Chance playing, please also scroll down and have a look at Doris, currently staying at Tai Po.  What a sweetheart!)

Wallis is now at our Ap Lei Chau Homing Centre

We also got a five year-old corgi boy, Wallis, from AFCD at the same time but he will have no problem finding a home.

As everyone knows, our website has been down for some time now and we miss it as much as everyone else does.  It's taking a bit longer than expected to get the new site up and running because there is so much information to include and Moxitek, who are donating a huge amount of time and effort to building our new website, want to make sure that everything is just right before the launch. Multi-tasking volunteer Andrea Chung is also working extremely hard from our end, so I'd like to thank everyone involved and to say how much I appreciate all the hours and expertise that are involved.

We've also started working on this year's Gala Dinner event and can confirm that the date will be Saturday, 1st October at the Aberdeen Marina Club.  For those of you who have attended past gala fundraisers, you'll know that we try to make each event as much fun as we can while bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to reach our target of one million dollars raised.  We have a new volunteer organiser this year, Jamie Nunn, who with a supporting team is bursting with ideas about how to make this year's event as successful, fun and different as possible.  The venue will still be the same, but otherwise expect something totally new ..........