Fri 9th Aug: Remembering

Bertie can't wait to get home

It's taken a good few years of waiting but finally another one of my ex-Lamma puppies who ended up moving to Tai Po was adopted.  This time it was Bertie, and of course I'm very happy to know that his time as a Homing Centre dog is over.  I - we all - never give up hope that the right person will come along and offer a home to one of the long-termers, and that a soft bed and some air-conditioned comfort will be their final memories.

Talking of memory, I met one of our ex-HKDR dogs from a long time ago at Acorn today and his parents were very surprised when I recognised Zeus from our Pokfulam days.  To be fair, we didn't have six hundred dogs back then and I was at the kennels every day so got to know all of the residents very well, but when it comes to remembering the dogs that have been with us I'm pretty good.

An SMCP story from 1989 showing a dog called Scruffy

In fact my memory of individual dogs that I've known over the years goes back much further than 2003 when HKDR was founded.   By chance I found this old SCMP story when I was looking for a photo, and I shared it on my personal Facebook page just for fun.   It turned out that a lot of friends were interested, as many didn't know that I'd been involved in dog rescue since first moving to Lamma in 1986 when I started feeding the abandoned dogs on a nearby island, and subsequently began taking puppies off and re-homing them.  I had already adopted five adults from the island myself, so with a full house I had to find others to take them in, or at least have the dogs desexed.

It was because there were three wild female puppies on the island I couldn't catch myself that I asked AFCD for help, and they came over (several times), eventually trapping the dogs and taking them back to the Pokfulam kennels.   I then had to go and "adopt" the three so I could take them for desexing and release them back onto the island (illegally), where they stayed until they died naturally.  That was my introduction to AFCD and the kennels full of dogs that were all due to be destroyed, and what prompted me to want to save as many as I could.  Of course I remember all of those island dogs and the names I gave them.

Little Dora at Whiskers N Paws last Sunday

Back to today's news, little Dora was adopted from her foster home so for the many would-be adopters who asked about her there are others still waiting.