Operation "Clownin' Pooches" at Hope Animal Sanctuary

If you haven’t heard about our intimate involvement with the Hope Animal Sanctuary and Mazatlan Animal Rescue (MAR), we’d like to welcome you to this new discovery. Back story here: Socrates and I started visiting the Sanctuary around April of 2019. We began volunteering one day a week to go and socialize with the pups in various pen areas.

One-day-a-week became multiple visits a week during the hot summer months in 2019 simply to transport animals to vets as we, at that time, did not have a veterinarian on-site. Many pups needed to be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, have their blood analyzed, etc. Around July, and with a tiny budget, we project managed the restoration of an existing building at the sanctuary that could be turned into an active veterinarian clinic. By October 2019, we had a full-time veterinarian on-site!

Needless to say, we were growing rapidly in the number of intakes. One reason we do not publicly disclose the Sanctuary’s location is due to the lack of compassion from many individuals who then start abandoning their animals onto the property. When they do get abandoned, it’s usually at night when no one is available to tend to these poor animals to do a proper intake in order to be tested for contagious diseases that could impact the other sanctuary members.

Another set of issues that arise are that we are retaining more pups than we are able to adopt out. This situation is not uniquely ours, but unfortunately in these recent days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with many people sheltering in place, it would have been a happy circumstance to have many more adoptions or even fosters while everyone is mostly remaining at home. With approximately 200 dogs distributed into multiple areas, we struggled with giving them the proper space and areas to run around.

Hence our Operation “Clownin’ Pooches” Project! It took me awhile to get to this point, but you should know by now that I don’t tend to tell any story quickly. We were able to get two donations that were specifically earmarked to go towards creating a dog park on-site. This Project has a lot of heart as we believe exercise and socialization are not only instrumental, but key to keeping a happy and healthy pup as they each await the opportunity to find their forever homes.

See below the fantastic transformation of the Bark Park, as the space has now been formally named. The dogs now have ample space to run around and get most of their pent up energy out.

If you’d like to make a donation to help us continue providing food and vet services, please make a donation directly to the MAR website.