It all started with one wee puppy, Iggy. Madi loves all things dog, and it wasn’t a tween phase that she outgrew like horses. So when the opportunity came around for her to be a foster parent for dogs and puppies, a stop between living on the street and living with a family, she wanted to jump at the chance.
To me it seemed like a good opportunity to combine a few things, learn some responsibility, do some volunteer work, do something she loves. The group she works for is called Ayuda, and the woman who runs it here in town doesn’t seem human, her heart is so big. She works tirelessly to get the street dogs fixed, to feed the hungry ones, to educate the local people on how to treat animals more humanely.
Often they will need to take street puppies because they start wandering into the streets, or they will take them in order to fix them, so they don’t become future puppy factories in the streets. The stray dog population is a huge problem here, so many dogs are starving, mistreated, poisoned. It’s heart-breaking if you have a soft-heart toward animals.
Madi started being a foster mom for the puppies, she was over the moon. What started with one puppy, next time was two, the next four. First there was Iggy, then the hippo sisters (which Cali named Cinderella and Jasmine), and a few others I’ve already forgotten.
Another part of the program is feeding dogs who are starving on the street. There are different volunteers who cover different areas. I took on the bridge girls, as they are called, four ferile dogs who live by the bridge who keep having liter after liter of pups because no one can catch them in order to fix them. Monumental efforts have been made by groups of people, but the girls are more clever than all of us.
Everyday I’ve been feeding the girls, only to discover two of them have recently had litters, with a total of 12 pups. Usually the pups are under the pila, a concrete washing stand, and they don’t make a sound. One day when I visited, the pups are everywhere crying for the mamas. Someone put a box with towels next to where the pups sleep, and had already taken three of the males. The moms were freaked out and wouldn’t feed the babies and the wee ones were wandering into the street in search of the elusive teet.
Luckily the hippo sisters has just been adopted a few days before, so we had an empty pen. I started bringing armfuls of puppies back to the house. After three trips, I had nine. Madi was so excited when she got home because to her the more the merrier the chaos. We went and bought bottles to feed the little ones. When we got the bottles home, we found someone had stolen the nipples out of two of them, but we had a couple that were complete. The wee pups didn’t like the bottles much and it worked better for them to drink the formula from a bowl. Easy for us.
We had the pups for a few days, and could see they were infested with fleas. We decided to bathe them. As the fleas release, they would cause the pups to bleed. There were at least 30 fleas on the face of each pup, you had to rub your fingernail along the skin to detach them. It was totally disgusting, how their skin was bumpy with fleas, not smooth. While we were giving the pups their baths, they were howling their little freaking heads off, I could hear them from the bridge, which is where the moms live. It’s like it was echoing in the valley.
Then while we are bathing puppy number three, one of the moms shows up, climbed over the three foot stone wall and squeezed through the barbed wire to get in the yard. She got stuck at first and I didn’t know what to do. The closer I got to her to try to help her, the more she would flail and be hurt. Even though I’ve been feeding these dogs for weeks and they are excited to see me, I’ve never pet them. Eventually the mom squeezed through successfully and nursed the pups. The next day the other mom was also in the yard. We’ve become a home for wayward puppy moms. They come in here and there to feed the babies, then go back out onto the street, like a teen drop-in center.
Now we have our own dog, nine puppies, two street mama dogs who come and go as they like. Yesterday I caught them sitting on the outside lounger thing Paul made, they were looking like street queens. If you move too quickly they scatter.
Madi and her friends have been enjoying the pups. She and her two friends will sit in the hammock with all nine of them and call it “puppy therapy”. Every evening we hold one while we work on the computer, watch tv, eat. They became socialized easily, loved being held, sitting on your shoulder, sleeping in your lap. It’s quite lovely really, holding a puppy.
The good news is that we got our own male doggie fixed, because he was humping anything with fur, and that was getting a little too annoying to watch.
So we will see how this all unfolds. We need to find homes eventually for all these pups. When the pups are gone, will Maya and Charro still stop by to eat, hang out, and be queens of the castle? Tune in.