What A Pain! The Truth About Dealing With A Potentially Deadly Virus

Having a dog rescue means we’ve been dealing with deadly viruses for over 8 years. Parvovirus has many issues in common with our current virus. This understanding of viruses is why we chose to close our shop to visitors. This is also why we sanitize our rescue shop regularly (at least once a day).

While we can’t tell you what to do in your personal lives, we wanted to share how we handle quarantines.

As much as we love our dogs, you (hopefully) love your human family even more. Protecting the vulnerable in our lives is what is most important. Hopefully sharing this information will offer some insight as to what the authorities are trying to achieve with the quarantine requests and orders.

1. Education – About the parvo virus: it is invisible, just like COVID-19, you can’t see the shedded cells. The virus is spread through shedded cells. For Parvo once a dog has the virus they undergo treatment for at least 10 days, but up to 21 days. During this time they are contagious and are kept in a medical quarantined area. Once the dog is no longer showing symptoms of the virus, they remain in quarantine for an additional 2 weeks. This is because they are shedding the cells for 2 weeks even after they are done with the sickness. Because the now recovered dog is still contagious, they are kept from the general population and any dog at risk is kept in a separate healthy quarantined area until they are no longer vulnerable, or until they have their shots.
   
2. Quarantine – Many times when you come to our shop you will see new puppies in their own pack and play yard, inside of another play yard. That’s because puppies are our most vulnerable dogs. Parvo is in many places and many dogs come into contact with shedded cells. These dogs are not at risk of contracting the virus because they have been immunized for it. However, these dogs can be carriers and if allowed to interact with vulnerable dogs, they could infect them. Likewise, if a human has been to a different shelter, a dog park, a breeder, or any other place where there are other dogs, they could have the virus on them. This is why our puppies can’t be held and aren’t allowed to touch any area that hasn’t been sanitized. This requires a lot of extra effort, and some say that we are over the top, but since instilling these simple measures in 2014, we have lost zero dogs to Parvo.
   
3. Protective Equipment – We have a medical quarantine area at our rescue. This is typically in a separate room. There is a disinfectant solution that we step in before we enter and leave. We use bleach and water. We have gowns we put on before we enter and remove to be washed once we leave the room (at the door). We wear gloves and dispose of them in a covered container before we walk out. If there is any concern that a puppy came into contact with a person, an item or an area we use a virucidal cleaning agent (not on the people).
   

Again, as much as we love our dogs we know you probably (hopefully) love your family more. We hope this extremely simple explanation of how seriously a deadly virus is handled by our rescue can help explain the measures being taken by the authorities.

This post is not meant as a medical reference article. And in an effort to keep it readable and not a tool to deal with insomnia, we left out the nitty gritty details.

The Heart of Rescue

People say it takes a big heart to do rescue. We agree and think it also takes a big heart for some of our rescues to pull through. Giselle is a perfect example of a dog with a big heart and a strong will to live.

I remember the day Giselle was brought to the shelter like it happened yesterday. Two nicely dressed women brought her in and said they had found her in an abandoned lot while our for their lunch walk. At first glance, she seemed like a little old lady, her frail body hunched over, fur missing, eyes dull showing signs of cataracts and she smelled of skin infections. I was on my way out the door with my newest load of dogs and remembered feeling so frustrated because for every 5 we pulled it seemed like 7 more came in.

The next trip out to the shelter was just 4 days later, and the tiny old lady dog was still there – she was still on the legal timeline to be held as a stray. I asked about her and almost fell over when the Director at the shelter told me the dog was roughly 8 weeks old. 8 weeks?! I asked if I could pull her as a foster and get her to the vet that day. Within 20 minutes we were at the local vet getting this little baby dewormed, some bloodwork run and ordering special nutrient-dense food. We named her Giselle because she was long and lanky like a Gazelle and when she was wrapped up in my arms and her body finally relaxed, I could see how beautiful she was. I felt lucky to be able to foster her until her time at the shelter was up.

No big surprise, no one ever came to claim her. 4 days later we were back at the vet with Giselle, and she had lost weight. I also noted to the vet how much she was urinating and how the medicated shampoo wasn’t helping, her skin was sloughing off, and the smell was getting worse. He checked her blood sugar level, a couple of times, it was 1100! Now we knew what her issue was, she was a diabetic little baby. She was so tiny none of the insulin would work for Giselle. We were sent home with a plan to try and get just a little more weight on her, check her blood sugar once a day and come back as soon as she weighed enough for insulin shots.

Thankfully Giselle loved baby food chicken and she put on the weight easily once we cut out the sugar-infused diet we’d been feeding her! Being relatively new to rescue, having a dog with an ongoing medical issue was something that was so frightening and overwhelming, but this little girl needed me so I stepped up. Giselle had to have her blood sugar levels checked hourly to start, and had insulin shots 2 times a day. She was a brittle diabetic which meant that she could crash out with no warning. So Giselle went *everywhere* with me. She went to my son’s Cross Country meets, she went to shelters to pull dogs, she went to the grocery store, she sat on a pillow outside my shower. She loved everyone that she met and always seemed to know that people were trying to help her.

In rescue, it’s common to get a dog that you figure is just going to stay with you for their whole life. I used to joke that we didn’t have a lot of people coming in asking if we had any juvenile diabetic dogs with missing fur, bad eyes and messed up teeth – but then one day an angel named Tony came to our little shop. He met Giselle and it was love at first sight. He didn’t care that she needed shots, or that she’d have to have her blood sugar tested constantly, he didn’t seem to notice that her fur was missing in some spots, he just saw her heart and her will to live and he adopted her.

Giselle was his princess and he took such amazing care of her. He got her skin problems figured out, her tiny little body had many infections both fungal and bacterial and while we had been treating them, they ran deeper than we knew. Giselle’s family spared no expense in getting her the absolute best care. It’s hard to believe but she even balanced out her sugar crashes and was living a pretty normal life as the princess of the house.

Unfortunately, even with the best care, her body had been through a lot of stress, her organs especially. Last week Giselle’s owner had to make the difficult decision to let her go. She was in renal failure and the prognosis was not good. She was surrounded by those that loved her when she passed and for that, we are so thankful.

The heart of rescue is a strong, big, beautiful thing. Tony needed some advice and help with what to do with Giselle’s care in her last days. Tony reached out to the founder, Kelly Smisek at Frosted Faces Foundation. Even though Giselle wasn’t from her rescue, she graciously agreed to help Tony. For those that aren’t familiar, Frosted Faces Foundation helps mainly senior dogs and is familiar with medical issues affecting the aged dog. Their help was so appreciated.

I know Giselle is running around somewhere having the time of her life, finally strong enough to play. And I know the heart of that little rescue dog touched my spirit from the moment I met her. I hope you get to truly experience the heart of a rescue in your life too.

Cruz the Wonder Chi

Meet Cruz, our newest rescue. His pull request came to my inbox as urgent from a trusted networker. We saw his story and decided we needed to pull him since he is the type of dog we have great success with. In his shelter paperwork he is noted as fearful, hard to handle, possibly feral and an escape artist with a need to flee.

We pulled him Wednesday. Thursday he was socialized with our own personal dogs in one of our training rooms. It was uneventful. He didn’t want to interact with the dogs, he was a tiny bit interested in observing them and their interactions with me, but mostly he was searching for a way to escape.

Today was his first walk on a leash. The shelter notes said he was not able to be leashed so we knew even getting a leash on him was going to be progress. As usual, we decided that since getting the leash on was so easy and he didn’t seem too incredibly uncomfortable outside with us, we would add in some pack members.

We started our walk and most of the pack ignored him. He did not fight walking on the leash (probably because we used the look forward, move forward technique). We like to break our walks up into 2 sections. The first is everyone’s time to go potty and socialize, at about the halfway point, we always stop for pets and play and finally finish with a walk with some sort of purpose. This video was taken during half time. We are so proud of Cruz and his accomplishments in such a short amount of time!

A Home For The Holidays

This phrase is common and conjures up visions of a crackling fire, holiday decorations, a piping hot cup of cocoa and family gathered together. In a word, happiness.

For our rescue it has a different meaning. We’ve continuously struggled with the restrictions on the number of dogs we can have on our property. Recently we were able to sell our home and are temporarily on a property that doesn’t have the number limitations.

What we are lacking is a home for the dogs that is their very own. While we are in this transitional time we are in desperate need of large kennel pieces to set up daytime play areas for the dogs to be able to stretch their legs and have a place that smells familiar to them.

We’re raising funds on #GivingTuesday to help kick-start our giving season and to support and grow our “A Home For The Holidays” campaign with the goal to be able to have a home for all of our dogs during this transitional time.

Not only will we benefit from the funds raised on #GivingTuesday, but we will also earn matching funds from our partner, Network for Good, for gifts given online— making your support go even further.

Please consider making your year-end gift on December 1. If you wish to make your gift go further with matching funds, give online at https://www.therescuedpup.com/donate/.