One of them is a pet food pantry where we go out into the community to give dog and cat food to homeless, or financially needy, families so they won't have to surrender their pets.
The other is an advice line where we try to help anyone who needs us in whatever way we can, yet again in order to stop them having to give up their pets.
I'm not going to lie, we can't even keep up with the tidal wave of genuine requests for help, but we always try to answer as many calls or emails as we can, without judgement in the main. Although, gotta be honest, some of the people who contact us are enough to make a nun scream.
I can't even tell you the amount of people who call up and say things like "I got this dog and I hate him. He pees everywhere in the house, so I got him tied up outside and that darn sucker screams the place down all day and night. If you don't come get him today, Imma shoot him."
Oh yeah, I get REAL judgey about calls like that.
For a dog rescuer with a caustic mouth and a wish to get anyone who mistreats a dog imprisoned for life, them's fighting words for sure...
But it was one of yesterday's calls that had me spitting feathers and cursing worse than a truck driver.
"I got your number from Gwinnett Animal Control, I've got this older dog I need to surrender and they can't take him. Can you take him?"
The truth is, because of horrific overcrowding in shelters, leading to most all of owner surrenders being euthanized, I totally understood why they gave the woman my number but I was not prepared at all for where this conversation went...
I explained that we do not take owner surrenders and that we only take in dogs from licensed rescues and shelters, and I asked her to tell me a bit more about the situation so that I could try and point her in the right direction. Even if we can't take them in, we can always try to guide them as to how they might find a new home, safely.
"I'm a pet sitter" she said. "I been lookin' after this dog for weeks and now my landlord is giving me trouble so I need to get rid of the dog".
"Hang on, it's not your own dog? You're the pet sitter?"
"Yeah, the owner ain't coming back for another couple months and I can't be lookin' after this dog no more. My landlord's saying the dog's gotta go, so I'm looking for somewhere to get rid of him today."
I almost swallowed my tongue in shock but kind of rallied enough to say "Look, I am sure you know this, but shelters are out of room, and this dog is going to be likely euthanized within hours of you taking him to any shelter. So you'd be literally sentencing him to death! Please, if you absolutely cannot keep the dog yourself any longer, would you just take the dog to a boarding facility today and have the owner make arrangements to pay for him to be there? Or pass the dog to a member of their family until they get back? You can't give away someone else's dog, they trusted him to you as a pet sitter. It's not legal for one thing, you are not the owner and it's unconscionable on every single level."
And then came the shocker...."Look, the owner is on active duty overseas and I don't get to speak to her very often. She ain't got no family nearby and I don't have time to start trying to find no boarding facility to put him in. But she'd be fine with it, I've known her a long time."
So she's serving in the military, has no close family and places her senior dog with a pet sitter and she'd be okay to let the woman dump him in a shelter where he'll die instead of paying for him to stay in boarding?
Yeah, right.
"That's just not true is it? What kind of a monster would she be to agree to that?" I asked. "I'm sorry, but I just don't buy parts of this story. She hired you as a pet sitter while she went off on active duty and you're saying she'd be okay for you to just dump the dog with a stranger? Or worse, in a shelter and never know what happened to him? No way is that true. F*ck you, I want absolutely no part of this. I'm not going to help you find a way to dump someone else's dog."
I slammed the phone down and she sent me a text telling me I was rude and inconsiderate and that she'd never trust me with a dog.
I can't tell you how mortified I am that this pet sitter, who wants to dump an unsuspecting client's dog at the shelter, or anywhere, doesn't like me. I may actually never get over it.
I traced her using 'reverse phone number look up' so that I could alert animal control about her plans or go on her facebook and let the world know what this pet sitting professional was going to do with a client's dog the minute it wasn't convenient.
I got her name but could not find her on Rover or on Facebook.
I phoned three animal shelters near to her to let them know her name and that she's trying to dump a dog that's not hers. I will phone more today. Her initials are YG, just in case you are worried that she is your own 'trusted pet sitter'.
I hope to God she doesn't get away with it, but because she's trying to, she is my Dick of The Week.