Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Here's hoping BB finds her forever home soon.
In July 2005, we started working with BADRAP on a project called Pit Bull Hall. BADRAP would be selecting pit bulls that were at risk in local city and county shelters, fostering them, training them and then putting them up for adoption in our shelter. Its a joint effort that has proven very successful with approximately two adoptions a month. Because we are saving five kennels for these BADRAP dogs, we stopped taking in pit bulls for our other kennels.
Until last week...
I was at a local shelter and saw one that caught my eye. I've been working with BADRAP for months on assessing pit bulls and this one seemed just perfect. Wiggly, flirty, sweet. Just perfect. So after we had selected 5 non pit bull dogs to take, I said to the Canine Associate who was with me, "Let's test the pit!" She was shocked, but was also game. We took her outside to the yard and went through the paces. Everything was going well, but as this was my first "pull" without BADRAP, I was hesitant. So I called one of the directors at BADRAP and asked if he had tested her. Sure enough, he had and she tested well. Their only concern was with other dogs. Pit Bulls can be dog aggressive and they weren't sure if she was or not. So we brought another dog out and let them meet and hang out. She was just lovely. So, I crossed my fingers, held by breath and said, "Yeah, we'll take her."
She was already spayed (she came in as a stray pregnant dog to the shelter and when the owner finally came in to look for her, she had already been spayed and therefore he didn't want her), so we gave her a bathe and let her settle in. Staff named her Big Beulah (since she is big and blue) and I call her BB.
Because BADRAP has all their Pit Bull Hall dogs in a foster home for a few weeks, I wanted to do this for BB too. So we put out a request to our volunteers and two people stepped up to the plate. MM took her home a week later (after she went through some more temperament testing and training) and now reports back to us daily. The emails we receive are great. Lots of good information so we can learn more about this pittie.
I went to visit her yesterday, just to see first hand how it was going. BADRAP came with me and we were so pleased to see how well BB was doing. She will stay with her for one more week and if all goes well, she will come back and go up for adoption. We are going to try to do the whole BADRAP adoption process with application, homecheck and foster to adopt period. We'll see how it goes. So far, we are quite pleased with this little experiment of ours. Here's hoping BB finds her forever home soon.
