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I really hope I won’t be writing, Diary of a Rescue Week Fifty-Two, some day. Daisy is still here, but she is ready to go

I am home again after a week of visiting and volunteering in seven animal shelters in our rural south with an amazing team of volunteers. When I try to describe the experience, I have to grapple for words

I don’t know if it’s that they have such expressive faces or if they know their odds, but as we pass row after row of them, their sadness seeps right through the kennel fence into my soul. I know they don’t want to euthanize these animals, but I also know that their job is impossibly hard. At Greenwood shelter the next morning, there were lots of beautiful dogs and much fewer pitbulls than we saw at the three shelters we’d already visited, despite the fact that Greenwood was the largest shelter we’d visited. I asked Bryson what would happen to the remaining ‘city’ dogs when the county dogs moved to their new shelter, and she shrugged, “They haven’t said yet.

We meet Laura, the assistant shelter director who does much of the dog assessments has a huge heart and an easy laugh. Matt, our engineer, works on a project of Debbie’s – building a roof for the small concrete puppy play area recently added to the shelter so the puppies can get outside even when it’s raining or the sun is blazing. With the help of Laura and Debbie, we wrangle dog after dog and walk endless laps of the short service road beside the shelter that takes you past enormous powerlines to the water tower, before bringing each back for its photo shoot. They no longer euthanize adoptable dogs at Tappanhannock-Essex County Animal Shelter, but Ellen’s words followed me to Lenoir, “For every five we send out, we take in six more.