Another great day at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. I spent the morning at DogTown. After the introductory and safety video, I participated in a puppy training class. Then on to "The Club House", which has two buildings of dogs, many from puppy mills. Best Friends began a couple years ago working with community outreach groups to put a stop to puppy mills, where dogs are kept in small cages and have little interaction; their only purpose is to breed. Many have been rescued and brought to the sanctuary, where they are given lots of socialization and training and then made available for adoption. I walked three dogs (one after the other). There is a nice long trail through the desert and the dogs all loved it. They didn't seem to mind that it was something like 97 degrees. I'm sure I walked well over two miles. Some dogs are shy or frightened of new people but others jump up as if to say, "Take me for a walk!" when you go into the dog building.
I drove back to town to pick up Mark and we had lunch at Angel Village again. In the afternoon I volunteered with the rabbits. There are about 140 of them in this nice area. There are another 200 or so in another area; these have to be quarantined as they all have health problems. The quarantined ones were rescued from a hoarder in Reno. There were just two of us volunteering with the bunnies and Burke, the caregiver, put us to work. First I filled their litter boxes with timothy grass-hay. The other volunteer filled up their water buckets. Later we fed them their "greens", a favorite. This afternoon they got romaine. Their favorite part is the core, or the heart as Burke calls it. As soon as we started walking around with the romaine, the bunnies who had been in their outdoor enclosures all ran inside to greet us. Many of the bunnies have nice indoor/outdoor enclosures (20+ enclosures in the newest building). Other bunnies are in open-air enclosures, all well protected from predators that live in the canyon. I didn't know that rabbits mate for life. When one dies, the partner mourns deeply and most of the time rejects any attempt to give him/her a new partner. One of the rabbits here now, who is 12, just lost her partner and is visibly grieving. I also learned that rabbits can get into ferocious fights with each other. Even partners can do this, although not often. So when trying out mates, the caregivers have to watch very carefully. We helped clean and then went to socialize, by sitting with the rabbits and trying to pet them. It was a fun afternoon. Janice, I have included lots of photos for you.
Mark spent the afternoon mucking bird enclosures at Feathered Friends. The longest and dirtiest job was cleaning up after a lot of pigeons. He pulled out all of the old nesting material from their cubbies and replaced it with fresh nests. He had to carefully move aside a few pigeons to accomplish this. Then he had to rake up all of the pigeon poop from the enclosure. Whew, what a job. The first question I asked the caregiver, Haven, when I arrived to meet Mark was why they have pigeons there. They are all ones that can't live in the wild. They have been rescued from people who tried to have them as pets, hoarders, and there are a few messenger pigeons. Mark also cleaned the duck and goose compound and worked on socialization by hand feeding some of them. There are lots of more exotic birds as well at the sanctuary - and Mark cleaned up after them as well. (Bethany and Gerry, there are some you would love). Mark's reward for all of his hard work was to get close up looks at the minks, owls, red tailed hawk, and falcon. There are two minks, and boy, are they fast. Mark got to feed one of them a dead mouse. The mink grabbed the mouse, went to put it in a safe place, and was back begging for more before you could even blink. It's not often one can see an owl close up but we saw two. The barn owl is really amazing to see.
What very special experiences we had volunteering at Best Friends. We would love to return.
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