1. Remember we are a 501C3. So you can still give a donation before midnight and get a tax deduction. Here is a rundown on some of the things that a donation would pay for. $4.00 will deworm 4 puppies, what a difference that can make $8.00 a vaccine, saves puppies every day $20.00 pays for one spay or neuter, the math is incredible on how many puppies or kittens one sterilization can prevent from being born $25.00 buys a bottle of doxycycline with 500 - 100 mg. tabs. This cures ehrlichia which affects almost every dog in Mexico, and it's also good for respiratory infections. When one pup gets one of those and there are 45 other pups in the rescue, it spreads like crazy. $25.00 pays for someone to work for seven hours cleaning up after and feeding our pups $25.00 pays for one soft carrier that one of our pups can ride in to fly to a forever, loving home $50.00 pays for one medium crate $100.00 pays for one large crate Other items that we use every day like: Vitamin B12 Wound gel Metronidazole for Giardia Ear cleaner Creams for skin problems - these are all $20 to $40 a container and we go through them fast. There are many more things of course but I just thought that it would be nice to know where the money goes. Thanks in advance to everyone who helps us help them. Happy New Year. On the left is Franklin, he's new, he was hit by a car but is doing much better now, Jeff has even let him sit on the couch. And on the right is Momma Elsa, who was used for breeding, she is so pleased to be here and even gets to sleep on the bed sometimes.

2. Last weekend I went to an area called the Guatalupana. The government on the island has been absconding with property that belongs to the islanders. So a large group of Islenos squatted on a big piece of property mid island on the Carrabean side. It has been a few years now and they still don't have water, electricity or sewage. Most of the homes are shacks and many of the homeowners have dug wells or bought large water tanks that sit in their front yards. Of course there are dogs everywhere and when we have spay and neuter clinics we go there to pick up animals. And when we get donations we go there with de-wormer, collars, vitamins, food and medicine if needed. I would love sometime to be able to vaccinate all the animals but we will need a bigger budget for that as most of our funds go to the sterilization clinics. The children are wonderful and after many, many visits the people are used to seeing me hang around making a big fuss over their dogs.

3. There has been a wonderful group of people that have supported Isla Animals for years. Cheryl House has created this group and stayed with it to help us save pups and spay and neuter every cat and dog we can get our hands on. This year has been one of the best as far as donations and we are so grateful and pleased with the work it has allowed us to do. Below is the list of donors and the beautiful dog that has sadly passed but instigated such generosity. His name was Dr. Zhivago. Thank you all for your support. 2011 ROSIE'S BOW WOW CLUB The club for 2011 raised a total of $2,950. In memory of Dr. Zhivago Extra Large Bones $300 & Over Cheryl House. In Memory of Rosie Jan & Terry Gerken (Moby) Large Bones. $100 to $299 Lael House Wojcik, Honoring - Rookie Julie House Presa, Honoring - Trucco James & Kristin Yasord. In Memory of Vago John & Jean Epler Chris & Kim Cannon Roxane Osantowski, Honoring - Tequila - adopted from Plaza Almendros(AKA, Oreo, Patches) Kelly Ragsdale Valerie Kordyban David & Karen Childers Ron & Diane Seals Medium Bones $50 to $99 Karl & Deanne House Drew & Alison House Tom & Barb Carlson Small Bones $25 to $49 Mike & Tina Lawrence Julie Howard Dan Lindner Don & Jan Hardin Honoring Goldie, Plaza Almendros Cat

4. Jeff and I just got back to Mexico a few days ago. We're having a spay and neuter clinic next week and then the normal dog stuff from there. I would like to do a sweep of the island, door to door, working on vaccinations and spaying and neutering. I mean really - we've been back two days and we already have a very weak momma with eight pups. Then I got a call about another dog with eight pups and Jeff and I are about to go pick up four. This has to stop. I called my new momma - Momma Rina after the hurricane that wasn't. Here is our new mom warming up her pups after their bath this morning, such a good mom. This must be black dog week, out of the thirteen puppies there is only one white one. We are so looking forward to moving ahead this year. With all the rescue groups and people that we are working with now, we can get more done and we're hoping that we can get some help with this. Already we have some wonderful monthly donators, and it makes a huge difference. So many people ask me what they can do to help, well it's really easy. If we can get enough people donating $10.00 a month we will have a budget to work with. Ten people giving up two starbuck coffees every month can buy enough dog food for a week, or three spays or four neuters, or twelve vaccines, or five distemper tests, or four parvo tests, or two and a half medium crates, or ten bottles of specialty shampoos, or two bottles of de-wormer, or five dog rides to the airport, or five health certificates, and on and on. Every penny goes to the dogs, there is no administration, we pay Marcelino's salary (he works at the house and helps with the dogs). IT'S ALL FOR THE DOGS. We've been home three nights and already have two momma's with their pups. There is no where else for these dogs to go. We will find homes for the pups and spay the moms. Each spayed female is one step closer to a better life for dogs in Mexico. If you already donate, ask a friend to do it too, and ask their friends to do it as well. Ten dollars a month and we can make a huge difference together. I forgot to mention in this blog yesterday that the Isla Animals Website is set up to do monthly donations. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the front page there is a donate button, click on that and then there are instructions on how to continue. Thank you everybody, in advance, who donates. It makes all the difference. We are setting up for a big spay and neuter clinic today and getting ready for all the street puppies that we find.

5. We are doing another big spay and neuter clinic in Corales near Rancho Viejo which is next to Cancun. This is our second clinic in this location. Last time we ended up with over fifty puppies. We can put the dogs back on the street but never the puppies. We often re-home the dogs if we can as well. Anyway it has been the worst year for distemper that I've ever seen. Unfortunately we lost about 20% of those pups to distemper. It only takes one distemper pup to infect an entire group of un-vaccinated puppies. So this April we're going to test every puppy that comes in. The tests are two hundred pesos a piece, about eighteen dollars, we want to have seventy five available for that last week of April. I'm asking if any of you can help by buying one or two tests it would make a huge difference. You can donate on our pay pal and make a note that it's for distemper tests and that's exactly what it will be used for. This is an extra cost that we didn't figure into our budget when we were making the original plans. On a more fun note, Isla Animals has had a small explosion of puppies. First we got a litter of nine. Pepe spotted the mom and her pups next to the bull ring in Cancun and has been waiting for them to be old enough to bring here. Then we got a moma and her seven pups. Everyone is healthy, has already been tested for distemper and is adjusting well. By the way Rusty is doing much better.

6. The race was great. There's lots of room for improvement but for a first effort we are all very happy. To all of the incredible volunteers, Jeff and I are so, so grateful. And to those who helped set things up ahead of time with the city and the schools and the race route, we couldn't possibly have done it without you. We haven't finished with the tally because Jeff is still working at the music festival but as soon as we have numbers I will post them. We had over sixty runners thanks to all of you wonderful people who signed up to sponsor school kids. And for you generous supporters who sponsored teams of five, it added so much excitement. Unfortunately we couldn't fill all the teams but next year people will have a better idea of what's going on. The whole event was fun and involved the entire community. From the island government to the police department to the Navy that allowed us to run on the runway. We had help from the Red Cross, they sent their ambulance to be on standby. We had runners of all ages from many different countries. For the first year we couldn't have asked for more.

7. What could be better than getting a puppy or dog off the street. How can you beat putting meat on a starving animals bones or help out a dog before it's abused and learns to mistrust humans. It's the best feeling in the world. Help me prevent another box of unwanted pups being left on a vacant lot. I can do all that and more if I have the funds. Help us turn this Into this It's a great gift idea for the person who has everything. You can buy them a monthly donation to Isla Animals. I will make sure that every penny that you donate is put to work. It's the most wonderful thing to know that we can count on a certain amount of money coming in each month. It allows me to plan ahead in this work that is other wise, to say the least, financially chaotic. And if you are looking for something different you can donate a certain amount of spays and neuters in someone's name. The surgery averages out to $20.00 an animal and it's the bottom line solution to overpopulation and suffering of animals in Mexico. Donate and then let me know by email bayfirestd@aol.com so I can make sure that a Christmas card is sent to your friend or family member. They will love it.

8. Thank You to the Bow Wow Club For Your generous Donation!

9. Yahoo, we are now a 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit organization

 

 

Donate $100 to Isla Animals today and get Alison's Book "No Urn for Ashes" FREE!

 

KEEPING AN EYE ON THINGS

Before Christmas we went out to the Guatalupana after hearing that there was one family with thirteen puppies. We found the house. One momma had 5 six week old puppies and the other momma had 8 two week old puppies.We took the older puppies and Delfino spayed the mom but we had to leave the younger ones behind. I made a note to myself to return. Then after Christmas someone came to my house with a little puppy that someone had handed them on New Years Eve. The pup came from the same area and was about the right age so I pulled up my picture of the younger pups and there she was.If you check the bundle of puppies the new little one is upper right. So now I’m worried. These pups are too young to be given away. If the family has started to hand them out, I’m going to get them. Which I did. There were five left.We gave them all baths, picked off the ticks and fleas and then of course they got new clothes. ha ha This is what dog rescue people do when they have time on their hands.

STILL TIME FOR A TAX DEDUCTION

Remember we are a 501C3. So you can still give a donation before midnight and get a tax deduction. Here is a rundown on some of the things that a donation would pay for.
$4.00 will deworm 4 puppies, what a difference that can make
$8.00 a vaccine, saves puppies every day
$20.00 pays for one spay or neuter, the math is incredible on how many puppies or kittens one sterilization can prevent from being born
$25.00 buys a bottle of doxycycline with 500 – 100 mg. tabs. This cures ehrlichia which affects almost every dog in Mexico, and it’s also good for respiratory infections. When one pup gets one of those and there are 45 other pups in the rescue, it spreads like crazy.
$25.00 pays for someone to work for seven hours cleaning up after and feeding our pups
$25.00 pays for one soft carrier that one of our pups can ride in to fly to a forever, loving home
$50.00 pays for one medium crate
$100.00 pays for one large crate

Other items that we use every day like:
Vitamin B12
Wound gel
Metronidazole for Giardia
Ear cleaner
Creams for skin problems – these are all $20 to $40 a container and we go through them fast. There are many more things of course but I just thought that it would be nice to know where the money goes. Thanks in advance to everyone who helps us help them. Happy New Year.
On the left is Franklin, he’s new, he was hit by a car but is doing much better now, Jeff has even let him sit on the couch. And on the right is Momma Elsa, who was used for breeding, she is so pleased to be here and even gets to sleep on the bed sometimes.

STILL STOMPIMG TOWELS

There are only a few pieces of equipment more important than a washing machine, if you run a dog rescue. We use a ton of towels everyday. Two or three days without doing the laundry, our machine is broken, and we have a stack half the size of a Volkswagen. Plus they don’t have “do it yourself” laundry mats here, you take you dirty laundry in, they weigh it, charge by the kilo, and you pick it up four hours later. But that doesn’t apply to us because they would never, never accept our smelly towels. Not a chance. So I spend the last part of everyday stomping towels.

And then we got a mom and four more pups in, which means more dirty towels. It has been incredible this fall. We can’t seem to get ahead of things. I was feeling so great about the four pups that we sent out last week and then we got four more in and the momma. But are these puppies ever cute. Jeff says I always say that. Ha ha

“REALLY”

Yesterday was one of those days that every animal rescue hates. Sorry to be mean but “stupid people with dogs” break my heart . I had three visit yesterday and each one got more ridiculous. First a very nice woman came to the house to ask me to rescue a eight month old lab that was in a bad situation. Her boss was taking care of it and his landlord said he couldn’t have dogs. This is a pretty average situation except for the fact that the boss sent his employee so that he wouldn’t have to give a donation to the rescue that was going to solve his problem. Okay that one isn’t so monumental.

Next, a woman comes to my house on a brand new motto and asked me if I will take her two pugs. She has had these two pugs, one 3 years old and one seven years old for three years. But now she is going to have a baby so she doesn’t want them anymore. I say, “you can have dogs and a baby at the same time,” and after much back and forth she confesses that they are not house trained. So rather than trying to find out how to house train them it’s much more convenient to dump the poor little things on me in a shelter with 50 other dogs.

Okay this last one takes the cake. A family shows up and rings the bell after I’ve gone to bed, which I admit is earlier than most. Jeff tells them I’ve gone to bed and to come back tomorrow. They ring the bell again. So I go down, worried that it might be an emergency. They have two, three month old puppies stuffed in a very small crate and they say that their landlord (oh those landlords) said they could only have one dog and their one dog had puppies and they can’t keep them. So I look at the mother, she’s filthy and really fat so I ask, “is she pregnant?” Yes they answer. I’m flabbergasted. So as much as I want to get those poor puppies out of that tiny box. I ask them what they are going to do with the new puppies, no answer.
So I look in the box, the puppies in there look like brown street dogs. My guess, they want poodle pups to sell and these two didn’t look like poodles so they were left over.

So I tell them that they can drop the puppies off at the island clinic when they take the mother into be spayed. I will pick them up there. They say, you can’t spay her, she’s pregnant. I say, what are you going to do with more puppies if you can’t keep the two you already have. We go back and forth for quite some time before they leave to go to the clinic to drop off the mother. We shall see, I go back to bed and lie there for hours, so frustrated that I can’t sleep.
I’m just going to add some cute pictures to break up this long frustrating story. As far as the momma dog, when I moved here I would have been opposed to spaying a pregnant dog but after seeing thousands of puppies abused and starving in the streets it hardly bothers me at all.

YAHOO FOR SPAY AND NEUTER

What a magnificent week we’ve had. Bonfil, Cancun, near the airport where the street dog population is heartbreaking. Candi, Isla Animals and Planned Pethood did a 5 day clinic. We spayed and neutered 1,574 cats and dogs. I still can’t believe it. What a team. Everyone from Canada, the USA, different parts of Mexico, and Cuba came together to make this happen. The impact on this area will be incredible.

As usual, we don’t put puppies back in the street so Isla Animals brought home 29 pups. We only took the ones that needed help or were too young to adopt out. The rest were adopted out the last day of the clinic with the help of local animal rescue groups who helped with the clinic.

Do you know how long it takes to vaccinate and deworm that many puppies.

Happy New Year

So, my years always start in September, first it was because of the kids in school but now it’s the month that we head to Mexico again. Jeff and I always drive back and forth in our RV because we just have too many supplies and too many dogs to fly.
The reason I even mention this is because so many people tell me that they want to do what we do, meaning live somewhere warm and rescue animals. So I thought, and I hope I can stick with it, that I would blog about life in Mexico doing animal rescue.
To start, I’m sitting in our new (used) RV, driving south. Our old RV was seven years old and Jeff said, “ too many things are breaking down for me to feel confident driving all the way through Mexico.” The last thing that anyone wants to do is break down in the middle of nowhere on a Mexican Highway.
We are packed to the hilt. All year people send supplies to our condo in Colorado and every year we take it down with us to save money on supplies. It really is wonderful – how much people send us.

The picture to the left shows only part of the supplies, the back bedroom is also full and the crates are in the garage. Packing the RV is a two day ordeal. The first day we pack the supplies and the second day we pack us.
Meanwhile in Mexico, the picture below is of the first puppy coming to us, it was found on the streets in very sad shape and of course there are dogs at the house already, nine of them, so here we go again.

TESTS SAVE PUPPIES

This year (my years always start in September) we are having two clinics in Bonfil. It is a poor area in Cancun near the Airport. The street population of cats and dogs is over the top. Last year we did a clinic there in January and Isla Animals took home 65 puppies. We do not put puppies back on the streets. Older dogs with survival skills who would be hard to turn into house pets are spayed/neutered and put back exactly where we found them. Often times they have territories and people who occasionally feed them.

But the puppies are a whole different thing, so they come to us. This November 5-10 we are joining with Planned Pethood, Candi International, Cancun Animal Rescue, Coco’s Cat Rescue, Luum Balicheo, Jaguar Cats, Animalistas and Rescate Malix for our next large scale spay and neuter clinic. We are hoping to do over 1000 animals.

Our next large scale clinic after that will be in January with Vidas and we are hoping for the same number of surgeries. If we keep hitting this area we WILL make a huge difference. We also do special surgeries or arrange to have them done if the need comes to our attention. Like Pablo who had a broken hip.

DOGS WITH NEW HOMES

This has been a busy summer for Isla Animals thanks to Rebecca who has been staying at the house and working really hard to take care of all the abandoned puppies, dogs and even kittens that have come in. She’s done a fantastic job and we are so grateful. Below are the pictures of the animals that she’s sent to new homes. The pictures show, Cowboy, Hadley, Ebbie, Hobo, Tontin, and two of our beautiful Calahoula pups.More are leaving next week so I will post those then.

PUPPIES IN THE SHOWER

Jeff and I just arrived in Colorado. We had a great trip and brought two extra pups along with us. They were so young that I just couldn’t leave them behind. I named them Ringo and Starr.They were so good, they slept the whole way but every once in a while they would pop up to check that every thing was okay. Even when we had to get the RV fixed they stayed in the hotel bathtub. Now they’re in Denver with my friend Alex who will take care of them and then find them wonderful new homes.

A LUCKY DAY FOR MOMMA

I actually called Doug and Eileen about two puppies called Ringo and Star. I was going to ask them to foster the pups. They were excited about it and came over to meet their new project but then we got distracted. Thank goodness their gulf cart broke down because the man that fixes it had a momma and four pups at his house. When I heard that I asked if I could go and see them and then I put de-wormer in my purse, it’s such a boost for a nursing mom. When we saw the mom and the pups it was clear that something had to change. The owner said that two of the pups had already died. So we asked them if we could take them all to my house to get them cleaned up. As usual they looked at us like we were crazy but agreed. Wow, the mom had so many ticks that we had to pick her for hours before we could give her a bath. She had a nail that was so long that it had curled around and jabbed back into her toe which was, of course, infected. Her eyes were infected, her skin had patches of infection and she was so listless that she let us do what ever we wanted to her.She’s a small white dog and has four two week old pups left that are a beautiful brown. The pups were covered with ticks and fleas too but we couldn’t use the tick and flea killing shampoo on them so we just picked at them as they wiggled madly, trying to get back to mom. Their eyes are just open but they aren’t walking yet. Talk about a project. We spent the rest of the day cleaning her up, treating her wounds, cutting off all of her knots and rubbing ointment into the sore spots.Then we called the owners to ask if we could keep her for a few weeks and take care of her pups. They agreed so Eileen and Doug left with a completely different project than they expected.