Ah Suzie… the dog that started it all!

On March 24th a local rescuer in Long Island saw a Shiba in a shelter and contacted Midwest Shiba Inu Rescue through a form on their website, looking for someone to get this sweet girl so she’d be safe. Michelle at MSIR forwarded the message to me, because we had some previous rescue-related contact and she knew I lived in NYC. If the beginning of NYC Shiba Rescue had to be tied back to one specific moment in time, that would be it!

I called the shelter and found out about her… "case 3248" was the name on the picture they sent me (to the left). She was a couple years old, not spayed, healthy, a runner. She’d been brought into the shelter as a stray a few days before. The owners showed up to identify her but then left her there. They didn’t want her any more… they said she wasn’t housebroken because they were never home to do it. They said they didn’t have time for her. They left her in a high kill shelter to most probably die because they couldn’t be bothered.

Luckily for Suzie, the woman that saw her waiting there COULD be bothered and she reached out to Shiba rescue to help Suzie. I faxed the shelter all the necessary paperwork so we could pick her up. (Thanks are due to Rachel Chamberlain for hooking me up with Mitch from The Jindo Project and huge thanks to Mitch for walking me through process of pulling my first shelter dog!) While I was working on lining things up with the shelter, I was frantically emailing my Shiba meetup group… "help! help! foster home needed!" or something along those lines anyway. I got email back from 6 or 8 people within a couple hours offering to help in one way or another. Wow!

On March 29th, Foster mom Gloria headed to Long Island for Suzie. She called me when she got home… Suzie was a sweetie, very high energy and IN HEAT! So, now, we had a healthy, young female in heat that had been running around loose. Oh boy! The next day Gloria headed to the vet for Suzie’s first visit. He recommended spaying her right away instead of taking the chance that a pregancy could take. A pregnancy would just be too risky - what if she WAS pregnant and the dad was a large breed dog? What if she died? Or what if she didn’t and then we had 5 or 6 more puppies to place and hope never ended up in shelters? Other than that and a case of tapeworms, Suzie checked out in good health and Gloria’s frequent updates sounded like she was falling more and more in love with this girl.

Posted on April 12th, 2007 by jenna
Filed under: Suzie