BGuthrie Photos: UT -- Kanab -- Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

UT -- Kanab -- Best Friends Animal Sanctuary:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. BF_120718_003_STITCH.JPG: User comment: You're so interesting! I don't think I have read anything like this before. So wonderful to discover somebody with some unique thoughts on this subject matter. Seriously.. thank you for starting this up. This website is one thing that is needed on the internet, someone with a bit of originality!
2. BF_120718_170.JPG: Cats are like potato chips... You can't have just one!
3. BF_120718_310.JPG: Kittens are angels with whiskers
4. BF_120718_329.JPG: In memory of the Reno Rabbits whose brave spirits inspired our actions and enriched our lives. 2006 From http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/2006-08-08-rabbits_x.htm?csp=1 Rabbit rescue ends some bad hare days Posted 8/8/2006 9:10 PM ET By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY WASHOE COUNTY, Nev. -- There are bunnies in the bedrooms and hares in the hallway. Bucks burrowing and does dozing. Cages and cages of cottontails nibbling their rabbit chow in clean, controlled contentment. And that's just inside this house rented by the Best Friends Animal Society. Outside, more than 100 newly built rabbit runs house close to 1,700 bounding bunnies rescued from a Reno woman whose obsession with her pets led to hoarding and eventually to a call for help. That plea led to what the society is calling The Great Bunny Rescue of 2006, an ambitious, nationwide campaign to find good homes for these rabbits. The society operates the nation's largest animal sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. It has a track record of tackling complex animal rescue operations, including a major effort after Hurricane Katrina. The rescuers needed every bit of their expertise when they arrived at Jackie Decker's house in January. Though overall the rabbits were in surprisingly good health, their situation was appalling, says Richard Crook, Best Friends' rapid-response manager. "The stench. The feces. The dead bunnies. It was just terrible. You just can't imagine thinking that any part of that was OK," he says. Decker, who already had had a run-in with Reno animal control officers in 2002 when she had 500 rabbits, was unable to acknowledge the problem, Crook says. "To talk to her, all the bunnies were being taken care of. The bunnies were fine." Repeated calls to Decker's home were not returned. Decker had first contacted Best Friends in September 2005, says its Bunny House manager, Debby Widolf. "At the time, I did not understand how many rabbits she had," so she gave Decker the names of nearby rescue groups to contact. "We had no room for additional rabbits," Widolf says. Five months later, in January, Best Friends got a call from another Nevada animal group telling the organization that Decker's situation had gotten out of hand. Widolf contacted Decker on Jan. 25, "and she told me she had 800 to 1,000 rabbits in her backyard." A week later, Widolf flew to Reno and spent two days at Decker's house. She immediately called for reinforcements from the society's Utah headquarters. "We set up a makeshift clinic in February on Jackie's property to begin treating ill rabbits." But it quickly became clear that more than just treatment was called for. The rabbits needed new homes. Best Friends drew up a contract to take legal possession of the rabbits -- and realized there were a lot more than the 800 they were expecting. "There were actually 1,600 to 1,700 of them," Crook says. The rapid response That same month, a Best Friends rapid-response team arrived in town, rented a ranch with a two-bedroom house just outside of town and set to work. In May, the team began transferring the rabbits from Decker's home to the ranch by the vanload. It's an operation run with almost military precision. And no wonder. Crook is a 22-year veteran firefighter. Adoption coordinator Paulina Russell is a former Marine and longtime Forest Service ranger. Wrangling rabbits is no visit with the Easter bunny. People would go into the yard using small-gauge fencing to herd a group together and just start grabbing. Rabbits' hind legs can be vicious. "There's a lot of people who have scarred-up arms from it," Crook says. And all the while, the bunnies did what bunnies do. While illness was taking some of them, babies were arriving each day. Sometimes a van would leave Decker's house with 150 rabbits and arrive half an hour later at the ranch with a dozen more, Crook says. A group of volunteer veterinarians and vet techs set out to block all that breeding as well as put a microchip under the skin at the back of the neck of every rabbit so they can be easily tracked. Volunteers built two rooms onto the back of the ranch house for surgery and a third for post-operative recovery. "It was like a MASH unit," says Michelle Williams, the project's veterinarian. "We had volunteer vets spaying and neutering 30 rabbits a day here, but 50 a day were being born." During the height of the transfer and fixing operation, there were upward of 25 volunteers working in Reno, with an additional 15 at the society's headquarters in Utah working on logistics and adoptions. It wasn't until the end of May that they finally turned the rising tide of bunnies. As summer set in, volunteers built pens and rabbit runs and hooked up a misting system to keep the cottontails cool in the 90-degree heat. The focus turned to socializing the bunnies and finding them homes. Volunteers spend hours each day visiting the animals, cleaning their cages and getting them used to being around people. Karen Swope, a retired music teacher, comes out every Thursday with big garbage bags of lettuce-ends that she gets from a restaurant near her home and feeds the bunnies. Russell arrived as a volunteer and was hired to coordinate adoptions. Though many large animal sanctuaries are signing on to take bunnies by the bunch, individual homes also are needed. "We've pretty much saturated the Reno area," she says, so volunteers are looking farther afield. In June they launched the Rabbit Ranger program, which asks "responsible and reliable" organizations or people around the country to take 10 or more rabbits, either permanently or temporarily, while adoptive homes are found. The efforts have been successful. As of Monday, all but 250 of the bunnies were spoken for. Russell is experimenting with caging and shipping methods in Reno while Crook travels the country doing on-site assessments to make sure the people getting the rabbits are up to the task. Some will travel in air-conditioned trucks fitted with padded shelves to hold cages. A Best Friends board member who is a private pilot will fly others. "She can take up to seven crates with two rabbits each, but if it's a short hop we can put three in a cage," Russell says. Crook is the first to acknowledge that all this is taking "an amazing amount of money." He won't give an exact figure, but when the figure $1 million is spoken, he smiles and nods. "It's an amazing amount of money," he says. A no-kill policy All part of Best Friends' mission: "A better world through kindness to animals." The Society has a strict no-kill policy and does not euthanize the animals in its care. So putting more than 100 people to work over the course of nine months and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on 1,700 rabbits makes perfect sense, Russell says. "You see how important it is to take care of all creatures." Had Best Friends not become involved, Washoe County Regional Animal Services would have had to do something, and the system doesn't have the money or resources to care for and place that many rabbits, says manager Cindy Sabatoni. And the county also was reluctant to get involved because the last time it tried, in 2002, it lost a court battle to take possession of Decker's rabbits. "The judge thought it was funny. He actually wrote 'hare-raising experience' " in his judgment, Sabatoni says. Crook's goal is to have all the bunnies spoken for by mid-August and then have them off the ranch and settled into their new homes by September. Then the volunteers will go home and the Best Friends staffers will return to Kanab, Utah, home to the sanctuary's 1,500 or so cats, dogs, horses, goats and other assorted animals. And hope they won't have to do it all over again in a few years. "Hoarders typically have a recidivism rate of 100%," says Kim Intino, a hoarding expert at the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C. Volunteers spent a month at Decker's house cleaning up the yard. They built her a new shed and left her with 15 spayed and neutered rabbits. "What we're hoping is that that will be enough," Crook says.
5. BF_120718_374.JPG: So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us. As we remember them. For all those who were taken during Hurricane Katrina
6. BF_120718_389.JPG: Cats leave pawprints on our hearts
7. BF_120718_397.JPG: MOLLY the pot-belly pig was our first pig. Her people lived in a town where the "wise" Council passed a "NO PIG" ordinance. Controvers made MOLLY a TV personality, but left her (still but a piglet) homeless and headed for Best Friends. With such fame behind her she didn't put up with too much 'stuff from just anybody, but did allow first Magdalen and then Frank, as caregivers to ensure her health and comfort. MOLLY wasn't just 'any old pig and wants us to remember that.
Description of Subject Matter: Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is the nation's largest sanctuary for abused and abandoned companion and domestic animals. According to their Web site at http://www.bestfriends.org, "The sanctuary is home on any given day to roughly 1,500 animals. About 1,200 of these are dogs and cats; the rest include horses, burros, wild birds, rabbits, goats, farm animals, and an assortment of other creatures." It's a no-kill shelter which means that the animals they can adopt, they do. The rest (which includes the crippled) end up staying with the shelter until they die naturally. They offer tours of the facility (which owns 23,000 acres in the red canyon area near Bryce and Zion) in exchange for a contribution to the group and I managed to time my arrival just in time to go on it. My cat was still in Silver Spring and I was having cat-withdrawal so it was great to pet and snuggle with a few of theirs. Of course I'm allergic to cats so I sneezed and itched the rest of the day.
Dogs are pack animals so they need special shelters and they have to take the alpha males into account when they plan things. Cats are a heck of a lot easier to house.
Dogs also use a four-color collar system to identify them. The four colors:
- Red = staff only (typically they bite)
- Green = volunteer friendly
- Purple = no children
- Yellow = no walks for medical reasons
The also have a pet cemetery called Angels Rest, which includes a lot of wind chimes and different types of markers.
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