On March 19, 2011, Eleven of our DFW Rackers volunteered to work at Operation Kindness, North Texas’ largest and oldest No-Kill animal shelter.
Operation Kindness is a non-profit shelter and they depend on private donations to keep their shelter running. They do not get assistance from any federal or city agencies so they rely on individuals and corporations to keep the doors open. Operation Kindness also relies heavily on volunteers to exercise the dogs, clean up the grounds, bathe the dogs, play with the cats, wash blankets and towels, keep the enclosures clean and disinfected, as well as helping to adopt out the animals.
The great thing about Operation Kindness is that no animals are ever put down due to not being adopted, but the down-side to that is once they run out of room, they have to turn away other stray pets. They turn away on average 100 animals a day. They focus on the education of spay and neuter and any animal that comes to the shelter will be spayed or neutered, receive all needed shots and vaccines, and will also be micro-chipped.
This facility has been in business for over 34 years and has successfully adopted out over 73,000 animals over the years! They average about 3,000 adoptions per year!
While we were volunteering with many other local volunteers, part of our duties were to shovel wood chips and mulch from a huge pile behind the shelter grounds. The shelter was limited on yard tools and the wheelbarrows they had were wobbly at best, but everyone pitched in and teamed up to make the best of the grueling work and we were able to re-mulch all of the dog’s enclosures! There was a lot of raking and hauling and picking up poo going on!
Once we finished the mulching, we then got to bathe puppies and big dogs! There was a single litter of puppies that had a total of 15 pups in the litter! They looked to be a Boxer mix and the shelter called them “Black-faced Cur Dogs”. We all fell in love with Daisy, the quietest pup from the whole litter.
Some of our group got to go into the kitty area and play with the cats! They brushed them and helped to tire them out by enticing them to chase toys and take lots of cuddles. There were a lot of kitties!
Although volunteering our time was a huge part, I wanted to make sure and mention the cash and supply donations that we collected at DFW. We were able to collect a total of $1,547 which included a $500 contribution we won from the Community Affairs Team by totally smoking a goal we had set for ourselves. Keep in mind that there are less than 90 people at DFW and only about half of the Rackers contributed… this is huge, lots of big hearts here in DFW! We also set up a collection box and took donations from the shelter’s “Wish List” including kitten formula, bowls, toys, blankets, towels, etc. It was wonderful! To this very day we still donate all of our long shredded paper to the shelter on an almost daily basis. Our Security Officer Jim, takes the shreds to them at least 3 times a week. They use the shreds for bedding and in the puppy rooms.
While we were at the shelter, we met several dogs. Two that really stood out to me were “Lady Gaga” the sweetest pit bull you could ever meet. And another guy was “Diaz” the Handsome Boxer. He was full of energy and very wiggly!
The event was a big hit and our volunteers felt good to be a part of something so great as helping our four-legged friends. We will certainly include Operation Kindness in our list of events in the future!
Blog post contributed by Lisa Beard in DFW
