Sochi Expedition 2017: The Rescue
Tanya Umansky, one of Sochi Dogs’ co-founders travelled to the shelter this spring. Over the next few weeks, she’ll be sharing her experience on the blog.
The Rescue
As I’m writing this, Sochi Dogs has adopted 218 dogs. Some of them stayed at the shelter just for just a couple of months and other lived there for 1- 3 years before they found forever homes. I remember all of these dogs by name and how they got to the shelter. I created web pages with their photos and stories, often gave them names, and met many of them at JFK airport, but I never had a chance to rescue a dog myself. So I was very excited to have this opportunity during my visit to Sochi.
Just a day before I came to Sochi Masha got a tip that the city beach will be cleaned from dogs before the season starts on June 1st and she knew of two dogs living on that beach, a mother and daughter pair. They survived on food scarps from a nearby store and cafe.
Time was running out and next evening Masha and I drove to the beach. We parked quite far and started looking for dogs.
We walked around search but there were no dogs and almost no people. We started to worry that we will not see them today. And suddenly success - they appeared out of nowhere. They came to us but they did not want to go with us. It took some convincing but we were able to catch them and carry them to the car.
They looked a bit stressed when we arrived to the shelter. We put them separately in a closed kennel and gave them lots of food and water.
Now Sandy and Julie are safe, fed and loved at the shelter. But the last big step is ahead - we need to find them a family. These girls are friendly, social and very attached to each other. Ideally, we would want them to be adopted together.
