What Is It Like to Live With 130 Rescue Dogs?
By: Daniele Ihns
Tags: The Masterpiece, Kindness, Dogs, Love, Adoption

The miracle of birth becomes nothing more than a bunch of puppies you’re going to have to find homes for.

In the beginning, before the 2011 tragedy, we joined the local community of animal protectors and attended the adoption fair every weekend trying to find homes for the stray dogs we fostered. After the tragedy, we gave up on that. There are way too many dogs and not enough homes.

If they’re puppies, our friends still advertise them online for adoption, but there’s no hope for the older dogs.

And then, there’s the noise

Nothing screams ‘home’ for me louder than the sound of 100 barking dogs. You can hear them from miles away. As soon as the dogs notice a car driving up our road, they will all start barking in unison.

There’s no such thing as arriving discretely, which can be frustrating for a teenager coming home from a party hoping that their parents will be asleep. That’s not something I’m familiar with.

But there are other peculiarities related to the noise.

Photo by Robert Gramner on Unsplash

You get in trouble with the neighbors

Not everybody appreciates what you’re doing for the dogs.

My mother had to move out of her previous home because her neighbor was throwing homemade bombs onto our garden. I can understand how maddening the noise can be but throwing Molotov cocktails onto your neighbor’s garden seems a bit over the top, even for Brazilian standards.

One of these bombs once landed in our swimming pool and it looked like a nuclear explosion. Luckily no one was hurt. But, it worked. My mother got scared and we ended up moving a bit further out into the countryside.

There were no neighbors around her land when she bought her current house. The people who moved there afterward knew of the problem when they decided to buy their houses.

In any case, they still sue her, all the time. There has not been one single year in the last two decades when my mother wasn’t involved in a legal case because of the noise.

She’s always won, so far. Since there is no facility to accommodate stray dogs in her town, the judges understand that she’s providing an indispensable public service and help her out. But it’s still a big pain in the ass.

You are very careful at night

Once it gets dark and the dogs fall asleep, you finally have some silence. It feels so precious that you don’t want to disturb the new status quo. We also don’t want the dogs to wake up the neighbors after 10 pm.

So we walk around at night like burglars in our own home. Tiptoeing our way around and trying not to drop anything.

Any noise can wake up one dog and then it’s the domino effect. Once it starts it doesn’t stop. So we need to be careful.

And there’s the occasional death threat

My mother has received a few death threats since she started helping the dogs. It’s usually from animal abusers who she denounces to the police.

One case was against a local hotel tycoon who went bankrupt and left his dogs to starve to death. Another time it was from a crack addict who had burnt his dog with cooking oil.

This side of life with rescue dogs is not pretty and to be honest, we would much rather not have all these dogs. The real dog heaven would be a world where everyone looked after their pets responsibly and did their share.