Why is rescuing a dog so important?
Hi! I’m Dr. Rebeca, senior veterinarian for Amigos de 4 Patas. And from now on I’ll be writing short pieces for our newsletter and website blog.
My very first one I want it to be about you, the people that rescue our dogs and acknowledge the importance of your commitment.
La Paz is where most our dogs come from, it’s a little city on the southeast coast of Baja California, right next to the Gulf of California, our weather is hot in the summer -really hot, over 100 °F or 40°C, and It’s humid, really humid. This weather conditions make La Paz the perfect location for … ticks! Almost all dogs that don’t have any tick prevention regime have them, and sometimes humans too, and believe me, having a tick crawling on your leg or finding a tick attached to your neck is not nice!
There is an estimate of the number of stray dogs that roam La Paz, and it is over 50,000! Life span of these dogs is no longer than 5 years, they wear their teeth short by chewing on sand to try to fill their bellies, they are full of ticks that not only make them weaker because of the blood they take from then, but also give them diseases, as well as other parasites that they carry. Then – during the summer, they die of heat exhaustion.
There are not enough refuges in the world to put them all safe and that’s why our program is so important. We can foster and bring them back to health, protect them against the worst diseases and prevent them from catching any more parasites. And then you come along, you adopt our dogs and we can start all over again.
I’m very proud of our wellness program -since we started it, the dogs we send north are healthy and we hadn’t had any nasty surprises since. We document all the procedures we do on our dogs and all the tests and vaccines we give them so you can go to your vet and share this information to ensure that the dogs stay healthy.
And I’m going to brag a little: we have had reviews from vets from the US and Canada that are nicely surprised that our dogs are in such good health. And all this is possible thanks to our great community: our rescuers, our vets, the vets of La Paz that we work with and all the people involved in our program
So… a big thank you to everybody.
Rebeca Kobelkowsky, DVM, Dipl., MSc.