Sorry for the radio silence...

..but we’ve all just been cracking on with the mad influx of dogs needing to come in due to people going back to work after Lock Down and now people are giving them up because they can’t afford to keep them any more.

I have NEVER known rescue to be so desperate as it is at the moment. I dread answering the phone as I know I’ll be saying “I’m sorry we have no room” to yet another person who’s at their wits end trying to find somewhere to take their dog. …And STILL people are breeding them purely to make money out of cute puppies , then finding out the hard way that people don’t want to buy them any more.

We are perpetually finding ourselves in a “bottle neck” situation where we take in a couple of needy cases and then nothing gets rehomed for weeks, so we can’t bring anything else in. We are crying out for foster homes but they need to be sensible, not people who are out at work all day / have kittens / no fences / young children because unless it’s a dog we’ve assessed already, we don’t know what they’re going to be like in a home environment.

Lots of small rescues are closing down as they can’t cope with the stress involved or afford the running costs and it’s going to be horrendous over the winter months when we’ll need to have heating too. Thank goodness our kennels is well insulated and keeps itself fairly warm,

The food we use here has gone up about £5 a 15kg bag now (we use 3 a week) and the rice and pasta I normally use to make up our “lurcher’s stew” has at least tripled in price, even for the cheapest brands so I’m trying them on different vegetables (such as swede) as well as the carrots and celery they get added it, to try and pad it out a bit more.

Anyway… on the positive side…. we have finally had enough of working in the damp, mouldy, collapsing office outside and are replacing it with a new, insulated temporary building. I’ll do a separate post about that - but it’s also going to include an isolation kennel which is for emergencies only (I keep telling myself that!) and a walk in storage facility for the “stuff” which is currently taking over our conservatory - donated bedding / coats / leads/ tins…all of which we do need and does come in handy to pass on to people taking on a new or foster dog , but takes up a lot of space. We can can also use the building as a “meet and greet” space when it’s too wet to stand around out in the paddock.

So…that’s what we’ve been up to over the summer months :)