Best Friends Animal Sanctuary - Tuesday

Another beautiful morning at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. It's getting below the freezing mark here so there's often frost and a slight dusting of snow in the mornings.

First thing is more puppy classes and then some dog walking.

Below is River who is a fab Brown Lab. I couldn't quite figure out why he was at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary since he was such a well behaved dog in a very popular breed. It turns out he was sent here because he kept getting heartworm (four times!)despite being on heartworm preventative so he was sent to Best Friends because here it's too cold for the heartworm cycle to propagate.

If River were at Toronto Animal Services, he'd be adopted the first weekend.


This girl is Opie and she's a Katrina dog. She's quite shy so they think she may have been feral before being caught and brought to BFAS. She's shy but not too shy for snacks.


BFAS has a cafeteria which makes $5 lunches. Not bad considering the view.


After lunch, I went to tour Pig Paradise which is where BFAS has something like 19 pot bellied pigs. It's stupid the thousands of PBPs which were bought and then dumped as part of that fad that went on a few years ago. The whole thing with pigs is that they don't stop growing until they're 4 or 5 years old so all these fadists were tricked into thinking the 8 month old mother of the piglets they were buying as pets were full grown at 40 pounds. A hundred and forty pounds later, the trend conscious pig owner suddenly doesn't know what to do with such a large animal and dumps it or sticks it in a cage in the backyard.

And now there's some equally inane micro pig thing going on with Paris Hilton leading the charge. Micro pigs are the same as pot bellied pigs except they've been starved to keep them small for longer but eventually, they still get big.

I'd like to see Paris carry one of these guys around in her handbag.




This last one was abused by her previous owner. He used to beat her with a shovel resulting in severe injuries to her legs. BFAS rescued her and brought her into surgery to try to fix her issues but unfortunately, she still has a lot of arthritic type problems. When the weather started getting cold, she walked into the office and decided to spend her time indoors.

She loves belly rubs.


Something a lot of the volunteers at BFAS look forward to is this:


That's right: sleepovers.

And this afternoon, I signed up and got my guy.

His name is Snowman. I don't know why he's called that but he seems okay with it.


Snowman's been on several sleepovers already and it's easy to see why. He's a really well behaved, lovable dog. Ostensibly, the sleepovers are to help socialize the dogs to different experiences and I'm sure that it helps but I think the sleepovers are almost as much a hoot for the volunteers as it is for the dogs.

I took him for a long hike in the lower valley where Snowman was quite enthralled by the scent of deer.


Now that I've brought him back to the lodge where I'm staying, he's started following me around everywhere and won't leave my side. When I was taking my shower, I thought he was going to jump into the stall. It's a good thing I've got a small, hardened heart otherwise I'd be packing him up and taking him home with me at the end of my stay here. And by the way, he's the type of dog that Ontario still wants to kill.



Dec. 5: I found out Snowman is called Snowman because when he was rescued just after Katrina, he was found carrying a toy Snowman. Snowman really loves his toys.