Smells like rotten eggs

When we began taking dogs out this morning it was important that we focused on a particular order of how we handled the animals. The reasoning for this was cross contamination on some young ones and some sick ones. This becomes very important when you are dealing with five week old puppies. We typically don't take in animals so young but I have to say that their cuteness might have played a part in them being in the shelter.

Having the young animals you have to make sure that you always handle them first and of course wash up every time before you handle them. Once you take care of them then it is on to the rest of the population. Then of course our sickies, which seems like a few right now. It turns out that we have a ring worm issues with several dogs. If your not familiar with the fungus I suggest reading up on it because it can get pretty nasty. And now we have three with the potential of a fourth popping positive.

The treatment isn't to crazy but it does take a while for this fungal infection to clear up. First comes a topical medicine applied twice daily to the affected area. The other form of treatment is medicated baths. I didn't think the baths were that bad because I had actually never used the right stuff to wash them in. Usually I would use a maleseb shampoo that soothes the skin but today was a little different. We ended up using a prescription sulphur bath. You heard correctly, a bath that literally smells like rotten eggs. Even worse, where we wash the animals is a whopping four by six room without the best ventilation. There was a point that I had to leave otherwise my lunch was about to come back up. Luckily this is only a weekly thing because not only was it tough on us but the poor little dogs actually had to have this stuff dry on them. Hopefully it helps because if it doesn't I feel bad that we all had to go through it.

The rest of the day was pretty routine. It was nice though to learn of the adoptions that had taken place over the weekend. Our girl Rikki, who has been here for a while and was starting to get a little nutty found the perfect home. A woman saw her online and new from that moment that she was the dog for her. A few of the new arrivals also got adopted which was nice to see. Of course they can't go home until Thursday when they start their recovery from their surgeries.

Like I mentioned before, in addition to the adoptions we have a whole lot of new arrivals that were taken in by our behavior specialist. There was everything from five young puppies, to boston terrier and bichon siblings, and even a solid white puggle (maybe). It's nice to see some adoptions and some new faces come in. Now I just want to get all of the other long termers out of here so we can get in a few more newbies. It really is tough to see great animals stay in the shelter for so long, no matter how good of a place we have, it is still a shelter and still extremely stressful.

Thanks for reading everyone and of course thanks to all of the volunteers out there that make saving animals possible.