Diary of a Community Animal Project Employee: Neglected Dogs

The following is a post that originally appeared on PETA Prime.

Because of your support, PETA is able to work in local communities, helping individual animals in need. Thousands of animals are helped by PETA’s Community Animal Project (CAP) each year. This is the first edition of a series of posts chronicling the work of CAP—this post is from Emily Allen, assistant manager for CAP.

Before I started at PETA nearly five years ago, I didn’t realize how dire the situation for animals was in so many rural and impoverished areas. There are millions of individual dogs out there who need help. They suffer in all weather extremes, at the mercy of people who often fail to do even the very minimum to care for them. If there is a chance that we can make their lives a little less hellish, we’ll certainly try.

PETA’s Community Animal Project (CAP) drives for more than two hours each way every week—sometimes several times—in our effort to spare North Carolina’s animals as much misery as possible. Many of these animals don’t have anything good in their lives—certainly not the hope of an indoor life or a decent animal protection law to keep them safe, let alone a law enforcement agency that gives a hoot. Here are just a few of the dogs we met this week during one of our North Carolina trips:

Our first stop of the day was checking on a playful lab mix named Mariah. Last winter, we persuaded Mariah’s humans to allow us to spay her. We transported Mariah to and from her spay appointment, and we provided her with a sturdy doghouse. The ride to and from her spay appointment was the first time that Mariah had ever been in a car. It was also the first—and only—time that she has ever seen a veterinarian. She gets uncontrollably frantic with excitement whenever she’s off her tether, which, unfortunately, doesn’t happen very often. Mariah’s people are elderly and frail. And while they feed her regularly and talk nicely to her, they just aren’t able to give her all the attention and exercise that she needs so desperately. And they aren’t willing to give her up either. I try to stop at Mariah’s house whenever I can and take her for a walk around the block so that she’ll have the opportunity to smell new things and experience a bit of freedom.