We are a small group of people who originally formed the 501(C)3 in 1999. We are retired to this area from other places and have professional backgrounds. Our President is a retired Air Force Colonel who was a nurse. She and others saw a real need in this rural community for someone to help educate the people on how to better care for animals and the need to spay and neuter and decided to build a shelter and start housing the unwanted animals of Stone County. I have been actively involved since 2008. Our shelter dream was finally a reality when we were given a wonderful gift from a local person who died and left an estate trust to us that will be disbursed over a 12 year period. We were able to secure a bank loan to build the shelter based on the annual disbursements from this estate trust and it was completed in August. We believe that all animals should be properly cared for and loved and not tied up in a yard or left out in weather with not shelter or used for breeding. We have conducted several small size rescues in the area over the years with the help of the local authorities and helped stop one hoarder who had 200 dogs at one time and could not care for them. The ASPCA was called in to help with this issue. We can only house about 20 t o 25 dogs and the same number of cats at any one time. We do not have a viable foster program to help take in more unwanted animals. We work from a wait list and take animals that are in danger sooner than ones that are being cared for by someone. Last year in 2016 we adopted out 128 dogs and transported 37 dogs to another rescue in Colorado that we work with that takes our dogs or puppies that we do not have room to keep. This shelter has a facility as well as a large foster program to house the dogs till they are adopted out by them. We took in a total of 170 dogs and returned 38 to owners who had lost dogs. We adopted out 59 cats, had 68 cats surrendered and spayed and neutered 249 animals.
