w w w . S t r a y d o g. o r g U p d a t e
POSTED SEVEN DAYS A WEEK AT FIVE P.M. CENTRAL TIME U.S.A
(Except Saturdays, when we post a morning pre-Adoption Day update and then an evening post-Adoption Day update)

Straydog Inc., The Late Pat Arnold's Happy Home for Strays, a No-Kill Dog Shelter
P.O. Box 1465, Gun Barrel City, Texas 75147 * (903) 479-3497 * EMAIL: straydog@straydog.org

Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 13 2004

FIVE P.M. UPDATE

Raising money 1991 to the present

     Over the first several years (1991 thru March 1997) raising money meant squeezing out of our meager paychecks a total of between $80,000 and $100,000 (over those years) to cover our shelter expenses, which we did (making Pat and me the largest individual all-time financial contributors to Straydog), though we were just about bankrupt when that first article came out about us in The Dallas Morning News on March 13, 1997.

     How elated we were when $40,000 in contributions came in that first week after the Morning News article appeared. We thought we'd been saved! But instead of staying saved we began accelerating our growth rate, taking in more and more rescues all the time, and the expenses continued to rise.

     Then in the year 2000 a group of very kind volunteers, Friends of Straydog (who were seriously trying to save us [I believe] as well as the dogs), began helping us with adoptions, which, thank goodness, accelerate our adoption rate. That should have lowered expenses, right? WRONG! The more dogs we adopted out, the more rescued dogs we took in, and expenses continued to rise. (It's a lot less expensive to run a sanctuary for hard-to-adopt or unadoptable dogs than it is to run a rescue-and-adopt-out shelter.)

     As time goes on more and more dogs ARE being rescued and ARE finding their forever homes through Straydog, and that's WONDERFUL! But it's costing us more and more money all the time. Our situation is a perfect example of a Catch 22: We can't afford to take in more dogs because we'll go broke--the increasing expenses will break us. But we can't afford not to take in more dogs because we'll go broke--the decreasing donations will break us. (Pat often said when money was running low that we needed some more rescues.)

     Before I left to go pick up Emily at the Dallas Veterinary Surgical Center the morning Pat suffered her brain aneurysm (May 31, 2003), Pat and I were talking in the hospital trailer kitchen about our plight, and I remember her saying she would never take in another rescue (which I reminded her she'd said a million times before), and I remember her talking about how she wished that we had been able to keep our shelter population at a small enough number so that she could have taken care of all the dogs herself, and she wished that I had been able to pay for it all without having to raise any outside money. What a wonderful life that would have been!

I received some really nice and comforting email messages regarding yesterday's update

     I appreciate very much the concern and kind thoughts many of you expressed. And though I may sound somewhat depressed and dejected when I start writing about the very difficult situation we're in, I'm a long way from giving up. I will never give up.

     Together we MUST gain control of conception (through spay and neuter), and until we DO gain control of conception and thereby maintain a sustainable population, we must provide the necessary funding to take care of the homeless at least as well as Pat Arnold insisted they be taken care of.

That's me, Bill Arnold, last evening at sunset, "staring off into space" (as my mother often used to
accuse me of). I was trying to figure out how we're going to keep Pat's Happy Home for Strays afloat.