Pets In Need: Disaster Response and Recovery Grant Report

How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?

This grant allowed us to help relieve the L.A. shelters affected by the fires in January by transporting in 30 animals already in shelters at the time the fires began.

How many pets did this grant help?

30

Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.

Mai Tai, a.k.a. Dandelion, the blue-eyed beauty landed at L.A. County’s Palmdale Animal Care Center as a stray dog before the fires. She was timid when she arrived at Pets In Need on Jan. 10, which made a lot of sense given what she’d been through. But animals are incredibly resilient. Within days, she revealed her playful and snuggly sides.

She was ready to be spayed and made adoptable, but as Mai Tai was recovering from her spay surgery, she had difficulty breathing. Emergency x-rays revealed a diaphragmatic hernia, a potentially life-threatening hole in the diaphragm that allows abdominal organs to move into the chest. While still recovering from her spay, Mai Tai had an emergency surgery to repair her hernia.

Once she recovered, Mai Tai was able to come out of her shell, and has since been adopted! Her loving family had this to say: “Her name is Brûlée now (like crème brûlée), and she is PERFECT. A little chew-y, and I just reached out to a trainer to help us work on recall and focusing through distractions, but overall I cannot believe how good she is. You weren’t lying when you said she was the best dog in the place! Thank you for putting us together.”