Rescue Rebuild, with the help of Mars Petcare volunteers, was able to positively transform the lives of dogs at Maury County Animal Shelter. Placed in quite a rural area of Tennessee, this shelter is one of only a few made up of both staff members and volunteers. This limits the amount of extra time they have to focus on enrichment and exercise. This is where Rescue Rebuild was ready to step in.
It was a good thing that Tennessee is still warm in late September, as all of our days were spent working outside. The primary goal of this build was to help increase the number of dogs that can get out of their kennels and feel the sunshine. With only two fenced- in yards quite a ways from the building, both of which were not safe to leave a dog alone in, the staff at Maury County were unable to make use of these as often as they hoped. With plenty of extra usable green space on the side of their building, our volunteers got to work building three new chain-link play yards. Effortlessly accessible by just opening the door from the kennel room out into the yards, the staff are now able to clean kennels more easily by rotating three dogs outside at one time and letting them release pent-up energy. We also added a bit of fun and new enrichment to these yards by building the pups some agility steps to climb up and down.
Once we built the new play yards, we then focused on how to fix up the already existing play yards and make them more practical. These grass yards with wooden fences had made it very tempting for the dogs to dig big holes and play the escape game. We all know that once one dog starts digging, they all do. Now you can imagine how many holes were in these yards! Using the dirt that was left over from digging up the new play yards, we patched up all of those holes along the edges. Maury County Animal Shelter now has five play yards for their dogs.
We all share that internal drive to do whatever we can to help animals become happier and healthier until they are in their forever homes…and today we were able to help just one more shelter. Thank you to all of our supporters and volunteers!
You can get more dogs playing outside! Click here to help Rescue Rebuild get more dogs outside playing!