Mark Starmer wasn’t a dog person when he grew up. In fact, his family had some pretty backward opinions when it came to dogs.
And you know what they say about people who don’t like dogs.
Starmer went on to become a lawyer and then management development for a major international bank.
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As an adult with children, he then decided to buy a Shar Pei puppy named Kaiti after he bought his son a stuffed toy.
His son actually hated the toy, which looked just like a Shar Pei puppy.
The dog needed someone to keep it company so they got an English Pointer. Then they were asked to rescue two French hunting dogs.
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It was probably safe to say by that point, that Starmer was a dog guy. Or at least a guy with some dogs.
His friends thought he was crazy for incurring the expense to transport his six dogs and two cats when they moved to Canada.
When they got to Canada someone left a dog at their gate. After someone heard that they rescued that dog others started asking them to rescue other dogs.
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It wasn’t long before they had 19 dogs on their property.
That number just started growing and growing.
Starmer wound up adopting more than 70 dogs over the years. He went on to pen an extremely long piece about it in Newsweek.
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“We’ve adopted 70 dogs over the years. But if you include the ones we have found and fetched for other people, we’ve actually rescued more than 100. Over time, Sharon and I began to feel that while we were helping many dogs, we could still do more. We had so much land that wasn’t being used, so we started taking in farm animals,” Starmer wrote.
In 2014, Stamer created a giant pen for all the dogs so they could roam freely and have more than enough space to run, play and explore.
Their reaction to being let into the sprawling fenced area is absolutely adorable.
As soon as someone opens the gate the dogs come running full speed out of the gate and start spilling out onto the farm.
There were lots of tails wagging, cheeks flapping, and drool whipping around in the wind.
Starmer was almost knocked over when dozens of dogs kept running toward him in waves.
The dogs’ reaction to playing in their new pen was caught on video and viewed on YouTube more than 431,000 times.
As of 2021, Starmer had more than 38 dogs living on his property with 90 farm animals.
Some of the dogs on his land have procreated. But Starmer claims they are all spayed and neutered at this point.
None of his dogs are given up for adoption, they are all considered family members.
They will all live out the rest of their days on the property being taken care of.
Check out the video of these happy dogs going for a run in their new pen in the video below.
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