Animal rescuers spend most of their time reading emails or answering phone calls about animals that need help. The rest of the time, they actually go to those places and try to provide help or take in animals that need medical treatment or have been abused.
Sky Sanctuary Rescue, a non-profit organization located in Arizona committed to humanely trapping and rehabilitating stray animals, does exactly that. It tries to save animals that have been maltreated and provide them a safe home for the rest of their lives.
The people who work with the organization have seen the best and the worst over the years, but a few days ago, they saw something they had never witnessed before.
When they arrived in the middle of the desert where a homeless family had found a resort, they saw 150 animals that desperately needed to escape the heat.
The homeless family had been living in the middle of the Arizona desert for about a year, when they were eventually evicted from the state-owned land near Wittman.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office explained exactly what happened in a press release.
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“Detectives were surprised to discover that none of the animals appeared malnourished, and no sick animals were found at that time,” Sgt. Calbert Gillet said in a statement. “The animals had shade and shelter.”
Indeed, as the rescuers also confirmed, the animals were not malnourished and they were sociable, while it looked like they had not been abused.
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However, there were some of them that were older and needed medical help, while all of them needed to stay away from the 110-degree heat that put their lives at risk anyway.
“It’s not often that members of the transient community reach out begging for help but when this family ended up homeless, in the brutal heat of the desert with the 150 animals they were so desperately trying to keep alive in the Arizona monsoons, we knew we had to help,” the Sky Sanctuary Rescue shared in an Instagram post.
The rescuers initially headed to the desert with a plan of taking in 10 dogs, but when they saw how bad the situation was there, they knew they had to take more than 50 with them.
Indeed, Elli Smith, the founder of the Sky Sanctuary Rescue in Phoenix left with 22 dogs the first night, while the authorities returned the next day and took with them another “56 medically fragile animals and one cat”.
As Smith shared with Today, the family has kept five dogs, and they have already found a home for them and their pets.
Luckily, those animals were rescued and will be fine, but what can we do about animals around us that need our help?
If you are an animal lover, you can make sure to adopt instead of buying a pet. It goes without saying that you should provide for your pet according to their needs, while it would be a good idea to donate to rescue groups and non-profit organizations.
Finally, teaching compassion to kids when it comes to animals is of paramount importance, and making sure we buy humane animal products is key to a world that will be a better place for animals.
Watch the video below to see what the rescuers saw when they got to the place where the animals lived.
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