Shelter Spotlight: Muddy Paws Rescue
We are honored to be their exclusive food provider: all foster families go home with a free bag of Kismet! We spoke with founder Rachael Ziering about the challenges of working in animal welfare, her favorite fostering moment, and why pretty much anyone would make a great foster parent.
What is the mission at Muddy Paws?
Our mission is to build and support a community of dog lovers, and to use that community to save dogs. We do that in a bunch of different ways, including shared learning and education, direct life saving, and innovation.
Why is community so central to what you do?
"Dogs can’t save themselves, so humans are going to be the ones to do it."
Dogs can’t save themselves, so humans are going to be the ones to do it. Our community consists of our volunteers, our foster parents, our adopters, our staff, and our donors, including our Loyal Companions – core donors we can count on every month. Anybody who's ever interacted with us is part of our pack, and that's something we just want to keep building. The more dog loving people we know, the more dogs we can save.
Tell us about your model.
We are fully foster-based, which means the dogs all live in foster care. Our HQ is in Manhattan, where dogs will sometimes meet with potential families and where we keep supplies and train volunteers, but it’s not a shelter. We rely on our foster network to house and care for dogs while they wait to be adopted.
What sets Muddy Paws apart from other animal rescue orgs?
Animal welfare tends to be behind the times when it comes to technology, and a lot of shelters and rescues are still on pen and paper. We have a custom built database in Salesforce which means everything is in one platform – foster management, adoption management, recruitment, retention, donors, dog management. It saves us a lot of back and forth and allows us to spend more time and energy on saving lives.
What are the biggest challenges you face in this line of work?
So many. At the forefront is just how many dogs we’re not able to save. We can only keep up with our own capacity for care, and that varies depending on the day, the week, the month, the year. It might be that we don't have enough foster parents, or the financial resources for intensive training or medical care, or we just don't have enough adopters. Sometimes we have a ton of dogs sitting in foster care who just aren't getting interest for whatever reason.
How do you deal with the day-to-day frustrations or heartbreak?
I've been doing this for over 10 years, and with time I've been able to put up a healthier boundary. Being able to see what's happening but not let it get to me every minute of every day is the only way I can move forward.
What are some of the biggest rewards?
Bringing a dog out of a shelter and getting to see them settle into their foster home and then, eventually, with their forever family, is far and away the best part of the job. We have our transport arrivals on Saturday, and we'll have like, 25 to 35 dogs coming in from a shelter. We get to see them meet their foster parents, and their foster parents are all excited to meet them and bring them home. I love the transport arrivals – it's a very rags-to-riches kind of a day. And one very specific thing I love is the first nap that a foster takes in your house. I foster a lot personally and it's always sweet to see a dog conk out and relax in a way that they probably haven't been able to in a loud, stressful shelter environment. Being able to give them a secure place where they can feel safe is a joy.
"Giving dogs a secure place where they can feel safe is a joy."
We love to hear heartwarming stories of adoption. Can you share a favorite?
I have so many! One of my favorites is about a dog named Bella who I fostered. She was kind of a pit bull, cattle dog mix, and she had a lot working against her in the shelter: She was blind; she was six to eight years old; and she weighed something like 70 or 80 pounds. So she's big, she's older, she's blind, and on the third day she was here, we discovered she was diabetic. Her blindness was probably caused by her diabetes at some point in her life.
We pulled her knowing that it was going to be a longer stay, but she was only with me for six weeks. She found the most amazing mom who lives in Brooklyn and has another dog, which was perfect, because Bella was wonderful with dogs – and having one she can follow with her ears and nose is so great. I thought I was going to have her for months and months, but somebody came out of the woodwork and said, “That's my dog.”
In your experience, what are the most common reasons that dogs end up in the shelter system?
One of the biggest factors is financial reasons. People who have had their dogs for years are no longer able to care for them; they can't afford the food, or they lost their housing, and where they have to go doesn't allow dogs. These are people who really do love their dogs but make the better choice for them because they can't care for them properly anymore.
A lot of puppies end up in shelters in places where there aren't strong spay/neuter programs. We still see lots of backyard breeding, where people end up with puppies they don’t want, whether they were going to sell them and then couldn't, or they just didn't alter their dog. There's a lot of not good reasons, but a lot of legitimate reasons that, through no fault of the dogs and no fault of the people who were caring for them, they end up on the streets or in a shelter.
You have a robust foster network. How do you attract and retain foster families?
A lot of it is just word of mouth – people who already foster and who tell their friends about us. One need that we haven't quite been able to conquer yet is getting fosters in suburban areas. A lot of our dogs don't do well in the city – it's too big, too scary, too stressful – but they would thrive in a slightly quieter area. So if anybody's reading who lives in those quieter, less congested areas, hit us up!
What are you looking for in a foster family or foster parent?
Anyone who wants to help! People say, “Oh, I can't foster because I live in an apartment.” I lived in an apartment for many years, and I fostered lots of dogs. Or, “I have kids. I can't foster.” Lots of our fosters have kids, or dogs that don’t get along with other dogs but do get along with puppies. I feel like there's something for everyone. And one of the biggest things we hear is, “Well, I work full time. I can't foster.” Even if the dog is alone for eight to 10 hours during the day, that's better than sitting in a shelter where it’s loud, stressful, bright, and where they’re getting walked at least as infrequently. Anyone can help.
How does living and working with dogs enhance your life?
"I can't imagine working in a field where I wouldn't be making a difference in the lives of dogs and humans."
I can't imagine working in a field where I wouldn't be making a difference in the lives of dogs and humans. It's crazy to look at the community we’ve built over the years. Not only have we saved nearly 9,000 dogs, but we’ve also touched tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of humans through those dogs. People have met their partners and their best friends through Muddy Paws. I look around at our adoption events and see all these people who wouldn't have necessarily met each other if not for us. That's pretty cool.
Photos courtesy of Muddy Paws Rescue
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