Pit bulls find new homes

I was choked up with joy to find this article in the Huntsville Forrester. To think they have not had a permanent home since 6 weeks old and finally two of them do and the other two hopefully on their way soon too thanks to BIN. There are some happy endings out of Ontario.

Pit bulls finds new homes
by Laura MacLean - Wednesday, May 9, 2007



A GOODBYE HUG: Huntsville Animal Shelter’s animal care attendant Christie Knight gets a goodbye hug from Zeus, a male pit bull, who along with his brother Reno was shipped to Bullies in Need (BIN), an animal rescue organization in Vancouver.

Four pit bulls that have been at the Huntsville Animal Shelter since they were six weeks old have finally found homes outside of the province thanks to the efforts of the town’s animal control bylaw officer Barb Mooney.

“It’s a happy ending to a wonderful story,” said Mooney.

This past Saturday, Zeus and Reno, two of the male pit bulls, were relocated to Bullies in Need (BIN), an animal rescue organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mooney picked the pooches up at the shelter and then drove them to WestJet Cargo in Toronto. The other two remaining pit bulls, Spirit, a female, and Seagram, a male, will be relocated to the same organization as soon as Zeus and Reno are found adoptive homes.

“Where they’re going, they’ll have more hands-on training to make them perfect for their future adoptive homes,” said Mooney, adding that the pit bulls have come a long way since they first arrived at the shelter. “We just really wanted to find homes for them.”

The pit bulls came from a litter of six that was seized by town bylaw officers last April after they learned a man was trying to give them away for free in the Brendale Square.

At the end of August, Kristy Robbins, a representative from BIN in Indianapolis, Indiana, visited the shelter to conduct assessments on all six of the pit bull puppies. The assessment was key in determining if the pups had suitable temperaments to ship them out of the province, as the current ban on pit bulls makes it illegal to breed or bring dogs into the province who were born after the ban took effect in August 2005. Pit bulls who were born before the ban are allowed to stay in Ontario as long as they are sterilized, leashed and muzzled in public.

“(After the assessment) they put out their feelers to all the adoptive agencies,” said Mooney of BIN. “I sent them updated photos of the pit bulls about every three months.”

In December 2006, BIN found homes for two of the female pit bulls: Ava, who now lives with a retired family in British Columbia, and her sister Kokanne (renamed Jena) who went to a foster home in northern Alberta.

“It’s kind of bittersweet for us because we’ve grown to love them,” stated Christie Knight, the Huntsville animal shelter’s animal care attendant.

“But this is just so amazing that they now get the chance to have a family of their own. It’s what we had always been hoping for.”