No one had even looked at Duke for more than a year.
The 3-year-old Rottweiler-shepherd mix had sat in the kennels at CNY Veterinary Services in Clay since he was 6 months old. His chances for adoption looked grim.
Then Duke’s photo was featured on Facebook on a page dedicated to dogs like him who have spent months or even years in shelters. The Patience Project’s picture was shared on one page after another and ultimately made its way to Gerry Ioannone in Rochester.
“My cousin forwarded his picture to me on Facebook,” Ioannone said. “I kept saying we were never getting another dog, because we’d just lost our other dog on May 6. But I kept coming back to that picture, because he reminded me of a dog we used to have.”
Finally, Ioannone agreed to go look at Duke, and he and his family made the drive out from Rochester to Clay. They spent a couple of hours getting to know Duke.
“He was really funny,” Ioannone said, “very precocious. He wanted to constantly be petted and have his belly rubbed. Very sweet.”
With that, any reservations Ioannone might have had about getting another dog went out the window. On June 22, just two weeks after being featured by the Patience Project, volunteers drove Duke to his new home. After two and a half years in a shelter, Duke now has a (human) bed to sleep in every night.
Patience Project founders Emily Doucet and Nastasha Faust hope Duke just the first of many dogs to find a permanent home.
“People don’t realize how many dogs are in a shelter. You look at their Facebook page, and you see maybe three or four dogs featured, and you think, ‘They don’t seem that full,’ and then you go and you realize, oh, no, there’s room after room after room with kennels,” Doucet said. “Because they’re rotating who they give exposure to, some of those dogs might have been there months or even years. They just haven’t had time to promote them again. They kind of get forgotten. We wanted to bring attention to some of those dogs that have been overlooked time and time again.”
Both Faust and Doucet regularly volunteer with Cuse Pit Crew, a local organization that advocates for pit bulls through humane education and community outreach. They also work with other area shelters. Faust said she was inspired to start the page after seeing how many dogs had been in shelters for weeks, months or years.
“A lot of people aren’t aware that there’s so many, and a lot of people don’t know how many shelters there are,” she said. “We wanted to get that out there.”
Faust went to Doucet for help building the Facebook page and reaching out to the community. They launched the page on June 7, featuring Duke as their first dog. Since then, the page has garnered more than 1,000 likes and found a home for at least two more dogs — Buck, a 5-year-old Jack Russell terrier who had spent four months at the CNY SPCA, and Lady, who spent a year and a half at Humane CNY. At the moment, they’re only working with dogs, but they’re looking into the possibility of starting another page for cats.
The site regularly features dogs from DeWitt Animal Hospital and Shelter, CNY SPCA, Humane CNY, CNY Veterinary Services, Wanderers Rest and Humane Society of Rome, though they’ve also showcased animals being sheltered at more faraway locations, like the Potsdam Humane Society, the Herkimer Humane Society and the Finger Lakes SPCA. And dogs aren’t just featured once and then forgotten.
“Every week, we then do a retrospective [of the dogs we’ve already featured] just to keep them in the public eye,” Doucet said. “We don’t want anyone to ever forget until they’re adopted.”
Doucet said there are several reasons a dog might remain in a shelter for an extended period of time: some, like Duke, don’t get along well with other animals, while others, like Mitzi and Rascal, who are featured on the Patience Project, need to be adopted together. Others might linger because of prejudices against specific breeds.
“It’s notorious that black dogs, larger dogs, Pitt mixes, Rottweiler mixes, older dogs, they tend to sit in the shelter the longest,” Doucet said. ‘We knew there was this whole population that people were reluctant to look at. When they come in they have an idea already in their head [of dogs they don’t want]. So we’re just trying to say, when you come in, these dog have all these great qualities, at least just go meet them. Maybe they’re not the dogs for you, but give them a shot.”
People may also shy away from long-term shelter dogs because of behavioral issues, and Doucet acknowledged that the longer a dog spends in a shelter, the more likely they are to fall out of the habits people associate with “good dogs.”
“There is a unique challenge for a dog who’s been there a while. It’s not the same as living in a home,” she said. “They might need some refreshers on basic obedience. We know a lot of great trainers in the area. There are a lot of trainers who love our site and offer to help with some of these dogs. We’re hoping that a lot of people can partner together once these dogs go home and make sure that they’re successful.”
For both Doucet and Faust, that desire to see dogs go to a permanent home comes from a personal place: both are dog owners themselves.
“Both my dogs lived in shelters, but not that long, maybe a month or two. I look at them, and I just can’t imagine if they’d had to live there one more day,” Doucet said. “And it’s not that we don’t like the shelters. The people that work there work so hard to make the dogs happy, but it’s not a home. I can’t stand to think of something just sitting there day after day after day, just watching people walk by in a cage.”
“My dogs are my family. I could never imagine my dogs being in a shelter for that long,” Faust said. “It’s just so sad. Every dog deserves a home.”
And there’s no shortage of homes, Doucet said.
“We believe that there are enough homes out there. It’s just that people don’t know that these dogs are there,” she said. “And there are people that will [walk into a shelter and say], ‘I want the dog that’s been here the longest,’ or ‘I want the oldest dog.’ There are good people out there. We’re just trying to connect them with these good dogs.”
To see the featured dogs, visit Facebook.com/patienceprojectofcny.
