Acer was rescued from the Far North, driven to Auckland by Paws Restart volunteers, and flown to Queenstown to a new home. pawsrestartanimalrescue@gmail.com Photo / Supplied
Abandoned and neglected North Island dogs rescued from misery and certain death are flown to start new lives in Queenstown and Christchurch with the help of an underground railroad-style network of volunteers with big hearts. Jane Phare reports.
Marley was on death row at the Far North District Council (FNDC) pound. Now he is well fed, goes for walks every day and lives his best life in beautiful Queenstown.
Acer does too. With half an ear missing, she was sitting in a concrete kennel in the pound waiting for her time to be up. Instead she, too, is running around her new home in Queenstown.
Thanks to a network of volunteers attached to Paws Restart, scores of dogs are rescued from death row in council pounds or appalling living conditions in the North Island, driven to Auckland, and flown to freedom and a new life in Christchurch, Queenstown and other areas of Central Otago.
Rescue centres, council pounds and foster volunteers in Auckland and Northland are swamped with unwanted or neglected dogs, so their chances of being rehomed are slim.
The FNDC has one of the highest number of dogs in the country, but one of the lowest dog registration rates. In past years the council’s pound has been criticised for its poor conditions and high kill rate. With nowhere for the animals to go, the possibility of an early death looms large.
Paws Restart tries to intervene before that happens, rescuing the dogs, paying for vet care and retraining, finding temporary foster homes and then forever homes with new families, often in the South Island.
“Can you help Joey? He needs a ride from Kawakawa or Whangārei to Auckland ... to make his flight to freedom,” reads a message on Paws Restart’s Facebook page.
Or, “Bhodi needs a ride from Kawakawa to Auckland ready for a flight to Queenstown ... needs to be at the airport at 5.30pm”.
Bodhi was at the end of his stay at the FNDC pound before being driven by a volunteer to Auckland where he missed his flight connection. He was treated to McDonald’s while waiting hours for the next flight, and is now happily rehomed in Christchurch.
Or a plea goes out: is anyone flying to Queenstown or Christchurch this week and prepared to add a dog crate to their luggage?
Behind Paws Restart is dog lover Tania Dicks-Maurice who, four years ago, decided to rescue and rehome older dogs that were destined to be euthanised.
“My vision was that I would personally try to help out the old dogs. It just kind of snowballed from there.”
By snowballing she means all dogs, puppies included, who have been mistreated, abandoned or neglected. It’s a dog rescue network that keeps her frantically busy, helped by friend Sarah Maxwell White and a team of volunteers. Dicks-Maurice’s first interview with the Herald is interrupted within minutes. “Can you call me back? I have an emergency vet on the line.”
Before the next call she’s been out to Avondale to collect donated food from Pet Direct. She regularly hits up suppliers for donated collars, leads, beds, blankets and damaged stock. It was Raw Pet Food Express that donated Marley’s crate and cover for his trip to Queenstown.
At the same time the mother of two teenagers is trying to run her landscape design business, but Paws Restart has taken over her life.
“It’s never-ending,” she says.
This month she’s been nursing three sick puppies, Moro, Molly and Mitch, at her Kumeū home. Bizarrely, someone gave away 13 puppies at a Mt Roskill bus stop after the mother died a ghastly death from canine parvovirus.
Two of the puppies, critically ill, ended up with Dicks-Maurice. Desperate to find the other sick pups, she put a plea on the Paws Restart Facebook page to find the other puppies, also likely to need urgent medical care. A third was handed in; she doesn’t like to think of the fate of the other 10.
Dicks-Maurice took a week off work to nurse the pups, administering medication and syringe feeding every two hours.
She once drove to Matamata to rescue three mistreated dogs after neighbours got in touch with Paws Restart. She paid the owners $50 to take one dog away, returned for a second dog to find the price had risen to $150, and finally rescued the third for $200.
The cruelty of some dog owners never fails to shock her. She tells the story of Toby, found tied up and starving in dense Murupara bush by a hunter. Nearby was a mother dog, tied up and starving, desperately trying to feed a litter of puppies. The dogs were rescued and Toby found a new home in Riverhead.
It’s the down-and-out and desperate cases Dicks-Maurice focuses on, dogs who have been abandoned or dumped somewhere, neglected, chained up, and are often sick or in poor condition. Apart from the FNDC pound, she also links with pounds in Waikato, Te Kūiti and Taupō, or dog rescue people find her on Facebook. Many come from the north and she’s constantly looking for dog lifts to Auckland from Kaitāia, Kawakawa or Whangārei.
Before that flight to freedom comes a heap of work and expense, paying for food, working with an animal trainer to make sure the dog is safe to go to a foster home while waiting for a new owner, and funding vet fees. Most of the dogs rescued are in poor health, need to be vaccinated, wormed, microchipped and desexed.
“That [vet bills] hits us really, really hard,” Dicks-Maurice says.
In one week alone this month, Paws Restart had to find $10,000 for vet costs.
“It’s probably been one of our most expensive weeks, which is really scary for a small rescue,” she says.
“We beg a lot,” she says.
Now and then, Paws Restart experiences what Dicks-Maurice calls a “foster fail”, when the temporary foster family become so attached to the dog they decide to keep it.
Once a dog is ready for a new family, their profile and cute photo goes up on Facebook, or they’re adopted out in the South Island with the help of Arrowtown-based Victoria Hoskin who runs the Central Otago & Queenstown animal welfare networkers.
The flights south become a logistical nightmare, matching volunteers driving to Auckland with volunteers flying out. They add the dog crate as an extra piece of luggage with Air New Zealand, costing $75 to $150 depending on the size of the animal. Paws Restart covers that cost and supplies the certified crate.
Volunteers meet and greet at both airports and help co-ordinate the return of the precious crates. Paws Restart relies on a network of frequent-flyer volunteers, often travelling to Queenstown or Christchurch for business, to accompany dogs south and bring crates back.
Tony Scott, an Auckland Airport rescue fire service member, will often drive dogs down from his Northland home and collect crates to return, working in with Dicks-Maurice and Donna Doolittle’s animal rescue in Kaitāia. Scott, who founded the firefighters race up the Auckland Sky Tower’s 1100 stairs to raise money for blood cancer, was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal in 2016.
Although Paws Restart has taken over Dicks-Maurice’s life, she says the reward is worth it when she sees photos of a chained dog in a yard, or sitting in a concrete kennel in a pound.
“Then you see photos of them down in Queenstown. What more could you ask for?”
Occasionally, the rescue doesn’t work out.
“We can’t just turn up to someone’s house with a chained dog and put him straight into a foster home because that’s a danger to everyone.”
Dogs with major issues stay with Dicks-Maurice while she works closely with a vet and a behaviour trainer, but a few don’t make the cut.
“The sad reality is that some of these dogs are so traumatised that they’re not rehomable. That’s the sad reality of the society that we live in,” she says.
“If we think there’s no chance [of rehoming] then I’ll make that call [to euthanise the dog]. We haven’t had to do many, maybe two or three.”
“It’s an incredibly hard thing to do. As a rescue [organisation] it’s the last thing you want to do.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
