Adam G. at IACC needs our help

Adam, the volunteer coordinator at Indianapolis Animal Care and Control, needs help finding a foster home for a dog between Aug. 15 and 24. (although the foster family could keep it longer if they wished, but for sure those days as Adam will be out of his office.)

Adam takes some dogs into his office to save them if he sees something in them that just needs a little time to fix. The dog in his office now is very shy, but has come out of his shell a lot in the last few weeks.

I really like Adam and the work he is doing to try and save the ones he can. If anyone at all can help, please contact him.

Here is part of Adam's email:

Currently I have one dog (named Big Baby) living in my office who is being rehabbed for extreme shyness. I am in desperate need of a foster home for the big guy. He’s still scared of people that he doesn’t know and won’t walk on a leash but is house broken and crate trained. His foster home can be just for the week that I’m gone or it can be until he’s ready to be adopted but he absolutely needs to get out of here by Friday at the latest. For more information about him, keep reading:

“Big Baby,” a male, one-year-old harlequin pointer mix (he’s your prototypical shelter dog, a Heinz 57 mix of who-knows-what). Big Baby was found as a stray in Lawrence and came to Indianapolis Animal Care & Control on June 28.

Right away Big Baby became one of the dogs known in the sheltering community as a “gutter dog.” He hid in the drain of his kennel, under the water bowl, in a ball as tight as he could get. He would not socialize with anyone and was labeled as a “Use Caution” dog because he was so afraid of being here.

He was tagged to be euthanized when his stray hold period ended and I happened to walk into the kennel on that day and noticed how stunning and scared he was. I moved him to my office to let him calm down.

In the last month, he’s slowly come out of his shell. He’ll walk right along side me down the hallways – but only if no one else is around. He’ll walk even better if there’s another dog to lead him. In my office he still shys from people and likes to hide under my desk.

Big Baby is deathly afraid of leashes and will run at the site of them. He won’t walk if one is attached to him, even if he is dragging it. Once outside, he is a different dog and he loves to run and frolic. He even chases after toys. However, he is an amazing fence climber and will leap off the top of them into the different outdoor kennels. I think it’s mostly because he wants to get closer to me because he trusts me. It’ll take a while for him to do that with anyone else but I am confident he will come out of his shell and be a normal dog.

I do not know what happened to this guy in the first year of his life and, based on his current mental state, don’t care to ever now what he went through. He’s definitely a hard placement but for whatever reason I walked by his cage on that day and spared him from being another statistic – at least temporarily. Now we need someone to step-up and permanently protect him.