California ‘Death Row’ dogs find new homes in B.C.

Amy Schmidt kisses her new dog Mira at Thank Dog I Am Out's Save 100 Dogs event on Saturday afternoon. (CTV Vancouver)

Hundreds of prospective pet owners gathered in an airplane hangar at Vancouver International Airport Saturday in hopes of taking home new best friends.

“It’s been the most amazing show of support for rescue,” said Susan Patterson, founder of Thank Dog I Am Out Rescue Society. “It’s mindboggling, actually.”

Patterson’s organization was responsible for the gathering, working with Landmark Aviation to fly in 100 dogs from shelters in California, where they would have been euthanized because of overcrowding.

Now, in less than 24 hours, those dogs have gone from the canine equivalent of Death Row to new homes in the Lower Mainland.

One such dog -- a one-year-old mutt named Mira -- will curl up in Coquitlam Saturday night, in the home of Amy Schmidt, who was waiting anxiously with her two daughters as the pets were unloaded from the plane.

"Initially they would prefer a chihuahua,” Schmidt said. “But mom has the final say."

Each would-be dog owner must be vetted before TDIAO will allow them to adopt a dog. The process includes a home visit by one of the organization’s hundreds of volunteers.

Adopting families must also agree to return the dog to TDIAO for re-homing if anything doesn’t work out, Patterson said. One of her organization’s missions is to ensure that dogs don’t end up back in kill shelters.

“These dogs are safe, no matter what,” she said.

Patterson’s rescue society gets its dogs from California because that’s where situation for shelter animals is most dire, and because it’s where she has the connections and infrastructure to make such a project happen.

“When you have a shelter that holds 600 dogs and you’re getting 200 a day and only 40 are getting adopted a day and you do the math, it becomes a critical situation where the dogs have to be euthanized,” she said of the situation in California.

TDIAO’s work helps address the demand for small dogs in British Columbia -- most of the dogs adopted Saturday weigh 30 pounds or less. Patterson said she always asks people to check with local shelters before adopting a dog through her rescue, but she says they aren’t always able to find a dog that suits their lifestyle in B.C. shelters.

“To me, rescue is rescue, I’m not bound by a border,” she said. “In a perfect world, I would love to have the PNE opened up and every rescue who wants to be there from wherever they are set up a situation like this and have hundreds of dogs from everywhere being adopted out.”

With files from CTV Vancouver’s Julie Nolin