Fur-Ever Home Rescue, located in Minnesota, has devoted its energy to passionately advocating for and rescuing local animals with urgent medical needs, behavior cases - animals that needed a little more effort than the majority. We are thrilled to have them as our BOGO recipient partner for the second half of November 2016.  

What is your organization's story?

Three years ago our founder decided to start a rescue a bit different than the others. She wanted to focus on helping the harder cases - the animals with urgent medical needs & behavior cases. Animals that needed a little more effort than the majority. We have stayed true to that vision while keeping quality medical & behavioral care our number one priority. We choose to stay small so we can focus our efforts on the more complex care the animals in our care require

Tell us about a memorable rescue.

Loki is one of my most memorable rescues. I fell in love with him through a photo on fb and Tania & I drove from Minnesota to Arkansas to bring him into rescue due to his medical issues. He stole the hearts of many with his fearless attitude & happy spirit. Even with the handful of congenital deformities & health hurdles he had, we were able to give him the best life we could, medically, after having surgery performed to help his breathing and then were able to provide him the best life we could, emotionally & physically, by placing him in the most amazing forever home. I drove him to his forever home last November & was able to get him settled in before heading back to MN. He almost made it a full year with his family before his time on this earth was up. As sad as I was to hear his time had come, I know he was where he was supposed to be & was spoiled every waking moment of his life there.

Tell us your most challenging moment in the rescue and how you got through it.

I would say our most challenging moment in rescue was when we decided to take a step back from the never ending madness of urgent animals needing rescue & decided we needed to think outside of the box & come up with a more proactive solution to save more of our local cats & dogs on euthanasia lists. Our solution was launching our new Outreach Program, which was designed to take animals from our local shelters that were placed on euthanasia lists due to their health or behavior & put them in a home environment, allowing them to shake off the stress of a shelter & heal before evaluating their needs for placement. We are running this program out of a remodeled log cabin that sits on a serene 78 acres just north of the Twin Cities, called the Healing Haven. We are then able to work with the rescue community to move them into appropriate rescues / foster homes so we can move onto the next urgent animal in need.

What programs do you offer your community?

Keeping pets with their families is important to us. Last year we started a "Keeping Families Together" fund to help us provide families with urgent medical care or temporary housing of their pets so we can help them keep

their animals. We have been able to provide life-saving surgery to remove a string a cat had eaten, covered the costs of reclaiming a family dog (vaccinations, impound & boarding fees, plus we provided them with a microchip & tag to help avoid the impound from happening again) from a local impound so they were able to be reunited, & housed a dog while providing veterinary care until her family found housing and was able to take her back.

We also have a "Survivor Fund", which was started after we were able to rescue Bobbi, a cat that had been attacked by a bobcat. Her story gained quite the following of cat lovers who felt every animal deserved a chance to be saved. This fund helps us save urgent major medical cases like Bobbi's, & funds their extensive medical care.

Let us know anything else you wish to share!

We have a lot of goals to maximize the potential of the Healing Haven once we meet our initial fundraising goal for the Outreach Program. We hope to open a boarding/training facility for the community in one of the buildings in the property to help offset the costs of the Outreach Program, & would eventually like to utilize the acreage as a sanctuary for animals that are not successful with your typical home placements. We are already housing cats that are from hoarding situations or are feral & hope to expand these efforts as well!