Pima Animal Care Center: All-Star Dog Rescue Celebration Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
You made a generous $8,500 grant to our nonprofit partner, the Friends of Pima Animal Care Center, a project fund of the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, so that our shelter could have a dental X-ray machine. Your gift funded half of this piece of equipment, as well as the extensive professional training that our medical team needed to be able to use it (photos of training attached).
As our community’s only shelter that never turns away a pet in need, we take in more than 14,000 dogs each year. Many of these dogs are injured strays. Oftentimes their finders witnessed them being hit by cars, or they found them – bleeding, stunned and hurt -- on the side of the road. We take in, on average, about 10 dogs like this every single week, and many of them are suffering from mouth injuries that require dental X-rays so that we can fix and treat them. Your generous investment is helping us save the lives of these dogs, as well as the lives of older dogs with dental disease and dogs with chronic sinus problems.
"The Petfinder Foundation's grant has been completely game-changing for our dogs' oral/nasal health," our director of medical services, Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, says.
Because of your generous gift to fund half of this machine's cost to help our dogs, we able to use your gift as a "match" – and our community came forward to donate the rest of the funds we needed for the equipment's full cost. Everyone was inspired by the Petfinder Foundation's generosity, and now we have a state-of-the-art dental X-ray system to help our dogs AND our cat friends. Thank YOU!
How many pets did this grant help?
30+ already -- and it will help hundreds, if not thousands, more dogs in the years to come.
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Troy, a 1-year-old Pit Bull mix (first photo), lived a difficult life before he came to us. One of our Animal Care Officers rescued him after his owner was arrested and Troy was left behind. Troy’s owner never came to redeem him, and when Dr. Wilcox went to neuter Troy so he could go up for adoption, she found a badly broken tooth that was causing him pain. Troy had likely been hit by a car in the past, and he had never received treatment from his former family.
Dr. Wilcox extracted Troy’s broken tooth, and then she used the dental X-ray machine to make sure all of the painful root fragments had been removed, too. Our X-rays showed we had done a complete job, but without this tool, we never would have known that we had done everything Troy needed to feel better. Without this machine, we would still be sending dogs like Troy out half-treated!
Thank you so much for helping us save the lives of Troy and dogs like him. We appreciate your generosity, Petfinder Foundation!
