Waco Pets Alive!: KONG Toys Grant Report
How did this grant help your organization and the pets in your care?
WPA! focuses on rescuing urgent pets (cats and dogs) who reside at our local municipal shelter. Typically, this means we take in a variety of medical cases and, for dogs specifically, long-stay shelter residents.
While our municipal shelter tries very hard to allow the dogs who live there to have daily enrichment, the shelter is still a stressful environment, and enrichment and exercise opportunities are limited.
Most of the long-stay dogs who join Waco Pets Alive! from the shelter have been living in a kennel run at the shelter for more than 30 days. They are placed directly into foster homes once they join our organization. Naturally, there is usually a period of adjustment back to life in a home, and often these dogs have pent-up energy and even frustrations from their shelter stay.
In order to help make the adjustment back to home life as easy as possible, our foster homes work very hard on physical and mental enrichment activities for these pets. The Kong grant helps significantly in this endeavor and is a key component in helping these pets adjust as quickly as possible, making things much easier for the pets and their foster parents!
How many pets did this grant help?
12-20
Please provide a story of one or more specific pets this grant helped.
Mason came to Waco Pets Alive! after living at the local municipal shelter for over 30 days. He was a young (estimated 1 year old), large-sized, mixed-breed, medium-energy dog with an excellent personality. Unfortunately, Mason kept getting overlooked for adoption at the local shelter. Even worse, the shelter was reaching capacity for medium-/large-breed dogs, and they needed to get dogs out as quickly as possible to make space. So Mason joined WPA!
Once in his WPA! foster home, Mason was able to unwind and stay busy with the help of the Kong Toy Grant. In fact, Mason absolutely loved his Kong, and it kept him busy and entertained when his foster mom was at work or had to leave the house. We are so excited that Mason (and his Kong) left to his new home on Aug. 27, 2022, and he is settling in nicely!
