2007.02.08 Thu

These are just a few of the animals who have wound up at ARK for one reason or another. We’re doing our best to care for them by preventing any new stress from developing, ensuring their physical and mental health, and making their lives as carefree as possible. Health care is of course one of the most important things to keep in mind, but giving the dogs proper walks and using physical contact at appropriate times are also vital to lessening their stress. The last part of our care-giving entails making sure that the enclosures where the dogs spend most of their day are comfortable.


Being able to see through the fence of an enclosure into a neighboring dog’s enclosure may cause a great deal of stress in some dogs. From a person’s perspective, this kind of setup is convenient for maintaining and watching over the animals, and for allowing visitors to see many dogs at once. It also allows for a nice breeze.

But imagine yourself living in a house where you can see your neighbors, and your neighbors can look right in at you all the time...it would probably be a tad uncomfortable, right? Well, this is especially true for dogs, who may lack a sense of security. And if a dog can see too much of what’s around him, he’ll get overly excited from all the sensory information, and won’t be able to relax. There are some dogs at ARK who have lost a bit of weight from this, and others who have gotten into fights through the fence and been injured.


To put a stop to the fighting that happens through the enclosure fences, we try changing around the living quarters of the offending dogs, or sometimes hanging up a piece of plywood that blocks eye contact between neighboring dogs. But some dogs will scratch or chew on the plywood, and the whole area starts to look bad when patches of plywood are stuck up everywhere. We’re always trying to find better materials or methods to solve this problem. Ideally, we’d like to find some material to use to block eye contact between dogs that could withstand scratching and biting, remain strong despite harsh weather conditions, cause little damage to the mouths of dogs that bite it, and lastly, still manage to look pleasing to the eye. Some may wonder why we care if it’s ‘pleasing to the eye’ when all we’re using it for is preventing dogs from seeing each other. But we at ARK take the beauty of our surroundings very seriously.

We can, technically, spend money on buying proper materials for this task, but looking at our budget as a whole, it may be a bit difficult. If there are any construction-oriented people out there, or anybody with an idea for us, please give us a hand in figuring this out. Also, if anyone out there has some extra materials we might be able to use, please, please do bring us some. We’d be so grateful.


All we want to do is provide a happy environment for our animals to live in until they head off to the home they’re destined for. There may be some who stay here until their very last days – we’re working for them too. Without your help, we wouldn’t be able to save anyone.