Old Dog Haven finds new homes for old dogs

If an elderly dog ends up in an animal shelter, it is not good news. A 12-year-old dog with cancer is considered unadoptable, and shelters will most often put them down.

“Amazingly, people take their elderly dog to shelters and surrender them,” says Mountlake Terrace’s Melanie Granfors. “Sometimes people have died and they left their dog to family members who can’t care for them or don’t want them. Sometimes they can’t take care of an elderly dog anymore because there are needs. Sometimes it’s inconvenient to have an elderly dog.”

Since 2011 Melanie has adopted eight elderly dogs through Old Dog Haven, a non-profit that rescues old dogs from shelters, places them in permanent homes and pays all the medical bills. Right now she has Coco, a blind 10-year-old dog with what she calls “in-control cancer” and Stella, a 16-year-old chocolate Lab with cancer.

Both dogs would have been euthanized if Melanie hadn’t taken them in.

“What they need is hospice care and that’s what we’re doing. We run assisted living, in our homes, for dogs. So the mornings are: get up, everybody line up for their morning pills, their morning special diet, then their walk. It’s like a little hospice, a little nursing home.”

On the wall in Melanie’s living room are rows of 8×10 portraits, a memorial to all the elderly dogs she’s adopted over the years. She was able to have about a year with most of them.

“People say, ‘Oh my goodness, how can you do that work? You take an older dog and you’re going to have to say goodbye.’ I look at it as joyful work. I look at it as providing happy endings. They come, sometimes, in terrible shape and once we get them basic medical care, that’s all paid for by Old Dog Haven, they start to thrive. They can live with blindness, they can live with cancer, as both of mine are. It’s joyful work.”

Old Dog Haven was started by Lee and Judith Piper in 2005 and they currently have 265 elderly dogs in permanent foster homes. Thanks to generous donors they can afford to pay $40,000 in medical bills each month. That way, the foster parents are able to give the dogs a warm, loving home during the last months or years of their lives.

“Waldo was the 15-year-old Dachshund,” Melanie says, pointing to a picture of a sweet faced brown dog. “He came to us shivering, quivering, whining, absolutely frightened out of his mind. He’d lost his home of fifteen years. But within a few weeks he was doing what they called the Happy Dance. Every single morning he got up and would run out and dance in circles and just wake the whole family up. His shelter name was Happy.”

Of course it’s tough when these foster parents have to put a dog down, but they would never trade the love and companionship they get from these sweet, old pups.

“I think it’s an honor to be able to escort them into that phase rather than have them be turned into a shelter and die alone.”

Visit Old Dog Haven to apply to foster a dog or to make a donation.