FRECKLES THE HERO!

What do you do in a life-threatening emergency when you have 15 dogs and you’re passed out on the floor?

A Conversation with Cherished Tails Foster Shelly Lambert

My husband Dan and I moved here from Iowa in November 2014, and the next spring I told him I wanted to foster. He said “Shel, we just left the kids and grandkids in Iowa, WHAT are you talking about?“

I told him “I don’t want to foster kids, I want to foster dogs!” We started in the spring of 2015 with Pinal County and Valley Humane, and we got in with Happy Tails Dachshund Rescue. After a while, I quit fostering with those groups and I was kind of in between.

Then some parents of Dan’s students contacted us and said “We have to move and we can only take one dog, can you help us?” We ended up getting two 11 year-old dachshunds and a 14 year-old black lab. I got online and started asking people if they could help us out, and somebody suggested we contact Pauline (Haas-Vaughn, CTSS Executive Director). That was in September 2017, shortly after she had started Cherished Tails in July 2017.

Since then we’ve drank the Kool-Aid, ate the cookies, and bought the t-shirts. Whatever you want to call it, we both did it, we totally love this rescue! If it weren’t for Pauline, we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing here. I don’t know what it is about Pauline: animals love her, people love her, and she’s someone that very easily gets her point across in a way that doesn’t offend people (unless she really wants to).

Dan and Shelly with Alice, the mischievous Corgi.

How many dogs have you fostered over the years?

We only have six today. That makes 13 dogs in our home. We have seven of our own, and we’re going to be getting another foster soon. We focus mostly on adoptable dogs. We have two little girls that were part of a Buckeye hoarding situation three years ago and they’re still feral. We’re trying to get them settled in, even after all this time. The other day one of them got out the gate and she actually let me pick her up, so we’re making great strides.

Before we got in with Cherished Tails we were working with another rescue, and there was one spring when we had 34 dogs. There were 24 puppies under three months old, and we had our own dogs. Freckles was one of the puppies. He’s a Catahoula and the only big dog we have, the rest are little ones.

I do have to make sure I can catch the feral girls and get them crated, though, because Freckles is good with puppies, but not with adult dogs. But he’s my baby, I’ve had him since he was three days old. He turned eight in November, and I’m not willing to give him up.

The last two of our foster dogs that got adopted were numbers 744 and 745 since we started doing rescue work.

King Freckles

The Catahoula got promoted from “Prince Freckles“ to “King Freckles“ two years ago after we had a power outage. There were something like 400 poles that broke in a wind storm, and the power was out for four days. We’d borrowed a generator, but the wind changed direction and blew fumes into the house during the night. Freckles went nuts and woke us up, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.

Dan went out to the garage to turn off the generator and then he passed out, so when Freckles woke me up I got the dogs out of the house. He was the last one still inside and he was fading fast, so I had to drag him out, because he weighs 90 pounds and I couldn’t lift him. I got him to the patio and started pouring cold water on him to get his body temperature down, and he was okay. By the time Dan regained consciousness and found me I’d fallen and hit my head, and my face was covered in blood. It was crazy.

We had five dogs of our own at the time, and we were fostering, so we had 15 dogs here. One of the schools over in Toltec opened up their gym for a shelter where you could bring your pets, but they had to be crated. 15 dogs in crates, and one of them 90 pounds? How were we going to do that? Plus we had birds, turtles and fish, so we just stayed here.

This was in July and it was about 118°. I set up cake pans and pie plates, and a coworker brought over some battery operated fans. Arizona Power Service was handing out ice, so we were able to fill up our little chest freezer and keep refilling the ice for the dogs. Freckles had to be in the crate, and so did the two little feral dogs. We kept blowing the fans across the pans of ice to keep the dogs cooled off, and it worked! Although, we did spend a small fortune on D cell batteries.

Tell us another success story?

Mauricio, now Mario, with his new best friend

We had a guy named Mauricio that came from Yuma. We don’t know exactly what happened to him, and that’s probably a good thing, because I’d be in trouble. I don’t tolerate people abusing dogs.

Mauricio was shutting down; we didn’t even have to close his crate because he wouldn’t come out of it for any reason. After a while, he started coming out to do what I called a “hit and run” on my toes. I’m usually barefoot, and he would come and give me a little nip. He wasn’t really biting, it was sort of a lick-bite. Then he would turn around and look at me like he was laughing, and head right back into his crate.

We had him for six months before we felt he was ready to go to adoption events, and at the first few his feet didn’t even touch the floor. The automatic doors at Petsmart terrified him, the shopping carts and the people terrorized him. We handed him around from person to person so he would learn not everybody’s bad.

15 months after we got him, he was adopted by a couple with a Chihuahua, and now he’s living the good life! When we met up with them in Pichacho and put him down on the ground, Mauricio immediately trotted up to the gentleman and climbed into his lap, it was like he knew that was going to be his new best friend. Dan and I both started bawling, because he’d never done that before with anybody. Every year they send me pictures at Thanksgiving to let us know how he’s doing.

What’s your goal with your rescue work?

To someday put the shelters out of business! We are trying to get as many dogs as we can out alive, and then to teach them that not every human is a jerk. I tell people when adopt from us they’re saving two lives: the dog they’re adopting, and the dog we get to pull out of the shelter because we have an opening in our house.

What would it take to put the shelters out of business?

Everybody needs to get their dogs spayed and neutered! Don’t let them breed.