What Is It Like to Live With 130 Rescue Dogs?

Not heaven nor hell, something in between

My mother has 130 rescue dogs. It might be 140 — for all I know, the numbers keep going up.

It all started when we first moved from our apartment in metropolitan Rio to a small town in the mountains when I was 11. On the 2h road trip between the two cities, it’s inevitable to pass by a few dozen abandoned dogs.

Since we were now going to be living in a house with a garden, my mother picked up one of these dogs and took him home. We named him Ringo. I think it must have been my idea because I was a huge Beatles fan at that time.

That small act of kindness opened a pandora’s box.

Within a year, my mother had collected another 10 dogs and 6 cats. Once it started, it never stopped. As long as we had space and could afford to feed them, we kept on rescuing them.

But until then, things were pretty much under control.

Until tragedy struck.

A Tsunami of Dogs

In January 2011, my mother’s town was the epicenter of a natural catastrophe, which left over 1000 people dead. Unprecedented levels of rain led to massive landslides and flooding.

The valley, where my mother lives, was one of the worst-hit areas. The morning after the rain, she and her boyfriend went down to the river to find that their entire neighborhood was gone. Her house is on a small hill, away from any steep mountain faces, so it was one of the few to be spared from destruction.

Rescue workers were already on the scene. Mud and rubble everywhere. Then the dogs started to appear, hundreds of them. They had lost their families due to the flood but somehow managed to survive.

Overnight, my mother went from having 40 dogs to over 100 dogs. And despite our efforts, there aren’t enough homes for all of them to be adopted into.

Elsewhere in the region, all of our animal protection colleagues rescued another 1000 dogs during that week alone.

So this is what home looks like for us since then.

Welcome to Dog Haven!

Get ready to see dogs everywhere. Because they ARE everywhere. Look behind you. Dogs. On the walls. Dogs.

My mother lives on a farm so there’s plenty of space and it’s really nice to be surrounded by dogs. But still, you can’t fail to notice that it is a hell of a lot of dogs.

You have spectators when you go to the toilet.

I get mixed reactions when I tell people what my home is like back in Brazil. Some think it’s a dream, and looking at our photos, I can see why. Some think it’s madness, and I agree there’s a degree of madness there.

Sometimes it is a blessing.

The dog who you see swimming with me lost movement in both her back legs because of an accident. Since she moved in with us she has been doing her own physiotherapy sessions every day in the swimming pool.

After a few years, she was able to walk again, despite the negative prospects from the vets.

Other times it can feel a bit overwhelming.

This is my nephew Beni, accurately portraying what it can feel like to have so many dogs around you all the time.

Beni is on the autism spectrum. He loves the dogs and knows all their names by heart. And when you have over 100 dogs, you start to get creative with names.

My mother is diabetic so she names a lot of the dogs after the sweets and desserts that she’s not allowed to eat.

Stepping on dog poop is a daily occurrence.

A Minefield. That’s how our mother describes her lawn. With the right attitude, you can eventually start to see some beauty in it. The butterflies seem to like them.

There’s a lot of logistics involved.

Each group of 5 to 7 dogs has its own kennel. They take turns during the day to go for walks. Some groups fight with other groups, so it’s complex logistics.

We write their names on the kennel doors so we don’t mix them up when they go back in. Once they established themselves in their groups they become families. You can imagine how disappointing it would be to end up in a kennel that’s not yours.

You get to spend your days in rags.

And after a trip to the garden, the rags go straight into the washing machine. This is actually great.

When I visit my mother, all I need to pack is a couple of pajama pants and some old t-shirts. It suits me well.

You don’t know anymore what’s a dog and what’s home decor.

Would that be 03 cushions and a dog or 03 dogs and a cushion? Oh, and a baby.

Dogs start featuring in your dreams and then onto your paintings.

Before you know it, they have slipped into your subconscious and there’s no way to get them out.

Whenever and wherever you sit down it looks like this.

The best thing about rescue dogs is the gratitude you see on their faces.

You develop a strong immune system.

All the bacteria and worms you could get, you would have gotten by the time you’re 5. I’m joking. We do take a worming tablet once a year just for guarantee.

All the dogs are vaccinated and dewormed. But overall, I do think we have a stronger immune system than average from growing up with all these dogs.

Now to the Less Romantic Side

There’s no official public service to care for stray dogs or animal abuse crimes where my mother lives so we became that service.

As soon as people start to learn that you care for abandoned dogs, they start to drop boxes full of them at your door during the night.

Eventually, you also start to get calls from people denouncing mistreatment, and you go out to help because you just can’t sleep knowing that an animal is suffering.

You become a detective

We installed a camera by our gate and collect evidence of animal cruelty and abandonment cases. My mother and her lawyer friend then seek legal justice against those crimes.

But, unfortunately, in Brazil, these efforts are just as good as trying to dry an iceberg with a cloth. The more you rub, the wetter it gets and there’s no end in sight.

The miracle of birth becomes nothing more than a bunch of puppies you’re going to have to find homes for.

In the beginning, before the 2011 tragedy, we joined the local community of animal protectors and attended the adoption fair every weekend trying to find homes for the stray dogs we fostered. After the tragedy, we gave up on that. There are way too many dogs and not enough homes.

If they’re puppies, our friends still advertise them online for adoption, but there’s no hope for the older dogs.

And then, there’s the noise

Nothing screams ‘home’ for me louder than the sound of 100 barking dogs. You can hear them from miles away. As soon as the dogs notice a car driving up our road, they will all start barking in unison.

There’s no such thing as arriving discretely, which can be frustrating for a teenager coming home from a party hoping that their parents will be asleep. That’s not something I’m familiar with.

But there are other peculiarities related to the noise.

You get in trouble with the neighbors

Not everybody appreciates what you’re doing for the dogs.

My mother had to move out of her previous home because her neighbor was throwing homemade bombs onto our garden. I can understand how maddening the noise can be but throwing Molotov cocktails onto your neighbor’s garden seems a bit over the top, even for Brazilian standards.

One of these bombs once landed in our swimming pool and it looked like a nuclear explosion. Luckily no one was hurt. But, it worked. My mother got scared and we ended up moving a bit further out into the countryside.

There were no neighbors around her land when she bought her current house. The people who moved there afterward knew of the problem when they decided to buy their houses.

In any case, they still sue her, all the time. There has not been one single year in the last two decades when my mother wasn’t involved in a legal case because of the noise.

She’s always won, so far. Since there is no facility to accommodate stray dogs in her town, the judges understand that she’s providing an indispensable public service and help her out. But it’s still a big pain in the ass.

You are very careful at night

Once it gets dark and the dogs fall asleep, you finally have some silence. It feels so precious that you don’t want to disturb the new status quo. We also don’t want the dogs to wake up the neighbors after 10 pm.

So we walk around at night like burglars in our own home. Tiptoeing our way around and trying not to drop anything.

Any noise can wake up one dog and then it’s the domino effect. Once it starts it doesn’t stop. So we need to be careful.

And there’s the occasional death threat

My mother has received a few death threats since she started helping the dogs. It’s usually from animal abusers who she denounces to the police.

One case was against a local hotel tycoon who went bankrupt and left his dogs to starve to death. Another time it was from a crack addict who had burnt his dog with cooking oil.

This side of life with rescue dogs is not pretty and to be honest, we would much rather not have all these dogs. The real dog heaven would be a world where everyone looked after their pets responsibly and did their share.

What is the solution?

If we are ever going to see light at the end of the tunnel it needs to start from the people.

Understand that castration is an act of kindness

There’s a large share of radical religious people in my mother’s town who believe that God is against castration. Even when castration is offered for free, they refuse to castrate their dogs. They argue that God made them with uteruses and testicles therefore they have the right to procreate.

Funnily enough, these are the same people that think God is fine with them throwing a bag full of newborn puppies into a river. We’ve tried to argue on occasions but they fail to see this hypocrisy.

We are never going to solve the overpopulation problem if people continue to allow their dogs to breed out of control. Castration is the only way to tackle this, but people have to be willing to do it.

Stop buying dogs and start adopting

In Brazil, it’s still common for people to buy fashionable dogs, and when the trend passes, they release their dogs on the streets and buy the latest model. As soon as there’s a new Hollywood movie featuring a new breed of dog, you can be sure my mother will get some of those a few months down the line.

It was true with Jack Russel terriers after The Mask, with Jim Carrey, dalmatians after the release of the 1996 101 Dalmatians, and labrador retrievers after Marley and Me, not to mention the ones that appear in the local soap operas.

We fail to understand why people insist on breeding their dogs and buying pure breeds when there are enough dogs in need of a home.

If everyone starts to see dogs for the sentient beings that they are deserving of love and affection, instead of using them as fashion items, we might have a chance of resolving this problem.

Until then, my mother’s work is just another attempt to stop a wildfire with a bucket of water.

Thank you for reading.

If you are interested, you may read the following article about how helping a stray cat got me a dream marketing job at Coca-Cola.