Volunteering at your local animal shelter is a great way to help save lives. If you are interested in helping homeless dogs, we’d recommend volunteering at a local shelter to help walk the dogs.

Dogs that live in shelter environments often don’t get the exercise and mental stimulation that they crave. These dogs may end up “cage crazy” where they go frantic with pacing, or in the case of Bowie, literally jumping off the walls of their pen.

Bowie was a high energy cross who was extremely sweet and lovable, he would love up on caretakers (almost crawling in their laps) and solicit them for a game of catch. However, his time at the shelter meant lots of time cooped up, and he slowly started to “loose it”. He was still himself as soon as he was out of the cage, but inside it he would leap from wall to wall and bark. The more he did this, the less people wanted to adopt Bowie, so the longer Bowie stayed.

Bowie made people think twice about adopting dogs from this shelter, so the staff decided (off and on) to put Bowie in the back room till he was acting better. However, this meant that he was just more confined and got worse, till one day Bowie was no longer at the shelter. We don’t know what happened to Bowie for sure, he may have won over one of the staff, but it’s not hard to fear the worst.

By volunteering to walk dogs, you may be helping them out in the biggest way possible.