It started with a single post about a pregnant dog struggling to survive near the dump in Grassy Narrows. When PetSave agreed to help, the situation quickly grew into something much larger.
In this episode, we hear how PetSave, Flights for Hope, community members and other rescue organizations began coordinating a major northern rescue effort. A PetSave crew travelled roughly 17 hours from Sudbury to assess the situation, while a Bark Bus was dispatched to help transport dogs out of the community.
Once on the ground, the team discovered many more dogs needing assistance, including a surrender list estimated at 25 to 30 dogs. The mission involves catching skittish community dogs, supplying food, arranging transportation, coordinating foster and rescue placements, and dealing with the realities of working in a remote northern environment.
But simply transporting dogs south is only part of the solution.
PetSave is also looking at the root of the problem by helping communities access spay services and veterinary care. The transcript describes residents travelling more than five hours for veterinary services, while PetSave works to help cover spay costs and connect northern residents with veterinary support, including telemedicine where possible.
Perhaps the biggest story is the network itself. Flights, buses, vehicles, rescue groups, fosters and volunteers across Ontario are coming together to move animals from remote northern communities to places where they can receive care and eventually find homes. As the episode puts it, animals may travel by “planes, trains and automobiles” — whatever it takes to get them help.
One dog started the call for help. Now an entire network is responding.
Follow the continuing PetSave rescue effort at LoveTheNorth.ca.
From One Dog to a Bark Bus: The Grassy Narrows Rescue Mission
Explore more Northern Ontario video podcasts. Read this episode's transcript.
Description
Transcript ~2,745 words · ~14 min read
Hey everyone it's Eric here from Love the North and it's another PetSave episode. Talking about what's going on in the grassy Narrows. Joel and the PetSave crew have sent a crew up there 17 hours from Sudbury to go and
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round up the wild animals. The dogs. Is there any cats? No we haven't heard of any cats up there. There may be the odd one.(...) So how goes the battle? Well you know there's always challenges. So first I'll tell you how we actually got into this. And this is what I say about rescue. How you fall into situations or how I fell into rescue. It's all just from circumstance. So(...) there is a group called(...) Flights for Hope. They're an amazing group and you might want to follow them. They're they just do amazing work. They're it's a lady out of southern Ontario and what she does is she raises money to fly dogs. So you know one of the communities one of the usually the first nation community somebody will post of a dog saying we need to get this dog out. Either injured pregnant you know or just a community dog needs to leave.(...) Has no owners so you know they they post. Everybody works with it. We have you know amazing the people in the community love their animals and they really want the help. So now they have a way of reaching out. So they reach out through Flights for Hope(...) and say here you know here. And so that's what happened with this particular case how it got started.
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Lee is one of our real estate people here. Big supporter.
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At least Filion and she messages me regularly and she messaged me this one. She said look at this there's a dog in the dump.
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Up in grassy narrows because a lot of dogs in the communities will hang out at the dumps because that's where they can scavenge for food right. So it's survival.(...) So she sent me the message and I've always told Flights for Hope if you get stuck I'll take it but please always find someone else. But as a last resort I will help out. So I looked at where it was and I thought oh they're probably not going to get a lot of response on that one. So I wrote in said I'll take the dog. So then of course they connect us into the people in the community and say you know who's who's who was the person who's initiating it. Who wants who's our contact and how do we get this dog. So it all started with this pregnant dog that was starving to death out at the grassy narrows dump. And and so the community wanted to help her and and so we went up there we you know told the group will take it we'll make flight arrangements trucking arrangements into Thunder Bay and then flight from Thunder Bay to us. However it's proved to be a little more challenging trying to catch the dog. So she's kind of feral.(...) Yeah so when they're feral dogs they've been you know they're they're not trusting. They've usually spent a lot of time out in the community. And so they don't really have a connection with people. So very skittish. So over the days we kind of watched on through videos that they were struggling and unable to catch her. So I said well you know what why don't we send a crew up there because as we talked about this over a few days of trying to catch this dog we now learn of the situation in the area. How many dogs there are how many community dogs and how much help they really need. So then we start talking and they said well(...) you know there's there's all these dogs up here and we don't really have any help much anymore. There's a couple groups that do the in their area they do what they can. Chris Madison's group is amazing.
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You know and Aaron from Northern Reach is very good. So you know they're everybody tries to do what they can. They're limited in space and area up there right. So I said okay we'll we'll we'll look at the numbers and then when we ran the numbers we thought you know what let's ask for a bark bus. So I contacted Craig Fielding said can we get a bark bus up there.(...) Once I learned of the numbers and so what we did was we put together with a group the bark bus left this morning and there it's headed to Grassy Narrows and our crew I sent up earlier this week to kind of just assess put a plan in place how they're going to capture them. Because we actually have to share the dump with the bears. And so when I talked to Chris Madison I said well apparently there's a few bears in the dump well she kind of giggled too. She said a few is that what you've been told.(...) So they started sending us videos of how many bears. So actually our people have kind of befriended them in the last couple of days. They seem harmless(...) you know but they're they're bears so you have to be very cautious. And there's mama bears there with cubs. They're sending me all sorts of pictures of the cubs up in the trees and you know mama's in the dump and some of the bears there's there's quite a few bears. There's there's probably over 20 bears. Oh yeah sitting around hanging out. And(...) you know they can have the dump. We just want the dogs. We just want to get the dogs out. So I've told my crew like if you can be sent I told them you know it's got some apples and sardines and stuff and try feeding them on one side of the dump. Well you try to catch the dogs on the other side of the dump. So anyways I've gotten a few this morning so that's a good thing. They're out there today they did an assessment yesterday and now they're out catching the dogs today. So how many dogs do you think you're going to capture? Well we don't know and then there's a surrender list right of people who have had their dogs it really can't take or maybe have multiple dogs they're looking to actually surrender their dogs and get them out of the community. So apparently that list has 25 or 30. Now the bark bus will carry 25 adults creates it's the small bark bus because again we don't know the well we don't exactly have to make sure what kind of roads there are. So our first trip in it's looking pretty good so I think we could eventually send up maybe a bigger bus but so for now we'll send this one and we may do another trip just to help accommodate the numbers that they're asking for.(...) And at the same time we've learned that they actually do have a relationship with a vet but they have to drive five and a half hours to that vet. And they actually drive to London. I know yeah well they have five and a half hours so they're going to Manitoba. They actually go to a vet clinic a mobile vet clinic across Manitoba border and they're getting an extremely good price. So what we've done is(...) I've told them that I will take all their litters if they can arrange transportation I'll with pet save will raise money and pay for those spays across the border for them.(...) So until we can get them help up there right it just kind of like you have to hit it at the root cause which is you know(...) yeah you got to spay them because you can keep removing animals but it's only a band-aid. So we need to tackle the females and get them all spayed and that's how we stop populations right and we stop the suffering and we stop the dump dogs and all the sad stories. So the communities you know was very anxious to take our help and they're happy to work with us just hoping all will go well on the first trip and then we'll look make a plan to return again. Well(...) it's been weeks in the making and you know it's a lot of money so you know just to send a bark bus to send our crews up like we're probably looking almost ten thousand dollars. So and I also called in food but a week and a half ago I called in food to start feeding them and to start just helping the community. So we sent a couple thousand dollars from a vendor in in Kenora and and then we've brought up food on the first load and the bark bus had more food this morning when it left. So we're going to try feeding them all getting them all you know so we can keep them healthy so we can try and keep you know violent fights between the dogs down for food and try and keep them out of the dump because that would be ideal is not to have to deal with the bears when we need to deal with the dogs. So when you when all the when the bark bus comes back(...) where are they going what's going to happen? Well Kim and Richard are up there right now and they're working with the community members and some support people and Chris Madison gave us one of their people's well for support to help out.(...) So we're going to load them all the bark bus will probably arrive Saturday morning so we'll be looking for help for Saturday morning. We're going to kennel them here but they're not staying like unless anything is really injured or you know perhaps temperamental or maybe you know we off previous loads we keep what they think are biters but actually once they settle in they're great dogs they just need food and some TLC.
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No I ain't no ankle butters up there they're all big dogs.(...) So anyways yeah so we're we're we're gonna we've been in touch with flights for hope posted that I'm going up now for a load and so we call out to all the province for rescues particularly in southern Ontario's and stays any southern partners that can help us out. So throw me a bone Canada out of Perry Sound they're helping out with the mom pups.
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We've got lost boys at a berry who help us up on the cassettes one. And took over 100 in the last load(...) and she's regularly taking out of the north so God bless her her and her team for all the work they do and it's about us banding together. I've got Niagara groups I've got several groups now that have come forward so they'll post again for me today and and help you know try and get these animals out because we can't keep them. There are too many animals in our area I haven't helped much in the last year or two in fact even with the fires you know Hill science sent up a skid of food thinking you know I was taking animals I always did for 27 years but I can't anymore. So we're too busy just in our own local community trying to get things under control in Sudbury and our outlying area and the north here. So they will go to southern Ontario eventually. And that's the power of the network. That's the power of the network it's incredible social media has made it possible for all of us to connect. I would have never known about all these groups in the province and there's actually somebody who's putting our registry together of all the rescues in Ontario and it's a staggering number. When you compare it to like SPCAs who are usually in just major centers if you actually look at you know SPCAs make up a tiny portion in this province and humane societies we the the rescue community massive the massive numbers. I'll bet you I would say easily 95 percent of all animals in this province end up in rescue care because(...) of the social media the networks the each each rescue building their own communities the people in their communities I mean every community you have over 75 percent of every community owns a pet and they're and we're made up of animal lovers right a lot of people are animal lovers so you know that's how I met you so so when you think about it you would just add to your network right now you're spreading the message we have networks that do all sorts of different things for us so the flights for hopes which it started with one single post(...) for one dog has turned into a bark bus with now a second one planning to go up you know in the weeks to come so uh yeah it's it's it happens just like that that fast all of a sudden pictures start arriving videos start arriving and then you're seeing the true picture of what goes on in the community and now there's five communities because actually one of the outline communities to grassy narrows has also contacted us and said we have a mom and seven pups that need to get out so we'll we'll put them on the load to come back as well tomorrow and we'll learn more about those communities and how we can help them
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we(...) don't have it in that area however there are rail cars that go up through the musliny area and a lot of times animals are transported through other networks that do use the rail so animals fly they'll boat it they'll rail it i mean planes trains and automobiles right that's that's that's it's all working for the animals so in the network so again the bark bus is coming back saturday saturday morning the bark bus will be back we're actually looking for either a foster homes to help out we're gonna look for people to help out because we'll have to assess all the dogs where we've got some you know it may require some vetting and our our vets are on standby in fact today our vet is conferring with with a gentleman up there who has a badly injured dog but he doesn't want to give it up and he shouldn't have to right he loves his dog he just needs help and so we're providing that link to our vet who does mobile license care and and and veterinarian care so she will through telemedicine today because telemedicine especially became huge during covid when a lot of people couldn't go into their vet offices so a lot of vets started this telemedicine well it's actually been a really good thing for the north because widespread and our geographics it makes for an excellent(...) option so this gentleman's going to do telemedicine with our vet and he will get the medication required for it to for his injured dog so for saturday morning for anyone that wants to or is able to help out that's right give us a call so text me at 705-662-2352 for saturday morning if you can help out you can foster if you can donate so luke and john smith john smith's been a big john smith royalty big supporter for the last 20 plus years um lise filio as well as real estate our real estate buds each put up 500 bucks for us to do this trip and so we're going to be fundraising today to try and get some more funds together to help help these animals and then get them onto our southern partners(...) joel that's uh that's enough to keep anyone busy for a while yep so yeah we appreciate and again just join love the north and and and you know you'll hear what's going on in pet save and throughout the north we'll see you soon all right ciao
