For anyone who follows us online, you’ll know that Happy Doggo Land - our sanctuary - is the main place where we care for dogs. It’s where we bring dogs when they’re sick and it’s where they stay when they’re waiting to be rehomed.

But for some dogs, the land just isn’t the right place for them. That’s why we have a network of places where dogs can go to recover, recuperate, and even live permanently.

Foster care

Recently, we sent Cindy Crawford, the obese dog we found on the streets, to live with Lana. Why? Because she wasn’t losing weight at the land.

She had immediately dropped 10kg in the first couple of months of living with us, but a build-up of sneaked snacks, food pilfering, and general laziness had meant she’d plateaued. We tried everything but it was soon clear she needed to leave the land to lose weight. Within 3 weeks, Cindy had lost another 2kg and was running through the jungle.

We did the same thing with overweight Beagle, McMuffin, in 2023. She went to live with Valeria, one of our helpers, and lost the weight she needed to travel to her forever home.

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Sybille at My Disabled Hairy Friends

We have an incredible network of people who help out at Happy Doggo. One of these is our friend, Sybille, the angel behind My Disabled Hairy Friends.

Sybille is actually a human doctor who works part time in a hospital. That experience gives her invaluable insights into helping disabled dogs. Sybille helps dogs who have spine, leg, hip, and various other issues, many of her own dogs being paralyzed in their back legs.

We often send dogs who have been run over or who need rehabilitation to Sybille to get them stronger. She employs tactics like physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, and acupuncture to get them feeling better.

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Niall's House

Our sanctuary can be quite hectic with people coming and going, dogs barking, deliveries happening and building work going on. That’s not always the ideal environment for a very sick dog or one who is coming to the end of their life. 

That’s when Niall takes the dog home to his own house. A quiet little apartment near the land, the dogs can lie on a comfy sofa and enjoy the air conditioning while they recuperate, or live out their last days in peace and comfort.

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Local protectors

There are some dogs who don’t do well at the land, wouldn’t be suitable for adopting, but are a little too soft to be left to their own devices on the streets. For these dogs, they’re often watched over by kind locals.

These lovely people don’t necessarily take the dogs into their homes (and often, the dogs don’t want that anyway) but they are essentially their owners. They’ll feed them, make sure they have medical care - either bringing them to us or the vets - and generally keep an eye on them.

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The streets

This might seem like a strange thing for a rescue to do, but we regularly put dogs back on the streets. Some dogs are street dogs through and through and just can’t cope with a home environment or being in semi-enclosed spaces at the land.

When this happens, we will get them as well as possible and take them back to the area where they live. We’ve had street dogs try to chew through bars and dig themselves free, howl all day and night, or get themselves into a panic at the sanctuary. When they're like this, being with us is actually detrimental to their healing process.

By putting them back where they came from on the streets (if it’s safe), the dogs feel comfortable and we're able to keep an eye on them while continuing their treatment.

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Dogs, like people, all have different needs and a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for the dogs in our care. We're lucky to have  a variety of options for treating and recuperating our dogs, but the decisions we make aren’t always easy. When we foster dogs out, we miss them; when they go back to the streets, we worry about them; and even when they go to kind locals, we have to make sure they’re getting the care they need.

We don’t always get it 100% right, but judging each situation on its own merits means the dogs get the care and treatment that’s right for them.

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We've dug into the topic a little more in this video:

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Are you interested in adopting a street dog? Check out our Adoptable Dogs.