New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Nonprofit provides safe haven for dogs
STAMFORD — About 650 lucky dogs have found a home since a new rescue organization opened in the city in 2020, and much of their luck stems from a mother-daughter duo with a passion for helping dogs in dire situations.
Darien resident Kirstin Mende and her mother, Maria, formed Lucky Dog Refuge just as the pandemic shut down much of the world. Despite the challenges of starting a nonprofit during lockdown — including a longer-than-usual wait time for permit application processing — the “family passion project” has gained steam, filling a needed niche: Mende said Lucky Dog focuses on providing a safe haven to dogs “who are most in need,” including those with medical conditions that are expensive to address and those living in “kill shelters.”
Dogs have made their way to the rescue from around the country — from the Northeast to the South — and even from outside the United States, including the Caribbean and Asia.
For Mende, part of her dedication to finding a permanent home for difficultto-place animals comes from personal experience.
“We have six dogs in our family,” Mende said. “Each time we rescued one, we would track down the rescuers, who are really just good Samaritans.”
She said that years ago she started working with a rescuer in Mississippi to help other dogs in need. She soon learned that many rescues depend on fosters, and if they don’t have enough people to take in dogs, their space fills up and they can’t accept more.
So Mende and her mother looked to open their own facility. Around that time, Mende said she found out about a homeless 10-weekold American Pit Bull Terrier-Labrador Retriever-mix dog in West Virginia “who was just in the most horrific condition.” Believed to have been bitten by another dog, he had a gash extending from his chin to his stomach. A veterinarian recommended the dog be put down.
“Through our network of rescuers that we’d kind of unofficially made during this time, we said, ‘You know what, let’s see if anybody’s willing to do it. Let’s just give him a chance,’” Mende said.
A veterinarian in Lexington, Ky., was willing to try. After a couple months of treatment — including using shirt buttons and string to slowly pull his skin back together — the dog joined the Mende family in Connecticut. They decided to name him Lucky.
Today, he is a happy, healthy “goofball,” Mende said.
Often, “people are concerned about rescues because they’ll think that dogs have lingering trauma, and dogs are just so much more resilient than people,” she said. “All dogs need training, regardless of where they come from.”
Lucky Dog ‘summer camp’
Mende took a winding path to full-time rescue work.
After earning a law degree in 2005, she worked for then-First Lady Laura Bush in the White House. After that, she worked in communications for four years at the National Hockey League before returning to school and earning a master’s degree in art business. From there, she worked for an art insurance company for
several years before it underwent a merger.
At the time, “I said, ‘I’ve done a lot of really great things and I’ve fulfilled a lot of dreams that I had, but now I want to do something that’s less of a job and more of a passion,” Mende recalled.
Mende’s father, coal businessman Hans Mende, has been involved as well, helping with start-up costs.
Kirsten Mende, who works in an unpaid role, said she has learned “an incredible amount” over the past two years from members of Lucky Dog’s staff who had prior experience in dog handling.
“When I started, I didn’t know much,” Mende said. “I just knew I wanted to save dogs.”
A dog’s journey to the rescue includes medical clearance for travel, transport to Connecticut and another health check after arrival. After some time in quarantine at Lucky Dog, they meet other dogs and learn to walk on a leash. Volunteers take the dogs for walks every day.
Following an adoption process, Lucky Dog offers support as dogs settle into
their new homes. Mende said a few dogs have returned to the rescue for reasons that include people finding that having a puppy is more work than they expected or parents learning that their children have allergies.
“And then there’s occasionally a dog that we get that we just don’t find is safe to be adoptable,” she said. In those cases, the dogs have gone to live at a sanctuary near Albany, N.Y.
She said they picked Stamford’s South End as the location for their facility because of its proximity to Interstate 95 and the Stamford Transportation Center. The building is along the river at 36 Pulaski St., and Mende said the staff tries to make the space feel like a “summer camp.”
“It’s a beautiful spot to walk dogs,” Mende said. “The dogs having access to the water both at Lucky Dog and through Harbor Point is very soothing for them. It brings them from a very rural atmosphere into a big city but still gives them that fresh air, the birds, the animals, the water, to calm them down and not feel quite so enclosed
or claustrophobic.”
The role of social media
In Mende’s experience, much of the dog-rescue community communicates over Facebook. She said an outage of the platform, such as the one that occurred last year, can have a major effect on rescuers.
“All of our conversations happen on Facebook Messenger — whether it’s booking transport, (liaising) with other rescues, sending dogs for vetting,” she said. “The way to really network dogs across the United States is by posting them on Facebook, and it just kind of goes viral from there.”
Mende said Lucky Dog also uses social media to highlight its dogs and their transformations as well as raise money for emergency medical procedures. She said the organization tries to keep most of its posts “positive” because people “can very easily get burned out” if they frequently see photos or videos of animals suffering.
“It’s a balance between trying to have people contribute towards the cause without creating this atmosphere of compassion fatigue,” Mende said.
It means “picking those special cases to ... show up on someone’s timeline and say, ‘Hey, I know this is really hard to see or really hard to read, but we really need your help,’ and the rest of the time, we’re going to show you all the really happy stories ... so that when you do see the hard stuff, you know that it’s going to end up in a happy story,” she said.
Beside Lucky, a dog named Halo — the subject of a video by The Dodo — is an example of a happy story. The about-10-year-old dog was found alone in the woods in Mississippi — blind, malnourished and infected with parasites. She lived with a foster family for several months and developed a love for ice cream before coming to Stamford.
Halo has become an “unofficial mascot” for Lucky Dog Refuge, Mende said. She was adopted along with a friend she made at the rescue, a fellow dog from Mississippi named Layne. They visit Lucky Dog regularly.
‘Luckypawlooza’
While Lucky Dog Refuge opened about two years ago, a fundraiser to be held at Mill River Park will serve as its “formal debut” to the community, Mende said.
“Luckypawlooza” is scheduled to take place Oct. 15 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., with live music by the band Blame It On The Dog, food trucks, a beer garden and animals available for adoption.
“It’s really just about bringing the community together and (raising) awareness about the need for adopt-don’t-shop,” Mende said.
Dog-owning attendees are each allowed to bring up to two dogs to the Oct. 15 event, whose rain date is Oct. 22. Proceeds will also go toward efforts to upgrade Mill River Park’s dog run. Tickets can be bought online.
Lucky Dog Refuge was “founded basically at the start of the pandemic but they have this amazing alumni network and an insane number of dogs that they’ve been able to adopt,” said Nette Compton, the president and CEO of the Mill River Park Collaborative. “And this is such a great opportunity to bring that network together and celebrate what they do while also fundraising ... for them to continue to do such amazing work.”