Forever Home Files: Autumn, Bruce, Tiny, Honey, and Musa
Possibly the best part of our work is seeing a dog who was once sick, scared, and struggling in a shelter end up living their best life in a loving forever home. When we first share our Hansel Help recipients, they’ve just been rescued and often look completely different weeks or months later after receiving the care they deserve in a foster or adopter’s home. It never ceases to amaze us how much of a difference proper care and love can make. The five stories we’re featuring today include two of our first-ever pledge recipients — back when we were just getting started by pledging financial support to NYCACC dogs in summer 2023 — plus three pups from one of our newest partners, Perfectly Paired Pitties (P3) Rescue, an organization that was founded just this year.
Autumn from Loving Touch Rescue
This sweet, approx. 6-year-old girl was our second Hansel Help recipient ever! We funded the cost of her benign mammary tumor removal surgery last summer. You can see how amazingly far she’s come, living her best life full of love and joy with her family, compared to the pre-surgery photo below. Thanks to Flushing, NY-based Loving Touch Rescue, she got the care she needed and spent the past year in foster with the family she was destined to be with forever. While it was soon clear Autumn had found her home, the adoption was recently made official when all her rescuers and family could come together to celebrate 🥹.
Bruce from Red Hook Dog Rescue
Another of our earliest Hansel Help recipients, Bruce has always been a fan fave. His new mom, Alex, helped us write up his full story. ❤️ He was returned to the Brooklyn shelter about two years after being adopted as a pup due to a medical crisis in his adoptive family (most animals enter the NYC shelter system due to their family experiencing a medical, economic, and/or housing crisis). Bruce is a very big, sensitive boy who quickly became overwhelmed in the shelter, which landed him on the at risk list. Red Hook Dog Rescue visited him to evaluate his behavior, then after finding out how great he was, pulled him — but also quickly found that he’d become very sick in the shelter and needed emergency medical care.
At the same time as Bruce was in hospital, his intended foster broke his ankle, meaning the rescue had to find a new foster at very short notice! Bruce had a long road to figure out his forever, first with his temp foster Nina, and then he moved up to the Hudson Valley and spent almost a year with his wonderful foster Sarah. Once out of the hospital and recovered from the stress of the shelter, Bruce proved himself to be a really special dog: he is kind and gentle, and loves meeting strangers (he sits nicely when they approach, and then after a few pets he will flop down on his back for belly rubs).
Bruce’s rescuers always joked that he acted like an old man, even though he was barely three years old. Eventually, wondering if some of his behavior could be linked to pain, they decided to get him a full-body X-ray, which uncovered lots of arthritis and broken ribs from an undetermined time in the past, as well as an enlarged heart. His old man behavior in a 3-year-old dog suddenly made a lot more sense.
Despite being a friendly, gentle, handsome dog, Bruce — like many adoptable pets last year — struggled to attract applications during what many rescues anecdotally report to be one of the lowest years for adoptions in recent history.
This summer, so Sarah could travel, Bruce moved into foster with Alex, a Red Hook Dog Rescue volunteer who lives near Sarah in the Hudson Valley. Alex was the volunteer who originally asked Red Hook to pull Bruce, because his stress behavior in the shelter (grabbing his leash and growling to deflect his anxiety into a game of tug) was very similar to Alex’s NYC rescue dog Bono, who had passed several years before of old age.
Bruce settled right in to Alex’s home and they soon became inseparable — the whole neighborhood met him on walks, Alex’s daughter’s sports team would come over to say hi to him after practice, they would do the school run together… he even travelled to a Maine island with them!
Then, as the seasons changed, adoption applications began to pick up again. After a few applications that weren’t quite the right fit (and which ended up with other Red Hook dogs— including NYCACC long stay pup Zeusy Roll), Alex and her family realized that Bruce was, in fact, already home. They finalized the adoption in early November, and now Bruce is forever with the volunteer who first fell in love with him.
We’re so thrilled that this photogenic gentle giant with his own fan club and army of people pulling for him is finally settled!
Tiny from Perfectly Paired Pitties
We originally gave PA-based rescue Perfectly Paired Pitties (aka P3) a grant for the medical care of the too-cute, social-media famous, and still adoptable(!!!) Doc, but thankfully his medical needs were not as extensive as feared. That means P3 was able to use their Hansel Help funding for the care of more pups saved from Prince George’s County, MD, where there is strict BSL and dogs labeled “pit bulls” must be rescued and adopted outside the county. Miss Tiny was one of them. She needed treatment for skin, ear, and respiratory infections, then went to a wonderful foster home and even got her picture with Santa 😍. She got her wish for a forever family for the holidays, complete with a pittie brother to play with.
Honey from Perfectly Paired Pitties
Another pup the remaining funds for P3 was able to support, Honey was a volunteer favorite at Prince George’s County shelter and was picked up just an hour before she was set to be euthanized. P3 founder Sarah says, "Honey, true to her name, is super sweet. When she showed up on the urgent list, everyone kept saying how sweet she is. [She] was spayed and had some trouble with her incision so we took her to the vet to make sure she was ok and there wasn't any sign of infection." Last month, she proved you catch more flies with Honey when she caught a family’s eye on social media and they then adopted her the spot at a P3 adoption event!!! We could not be more thrilled for her or more grateful to her rescue and forever family.
Musa from Perfectly Paired Pitties
Yet another sweetie supported by our Perfectly Paired Pitties grant, Musa (aka Mufasa/Mush/many a cute nickname) is an extremely good boy. Last month Sarah from P3 wrote: "In September he was one of the last dogs on the urgent list and his face just called to me...I couldn't let him die. Our foster, raced to the shelter to pick him up and this poor little guy was nothing but happy and sweet. He only had a body score of 3, he was filthy and had a happy tail (where a dog is just so happy all the time the tip of the tail ends up bleeding from beating against the concrete). We [also] learned he was sick with kennel cough. He was seen at the vet and given antibiotics [and] had his tail examined as well as some other skin issues. The vet noted a lump on the top of his head which she thought could be the equivalent of a happy tail on the head... ie he got so excited to see anyone when he was in his kennel he banged his head. In October it hadn't gotten better and was totally free moving so we decided to have it aspirated, but because Mr. Mushu is so happy and wiggly they didn't get enough cells and we had to do it a second time. At this point they don't think the lump is cancerous but to know for sure it needs to be removed, and the vet feels unless it grows more removing it isn't necessary at this time."
Our funding helped cover his allergy shots and lump aspiration, and soon he was living his best life in his foster — now forever! — family, which includes a pup brother. He was where he was meant to be, and P3 calls that a “foster win.” We couldn’t agree more.
