Sunny Paws, A New Dog Rescue, Seeking Foster Homes And Volunteers
Seven years ago, a rescue dog named Sunny changed Toni Eaton’s life forever.
The senior dog had been abandoned by his late owner’s wife, who left him tied to the porch after she moved away. Rescue personnel in Arkansas, where Sunny had been left, spent nearly a month trying to trap him after he escaped, but when the neighbor at his temporary foster home threatened to harm Sunny if he escaped again, the search for a forever home quickly turned urgent.
“It was unbelievable,” Ms. Eaton said. “I can’t explain it, something was ignited inside of me and I knew that we needed to help this dog. In fact, I didn’t even tell my husband. My daughter and I loaded ourselves up in the car the following Saturday night and we drove to Connecticut to pick him up. We pulled over at this desolate, dark, quiet rest stop and we got him and ever since then, we were hooked on rescue.”
Although Sunny died a few years ago, he and his memory live on as the namesake of Ms. Eaton’s newly opened nonprofit, Sunny Paws Rescue. Since going live with the operation—which is currently an online rescue and adoption agency—in October, Ms. Eaton and her volunteers have saved more than 50 dogs that might have otherwise been euthanized, further abused, or left to fend for themselves.
“We’re a smaller, foster-based rescue,” she said. “We try really hard to adopt our puppies and dogs before they arrive. If we cannot, then they go into a foster home until we can find them their forever home.”
Ms. Eaton’s professional background is in nursing and hospice care, which she said translates well into her rescue work. As president and CEO of Old Colony Hospice & Palliative Care, she works with other health professionals to make patients comfortable during the final stages of their lives and comforts their loved ones during the hardest moments. Through rescue, she is able to help comfort and transform the lives of dogs who have been discarded, forgotten and mistreated by getting them into safe, loving forever homes.
“It’s actually kind of interesting how it parallels,” Ms. Eaton said. “The passion that I have for my profession is the same passion I have for rescue in my personal life. It’s really, to me, about doing the best that you can for vulnerable populations.”
Currently, Ms. Eaton’s staff at Sunny Paws is entirely made up of volunteers who handle everything from fundraising and community outreach to foster coordination and adoption screenings. In the future, Ms. Eaton said, her long-term goal is to establish a physical rescue home for Sunny Paws, ideally in Falmouth. The organization is beginning to fundraise with the hopes of raising enough money for a down payment should the right property come along.
There tends to be particularly large numbers of dogs in need in Southern states, Ms. Eaton said. She currently works with several Texas-based partners who alert her when they have dogs in need of placement.
The number of dogs Sunny Paws can take at any given time is dependent upon how many foster and adoptive homes it has ready for placement, but that will change once there is a physical space that the organization can call home. In the meantime, Ms. Eaton said, Sunny Paws is looking to expand its volunteer base of foster homes to care for dogs in the short term until they can be placed permanently.
“That’s our greatest need right now because the more foster homes we have, the more dogs we can save,” Ms. Eaton said.
Networking is a huge component of rescue and is often how dogs find loving, permanent homes, so Sunny Paws asks its foster parents to spread the word through any social circles they might belong to. Sunny Paws also covers the entire cost of the foster period—including veterinarian bills, food and even transportation to Massachusetts if the dog is out of state—so interested people can volunteer to foster dogs at no personal cost.
“It’s really a commitment that people will provide love and care and safety for these dogs and puppies while we go through the adoption process,” Ms. Eaton said.
Rescue and foster work is a deeply rewarding endeavor, Ms. Eaton said. Probably the most typical fear for foster dog parents is getting too attached, but Sunny Paws has a mantra to dissuade that: “Your heart breaks a little so theirs doesn’t have to.”
“A lot of the times, I hear the backstories of how these puppies and dogs are found and oftentimes the stories are so sad and, unfortunately, sometimes gruesome,” Ms. Eaton said. “It can keep you up at night, some of the cruel things that happen to these dogs. And then they come, and the second that the adopter sees that dog, and [you see] the look on their face—especially the ones who get really emotional and start to cry. Over time they post pictures on our Facebook page or they’ll send me pictures, [and] it’s a feeling of ‘we can’t save them all, but we made a real difference today.’”
Ms. Eaton encourages anyone interested in volunteering, fostering or learning more to visit www.sunnypawsrescue.org.