Last August, Fiona and I gave a ride to a young pit bull rescued from the Hartford Pound. It took the efforts of several people to save the young dog.

First, Sherry, an animal control officer in Hartford reached out to people that might be able to help. A woman in Maine had a place where the dog could be fostered, if there was some way to get her up to Maine. Fiona and I couldn’t drive up on the day that the dog needed to be picked up from the pound, so another person pulled the dog from the Hartford Pound and took her over to the Sadie Mae Foundation where she stayed for a couple days. Finally, Fiona and I picked her up and drove her up to Maine. Another woman picked her up from us and brought her to her foster home. Eventually, she found her forever home.

After the trip, I set up a mailing list for the CTUnderhound Railroad. Over the past half year, we’ve set up a website, a group and fan page on Facebook and have touched the lives of many dogs. As we look at our next half year, we’ve been thinking back over the past half year, and how we can be most effective.

Besides finding homes for dogs in need, we also need to work to make sure that there are fewer dogs that end up in the shelters, and we’ve worked hard to encourage spay and neuter programs. We also want to encourage town animal shelters to adopt best practices to make sure that these dogs find safe homes as quickly as possible.

The group has worked together to create a spreadsheet of town shelters as well as to reach out to various animal control officers. Currently, we are listing the Petfinder pages of forty-four town shelters on the CT Underhound Railroad Shelters Page.

This morning, I did a quick census of dogs on these pages. I counted 125 different dogs of twenty eight different breeds in these shelters looking for homes. Almost half of them are pit bulls. Pit bulls can be wonderful pets when they are properly taken care of, and I hope that people looking for a new pet seriously consider adopting a pit bull. However, I realize that for some people that is not an option and there are many other wonderful dogs in the shelter of Connecticut. If you are looking, please spend time looking through this list and seeing if there is dog that meets your needs.

The first half year of the CT Underhound Railroad has been more successful than I ever imagined it would be when we first started, and hopefully the second half of our first year will be even more so.