Wake County is growing exponentially and that keeps our staff especially busy. But are they too busy for love? Too busy to save a life? One stressed-out TeamWake member thought so, until a weekend assignment and a four-legged goofball changed her mind and opened her heart!
Last fall, the Wake County Communications team received a call from our Animal Services Director, Dr. Jenn Federico: the shelter was again reaching an alarming level of homeless pets and we needed to tell the community about our desperate need for adoptions.
“Arevik Badalyan-Drewek, who is our Communications Consultant serving the Environmental Services team, was having to repeatedly write all these news releases about these surges of dogs at the shelter and our hearts broke each time,” said Stacy Beard, the director of external communications for TeamWake. “I would be proofing all the pleas she was making to the public to adopt and in this latest effort, I just remember sitting there in my empty living room on a Saturday morning approving all the final edits so we could send out the release to the media – and it just slapped me in the face: I was a hypocrite!! Here I was helping tell people how fantastic, healthy and worthy it was to bring a pet into their lives and emphasizing that if the community didn’t respond we might have to euthanize for space for the first time in seven years – and I didn’t have a pet myself!”
So during the discount adoption special that Stacy and the Communications team were promoting, she, her husband and her 12-year old son did just what the news release was urgently encouraging people to do: they browsed all the sad faces on the online pet gallery and then went to the shelter to give one of those dogs a forever home.
"We found this big, beautiful boy frantically wagging his tail behind the kennel doors," said Stacy of the 2-year-old pit and Doberman mix named Bear. "His owner had surrendered him and his dad at the same time and while dad got adopted right away…not this guy. He was heartworm positive and the volunteers told us he had lost a lot of weight during his nearly three months at the shelter, surely because of the stress of this transition from his former life."
But the Beards didn’t let Bear’s health issues deter them. In fact, it made them want to take him home even more! $25 later, with the offer of a voucher for several hundred dollars from the non-profit/donor-funded Friends of Wake County Animal Center to get him treated (they do so much to try to get these long timers adopted), he officially became a Beard!
“We had two other dogs in the neighborhood with the name Bear, so we had to come up with a new name – after witnessing him zoom away from us several times at lightning speed chasing deer, his new name became clear: Checo, after Mexican Formula 1 race driver Sergio ‘Checo’ Pérez!” said Stacy. “Despite his speed and size, Checo is a goofy, sweet snuggle bug! He was house-trained in just a few days, did incredibly well with his heartworm treatment and he’s now a complete Velcro dog - he needs to be touching a human at all times! He forces us to get outside, to step away from work and already I’ve lost 10 pounds just taking him on walks! I kept telling myself that my job kept me so busy, I didn’t have time for a dog – but turns out I do and making time for a dog has been incredible for my mental health!”
If you would like to adopt and are ready to have a new family member, visit our center and find your new best buddy. The shelter is open for adoptions daily from noon to 6 p.m. seven days a week. The Wake County Animal Center is located at 820 Beacon Lake Drive, near the intersection of I-440 and New Bern Ave. in Raleigh.
