“The slating rescues are getting since last March is very disheartening"

The owners of a dog rescue in Ballivor who have been emptied by a surge in demand during lockdown have revealed that are receiving abuse from desperate prospective dog owners who are accusing them of making money out of the pandemic.

Ramona Cunningham and Chris Kelly have been running Coolronan Dog Rescue on a voluntary basis in Ballivor for the past fourteen years and say they haven’t had a pup in the facility since February and are seeing an unprecedented demand for dogs of all breeds since first lockdown earlier this year.

The big hearted duo admits being verbally abused for not having pure bred pups and have been accused of everything from selling dogs and increasing their rehoming fee to claims of benefitting financially for keeping dogs for a longer period of time. Ramona said:

“The demand for dogs is the highest we have ever seen in our 14 years of running this rescue.

“The slating rescues are getting since last March is very disheartening. Since last March I’d be afraid to count how many phone calls and messages we have gotten from people looking for pups and it is more small dogs in the last couple of weeks.

“People should be happy that there are not pups in rescues but they are taking this attitude that we don’t want to adopt dogs out but we just don’t have them.

“It’s last February since we had a pup in the rescue. Pups that used to be handed in like a collie cross Labrador it would be free to a good home, people are now selling them for five or six hundred euro and they are getting it. It has gone absolutely mental.

“People are looking for pure bred pups, for non shed pups, those are pups who never came into the rescue anyway, they are definitely not going to come in now.”

The dog rescue owners have been at the receiving end of hostility from people unable to secure a family pet. Ramona added:

“We have been called useless, we have been accused of selling our dogs, that we have upped our rehoming fee which we haven’t, we upped our rehoming fee last January, that is the first time we upped our rehoming fee I’d say in the last ten years.

“I saw another comment saying it was the rescue fault that people were going buying dogs off the puppy farmers.

“They are saying the longer we keep dogs there we get paid for it, I don’t know who they think pays us, we have never gotten paid in the last fourteen years.

“Anyone that comes in can see where we are living, it is a mobile home. We have never had running hot water here, we don't have a shower or a bath we have to go to my mother's house for that.

“We have put everything into the rescue for the past fourteen years.

“It is very upsetting; last week I was very tempted just to close down the Facebook page just for a couple of weeks just to give myself a bit of headspace.”

Ramona says there is great concern among rescues at the inevitable surge in dogs that will be surrendered once the pandemic has passed. She added:

“We and all of the other rescues are dreading it, we are kind of enjoying the half quiet time we have at the minute because we know ourselves when it does get back to normal we are going to get so many dogs in and they are all going to have behavioural l problems and it just going to be an absolute disaster.

“If you go back a couple of years nobody in Ireland wanted to adopt a collie or a lurcher or a bull breed and suddenly any dog will do it doesn’t really make sense.

“I wouldn’t mind if people wanted to adopt dogs for the right reasons but it’s not, it’s because they are bored or their kids are bored and they just want to keep them occupied.”