Urgent Animals of Hearne’s third annual “Find Some Bunny to Love” allows community members the opportunity to meet and adopt foster animals while enjoying food and a “giant” Easter egg hunt.
This Saturday, April 20 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at The Ranch Harley-Davidson, over 40 foster animals will be available for families to meet, including dogs and cats. There will be Easter egg hunts for kids of different ages, food trucks and a DJ. To raise donations for Robertson County and help pay for spaying, neutering, microchipping and vaccinations for the animals, a silent auction will also be held with items including restaurant gift cards, a monogrammed backpack and an assortment of artwork.
Founder Deborah Green Fatheree said she started Urgent, a center which raises funds for Robertson County Veterinary Services to stop the euthanization of animals in Hearne that were not rescued or helped. Although Urgent is only an eight dog facility that has been able to maintain zero kills in the last 72 months.
“I just had somebody contact me the other day and say, ‘Hey, a friend of mine just got two kittens from their work site that are two weeks old.’ I know if they take them somewhere else, those kittens are going to be put down,” Fatheree said. “I’ll do what I can to find a foster for them and bring them into our program, that happens all the time.
Urgent volunteer Korina Kocurek said she started volunteering two years ago after she adopted her dog through the event.
“I think [this event] is a good way to get involved in the community but also understand where these dogs are coming from by talking to the people that have them in their homes and being able to tell their story,” Kocurek said. “The foster we have now came in as a puppy and he was covered in mange, he didn’t have a very good chance of surviving. But through this, we were able to save his life, get him back to full health and now he is the happiest dog you will ever meet.”
Urgent is currently trying to encourage more college students to foster. When fostering an animal, the program provides veterinary care, food, toys, leashes and anything the foster parents finds necessary for the animal. The animal will live with its foster parent until someone can adopt the animal.
Madi Byerly has been fostering with Urgent for three years. She was introduced to the program her sophomore year of college and began fostering her junior year. To date, Byerly has fostered over 15 dogs that have stayed with her anywhere from two days to eight months.
“Seeing what a difference you could make by just opening your home to a dog that needed love, seeing what kind of difference that could make, it made a really big impact on me,” Byerly said. “Plus, I get to watch them start as maybe a scared, street dog to flourishing in a home and learning tricks, manners and being potty trained. So watching that progress, is one of the real reasons why I continue to do what I do.”
Byerly said it is important for people looking to foster for the first time at the event to keep an open mind when deciding on an animal. She also said taking the time to understand the fostering process without rushing into it is vital.
“I know you can look out and think ‘Oh, I want a designer dog, I want this breed.’ But, there are a lot of dogs out there that will surprise you,” Byerly said. “Some of the sweetest, most well-behaved dogs that I’ve loved fostering have been ones that I know for sure if I walked into an event and I had nowhere to start looking, then maybe I would have passed up.”