Straydog Inc., The Arnolds' Happy Home for Strays

Pat Arnold and I (Bill Arnold) came here to our Straydog site in the country outside of Gun Barrel City, Texas in October 1994 with 11 spayed and neutered dogs. Soon with the occasional nearby abandonment of a dog, plus occasional rescues while we were on the road driving somewhere, plus the rescues called in to us from people we knew in the Dallas area, the population grew to 20 dogs. When our population reached 24 dogs, while Pat and I were still paying all the expenses ourselves and going broke fast, The Dallas Morning News somehow heard about us and our desperate situation and published a feature story about our shelter. Within a week more than $40,000 was donated as a result of that one newspaper article of March 13, 1997, but instead of holding the funds to take care of the dogs we had already rescued, we continued to rescue more dogs, allowing our shelter to grow and grow, and soon Straydog had a population of 40 dogs. Our focus continued to be (and still continues to be) taking extraordinarily good care of our rescued dogs (which is very expensive), while at the same time trying to adopt them all out, and while continuing to struggle to raise more and more funding to pay for our ever increasing population. Soon Straydog had a population of 50 dogs, and then 60 dogs. Each plateau became our limit, but each limit was soon broken. We were at 65 dogs when Pat suddenly died of a brain aneurysm on June 1, 2003. We, the remaining members of the Arnold family, tried to maintain the 65-dog limit, but just as when Pat was still with us, there always seemed to be just one more homeless, helpless doggie we would welcome in through the Straydog gates. And now as of August 2006 we have 110 dogs at Straydog, adoptions are slow (which is easy to understand as there are so many "surplus" dogs out there, 15,000 being put to death every day in the kill shelters), and although we're still receiving solid support from our contributors, we're raising funds at a slightly slower rate than the rate of our rising expenses.

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