Ellie, full name Element, loves little kids and is super friendly with other small dogs. She follows her sister Mollie (full name Molecule) around. The two Maltese pups like to play with their foster sister, Bougie, a 74-pound Goldendoodle, essentially “tackling” the bigger dog.
“She rolls on her back and kind of looks like she’s laughing or whatever, and they bite on her ears. And she thinks it’s the greatest thing ever,” said owner Sara Krause.
When Ellie first arrived home with her in Ohio, she was tiny -- just over three pounds -- shy, and timid. Her first act of freedom was to run circles through the long, green grass at 1 a.m.
It was likely the first time the two-year-old pup had seen or felt grass.
Ellie was one of 408 Maltese dogs and puppies rescued from Add Love Pets in Stroud back in July. When she first arrived at her new home, Krause said she was timid and didn’t want to be held by anyone but her. She also only wanted to be around Mollie.
Today, Ellie is four pounds, bouncy and owns every backyard she goes into.
“She’s getting her confidence here, where she can go out and have her tail up our entire walk,” she said.
Most of the dogs taken into custody by the Humane Society of Tulsa have been successfully adopted, either within Oklahoma or by folks in other states. According to foster parent Rachel Ward, there are around 100 or so left. Ward and her husband, who live in Tulsa, fostered 14 mamas and puppies from the seizure, though not all at the same time. She currently still has two puppies from a recent litter that she calls “terrors in the best ways.”
“They’ve already got adopters lined up, and I’ve just been warning them. Be prepared. There’s more personality in these little dogs than you could have ever imagined,” she said.
All of the dogs she’s helped have had their own personalities, including one mama that Rachel called Frizz.
“She literally looked like she’d been electrocuted. She had the most crazy haircut… her hair would stick in every direction. And she had a crazy personality as well,” she recalled with a laugh.
Ward said the dogs were pretty shut down in the beginning and not used to human touch. They worked with them a lot, finding a balance between giving them space while also building trust and helping socialize them. It took a while for the dogs to stop cowering when someone came into the room, and they warmed up to Rachel much faster than her husband.
“I truly cannot imagine how any newborn survived in that facility… They’re literally little miracles, because I just look at the photos and I can’t imagine a mama giving birth in there, and it just cripples me,” she said, before adding that despite everything they’ve been through, they’re incredibly resilient and spunky, happy dogs.
Lynda McDonald drove all the way from Michigan to Nowata to pick up nineyear-old Trudy from the Beagle Freedom Project. She said it was obvious she had been bred many times.
“She’s just been a joy to us. Like I said, we had just lost our little girl (a 17-and-a-half-year-old Maltese), and so it was just a blessing to find her,” MacDonald said.
She calls Trudy her little shadow, and the pup loves receiving the cheese tax and going for walks, having much more energy than you might expect for an older dog.
“It’s just like she’s so happy to be alive and getting to do everything that she’s never got to do,” Lynda said.
She added that there weren’t many issues when Trudy first came home, though she is missing some hair on her tail and around her neck. Also, she didn’t make a sound for the first few weeks. Macdonald thought it was because her throat was damaged from the ammonia in the air at the facility.
“Then all of a sudden, she noticed the dog refl ection in the stove, and she started barking… and howling. It was so funny, and she couldn’t figure out what happened,” Lynda said.
Emily Clayton, rescue manager at Beagle Freedom Project, said they were a bit concerned about finding Trudy a home, since she was one of the older dogs, had some medical concerns, and was shy and shut down.
“She took maybe a month to find a home, but Lynda’s been incredible,” Clayton said.
In fact, all of the Stroud dogs that the rescue took on have now been adopted. There is one puppy still in foster, but he is set to be adopted soon. They took about 25 to 30 to help temporarily ease the burden on the Humane Society.
“It was a lot of puppies. We had some nursing mothers with little newborns. And we just offered to care for them while the case got sorted out,” she said. “We were able to keep the dogs. We were all so attached to them at that point… We’re just going to keep them and find adopters for all of them.”
She said the response has been amazing, with people coming together to help all these dogs.
There are still some Maltese available for adoption. Visit the Humane Society of Tulsa’s website to fill out an application.