With October being Adopt A Shelter Dog Month, in addition to the regular Micronesian Monday Features and Friday Weekenders, subscribers will get a series of stories about Guam’s boonie dogs every Wednesday this month. This is not our usual content this is very much an experiment for me. So I appreciate you coming along for the ride. Send any feedback my way.
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For the past seven months, the volunteers of the Boonie Flight Project have been doing what few people could: following through on a creative, humane solution for the stray dog situation on Guam. In a few months, they have found homes for over 160 boonie puppies who otherwise would have languished in the streets of Guam or waited with bated breath at the island’s only animal shelter for someone to adopt them.
The puppy shortage is maybe the most unexpected supply chain hiccup to come out of this pandemic. Shelters in the US and England reported during the lockdown last year that there was a surge of interest in pets that didn’t match their supply. Waiting lists grew.
ABC News 7 out of San Francisco reported last year that 2020 was a record year for puppy adoptions from high-end breeders and shelters alike. SFGate reported one shelter placed 187 dogs in new homes in July 2020, which was more than their annual average of 100 dogs.
The American Pet Products Association in June released their biennial pet owners survey and revealed pet ownership had increased and most pet owners are millennials. Of those who got new pets and who were influenced by the pandemic, 47% got dogs.
Meanwhile, “On Guam, if you want a dog, you can just walk down the street and pick one up. It's not that hard to find a puppy,” said Lauren Cabrera, the co-founder of the Boonie Flight Project. Cabrera is also a nurse practitioner on the island.
The idea behind the Boonie Flight Project started to take shape in March when Cabrera and her friend Kelsey Graupner were fostering some dogs. Cabrera had three puppies that were adorable but no one on the island was interested in adopting them.
Cabrera said she knew once the puppies got older, the chances of them getting adopted would diminish.
“Nobody here will want them on Guam. So what do I do?” Cabrera recalled.
She turned to Facebook.
“I started putting them on my Facebook and people started sharing them. And I wrote about the plight of boonie dogs starving on the street, and there's not enough homes,” she said. “People started asking how to get the puppies.”
Around this same time, Graupner had flown a dog that she’d nursed back to health to a family member in the states.
“Kelsey has a thing for really sick, mangy-looking dogs, the ones that are hairless and sunburned and covered with scabs. So she had one of those that showed up on her doorstep, and she got it healthy and shipped it to one of her family members stateside,” Cabrera said. “She was doing it again with another dog around the same time that I had those three puppies. I was like, ‘Hey, like, how do you do that?’ And we became best friends and started the Boonie Flight Project.”
At first, some people were apprehensive about adopting a boonie from Guam.
“I guess a lot of people have been promising to ship dogs to people and charging them and not sending them dogs,” Cabrera said. “So people would be like, ‘How can I be sure you're not a scam? Like, Are you really a real person?’”
Cabrera sent photos and videos of the puppies, even offering to video chat with prospective puppy parents to assuage their fears.
Then, a Hawaii-based pet shipper caught wind of Cabrera and Gaupner’s plans and she provided the boonies their wings.
Interest from stateside rescuers and adopters swelled. Cabrera's three puppies turned into 25 and in April they became the inaugural batch of boonies flown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean. They were shipped to different parts of the United States including Alaska, Indiana, Washington, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
When the first flight took off, Cabrera was full of nerves.
“I just wanted to cry. I was like, ‘I can't believe this really happened,’” she said. “‘Is the flight going to go OK? We're shipping so many dogs. Will the people like them?’”
Her nerves were soothed a couple of days later when she received videos and photos of the puppies meeting their adopters in airports and the puppies frolicking in their new homes.
“It's, like, I just cried so much. It's so sweet. I can't believe these dogs that were like in my house, who I never thought would get a home are like living the life now. That's so cool,” she said.
Cabrera and Graupner were soon joined by another volunteer, Stephanie, who helped with photos and social media and increased their reach online. Every shared post led to more eyes on these canines from the tropics. The applications started rolling in.
“Now, we get applicants from all over,” Cabrera said. One dog on their latest flight in September headed to Canada.
“We had this litter of puppies that we named after cheeses. So we call them the cheese litter, and they're very cute. We got probably 20 applications for these five dogs in a span of a couple of days,” Cabrera added.
In about six months, they’ve coordinated five flights. The group has become a well-oiled machine and they have a system for getting the boonies travel-ready.
“If they fit the program, we pick up the puppy from wherever they are. We put it in a foster home. We de-worm them, we get their vaccines updated every three or four weeks through (Guam Animals In Need animal shelter). We have a ...volunteer who takes professional photos of all the dogs and we make pretty graphics and put them on Facebook and people send applications to adopt them,” Cabrera said.
It’s a true rag to riches story. These once-stray puppies who were at best, ignored, or, at worst, deemed public nuisances, harmed, neglected, or ravaged by parasites living on the streets, are now healthy living in homes with families who shower them with affection.
“They get pretty spoiled. They have their own Instagram,” Cabrera said. “We made a big group chat for all the adopters from this flight and they are all sharing pictures.... giving each other different dog advice and asking everybody, ‘What are you going to name your puppy?’”
There’s a growing community of stateside boonie dog owners now, thanks to the Boonie Flight Project. The group has had immense support. Cabrera said the Department of Agriculture has helped with health certificates and veterinary paperwork. The animal shelter on Guam, GAIN, has provided vaccines.
“We all have the same goal,” she said.
Now that they’re off and running, the sky’s the limit for the Boonie Flight Project.
“We're looking into the possibility of doing a huge fly in probably January. That would have like 200 or 300 dogs on it. We're really excited and really serious about it,” Cabrera said. “Hopefully, we would like to empty out GAIN, clear out a lot of their dogs and ship them to adopters and rescues. But we’ll need a lot of donations for that.”
Those interested in becoming a boonie baby adopter can visit the Boonie Flight Project’s Facebook and Instagram or their website boonieflightproject.com. The group can also be reached through email at contact@boonieflightproject.com.
Thank you to Lauren Cabrera for her time and for sharing the story of BFP. Find and follow them online. Also, check out Lisa, Animal Travel Agent LLC, the pet shipper working with the Boonie Flight Project. She seems to be able to help people who are also moving to Guam and need help moving their pets too.
I am convinced there is no problem an animal lover cannot solve. They seem to be able to harness the power of the animals they want to save and perform these gargantuan feats.
But they can’t do it alone.
People are welcome to donate to support their efforts. The group has also had people organize fundraisers on their behalf.
“Adult dogs are so expensive to fly, but their adoption fees, we set them lower than puppies because we need to incentivize people to adopt the adult dogs. So we have to fundraise thousands of dollars for every adult dog that we fly out. So donating is great,” Cabrera said. “If you want to do a fundraiser for us, that would be great. We need a lot of towels to line the crates with for the flight days, dog food, that kind of thing is always appreciated.”
Also for those who want to help and who are in Guam, the organization needs fosters. Basically, you get to hang out with puppies all day. What a treat.
“We really need fosters, that's the most important backbone of our program is people who will keep the puppies for a couple of weeks and feed them, keep them mostly inside because Parvovirus is pretty prevalent here and can kill puppies,” Cabrera said. “So we need people who can take dogs. The more fosters we have, the more dogs we can ship out.”
Again, be sure to share the Boonie Flight Project posts with your network of friends and followers. You never know who might be in the market for a new furry companion.
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How Guam is helping solve the great American pandemic puppy problem