Home Is Where the Pets Are

Bill & Roberta Ramirez: Friends Forever Story By Kristin Anderson For Bill and Roberta Ramirez, “home” is not a static place—home is where their pets are. Bill and Roberta spent two decades living all over the globe—Houston, Brussels, Geneva, New York, Hong Kong—but there were two things that kept them grounded: their love for each […]

OHS Volunteers in Action

Assisting with ASPCA Emergency Animal Rescue in North Carolina Who do you call when you need help caring for hundreds of neglected animals? Well, if you are the ASPCA and you have just conducted the largest companion-animal rescue mission in your organization’s history, you call OHS. In January 2016, the ASPCA rescued nearly 700 severely […]

Aloha Dogs

It was a dark and stormy night…okay, it wasn’t really stormy, just a typical chilly Portland spring drizzle. But it was 10:45 pm at the Portland airport (PDX), and two night-owl OHS volunteers were waiting to pick up a very important shipment. A shipment that comes in almost every week, actually: three dogs had just […]

Earth Day Cleanup

On Saturday, April 23, the OHS Dog Path Crew welcomed the help of four volunteers from SOLVE for an Earth Day project on our dog-walking path. The team was small, but mighty! Team leader Candace Bailey reports: “We really appreciated the four ladies who came out to help us. They dug right in and didn’t […]

Fostering Healing

We’ve all seen those Who Rescued Who? bumper stickers, right? and You’ve probably also heard that having a pet has health benefits like lowering blood pressure and helping us live longer. As a veterinary assistant at OHS, I’ve met many pets and their people, and have seen time and again how pets make our lives […]

Walking the Dogs

On any given day at OHS there are anywhere from 75-130 dogs in our kennels, each of whom needs to go outside for exercise, to relieve themselves, and to have a change of scenery. OHS staff and volunteers do a variety of enrichment activities with dogs throughout each day, but we also rely on teams […]