160 dogs rescued from Florida shelter ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall
One hundred and sixty dogs were brought to safety from a shelter in Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton's landfall and placed temporarily with foster owners after volunteers and caring residents came together in the rescue effort.
Stefania Bada, a volunteer at Medley Animal Services in Miami, Florida posted a video on her TikTok account on Tuesday, documenting some empty spaces where the dogs were living in the shelter.
"We did it Miami!!!" she wrote in text overlaid in the video. "160 dogs all fostered out for 5 days to keep them safe and warm for the hurricane…praying some foster fails…the dogs left in this video were fostered as well! No dogs left behind."
Bada, who runs a dog networking page on Instagram called One Dog At A Time alongside two other women, Jennifer Rodriguez and Carolina Falquez, said in the update that she and other volunteers began their rescue mission on Monday to help clear up the shelter.
"Our one dog at a time networking page on Instagram asked and pleaded for the community to come together and help clear out the medley shelter and [that's what] we did !!!" she wrote in the caption. "This shelter floods horribly when it just rains, let alone a hurricane. All 160 dogs were taken out Brought to safety [and] now enjoying life for 5 days in a home ! We are praying for some foster fails 🙏🏽."
Since it was posted on Tuesday, the video has accumulated over 800,000 views and 150,000 likes.
Speaking to "Good Morning America," Bada said she and her team were monitoring the storm systems coming into Florida prior to the rescue effort.
"So when we heard about Milton, we were like, 'Okay, the dogs at the Medley Shelter need to be helped,'" she said. "That shelter floods horribly when it just rains here for an hour or two, so any form of a pressure storm is really bad for these dogs. So that's when we jumped into action. And we said we need to do whatever we can to help."
Bada shared that she and the other volunteers later were taking turns "posting like crazy" on the social platform to start finding foster families for the canines.
"We were sending direct messages. We were sending emails to the shelter. We were reaching out to volunteers. We were doing whatever we could, we really tried to promote on our page to rescue, to not shop, to rescue, to foster," she shared. "So once we started really going full speed ahead…people started to really reach out to us and say, 'Hey, we want to help.'"
Annette Jose, Director of Miami-Dade County Animal Services, who oversees the Medley Shelter told "GMA" the response and support they received from the community were "historic."
"I mean, they show up every day because we have so many pets being adopted from the shelter on a weekly basis, but this has been an unprecedented response from the community to come and pull our pets into safety during a storm," she said.
Jose also praised the volunteers who helped spread the word about the shelter's call for assistance.
"It started going from one social media platform to the other because of our volunteers, and then it was picked up by some influencers. Our rescue community also stepped up," she explained. "This is the kind of thing where everybody gets inspired from it, not just the volunteers who end up taking a pet for the weekend or for the storm, but our staff themselves finally feel like they were able to make a difference in the lives of these pets."
The hard work was all worthwhile after the mission to clear the shelter was accomplished, Bada said she received videos and pictures from the foster families who shared "these happy, beautiful stories with these dogs that are just living life right now, doing zoomies, cuddling, getting baths, playing with toys, just being dogs."
Discussing what she hopes the public could take away from their rescue effort journey, Bada encourages everyone to "foster."
"You need to please go to your local shelters. And when something bad is going to happen in your community in terms of weather you have to save the ones that can't save themselves," she added.
