Barn-Tastic! We met the pledge today!

This is incredible. You helped us go over the $1800 needed to meet Aron Woolman and friends' $8500 challenge today, and now we can finally raise that bar up above and beyond. Lookit this thing go. (See Petey graphic in sidebar) --->

Right now, we're just $500 away from the 20K mark. (I feel like an NPR announcer) Can we reach this goal by the weekend?

With luck, we'll be ready to cover the materials ($25K) needed to frame out the barn and break ground before the end of July!

Barn Raisers: James Schier, Kathleen Bieganski, Jackie Tracy, Anna M Stone, Sandra Ambrogio, Patricia Franzino (thank you Patricia!), Gwyn Burdell, Casey Good, Sheri O'Rani, Dina Hitchcock (you stop), Lee Vannucci, Christy Lusareta, Stevena Vincent, Katrina McNeil, Barbara Holmes, Dave Rees, Daniel Clark, Heather Franklin, Frank Pelliccio, Sheila Weisenborn, Brooke Suchomel, Natascha Hamm, M Kathleen Condron, Jennifer Suzuki ... Thank you good people!

MO Dog Shuffle - We sent three Missouri dogs on the next leg of their journey yesterday...Zena (above), Beauty and Jett all left us. Zena & Jett went north to Mendocino County.

Leslie Dodds was waiting to meet her two pups. When people ask us how to jump start shelter adoption programs that help pit bulls, her example always comes to mind. She shows us what can happen when you offer your local shelter sane solutions and steady help. Leslie's got a 9-5 job in the insurance biz, but she still found a way to volunteer herself into becoming the resident pit bull expert in two shelters in Mendocino County. She's grassroots in a big way. By working hard to train shelter dogs and facilitate solid adoptions, she's given that county's pit bulls a seat at the table.

We asked her to take a MO dog on a lark - Maybe she had a foster spot tucked away somewhere? Even better, she was able to use her partnership with Humane Society for Inland Mendocino County to bring two (two!) of the Missouri dogs into the shelter's adoption program. I asked her how she managed to make that happen and this is what she told us:

Well we are totally in loved with the new babes as I'm sure you knew would happen. Zena started kissing up to the shelter director right away. Smart girl!

As you know already, when I first started out at the Humane Society, I helped their one pitbull get adopted and then they weren't going to bring any more in. Our new shelter director stepped up and started letting me bring in one or two really sweet guys. She was terrified of pitbulls before she started this job and now she cries her eyes out when they leave.

We had our board meeting last night. We had already agreed to take one dog and the other was going to animal control to work in our pitcrew program. I brought up the idea of taking both of them last night at the meeting and the vote was absolutely unanimous to bring them both in. The Humane Society for Inland Mendocino County went from not wanting any to stepping up and taking in 2 bust dogs. I couldn't be any prouder of our wonderful shelter. - Leslie Dodds

We join you in "couldn't be prouder," Leslie. Kiss those beautiful dogs for us. Photo above right: Leslie huggin' on Jett, the cutey-pie from this week's AP slideshow.