06/14/2026
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Dahlia found her family today. 🥰
❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🩷
The ARC Rising mission is to cultivate reciprocal healing for the people and animals of the Flathead Reservation.
Adoptions are kind of like the cherry on top or the outward manifestation of the mission. The smiley part. That moment of payoff when we know we’ve touched some lives. It also broadens our family and reasserts that we are about results and transformations.
What gets us there is all the stuff that’s less seen: the history of the places where the animals came from, the people and animals who remain and need our continued support, the foster families who have poured their care, time, effort and sometimes resources into helping along the way, people on the front lines like Brianna who toils and devotes her free time to supporting those who have little else but problems, and the heartache, exhaustion, anxiety and sometimes desperation that goes into carrying traumas.
In Dahlia’s case, there is work left to be done. She came from a Parvo-infested drug-afflicted place where both people and animals have suffered largely unseen. Her mom will soon be spayed, averting another cycle of risk and mitigating the challenge of feeding puppies when people don’t eat enough themselves.
Some people choose to look at situations from afar and focus on choices that have been made, feeling our work absolves the actors from consequences. We choose to be in the places up close, which leaves little doubt that “choices” means very little in the context of trauma. Certainly puppies have made no choice, nor have children or others who are affected. Poverty, historical trauma and narcotics are often interwoven in a recurring cycle that afflicts many on the periphery.
Sometimes there is only one choice: and that is ours. Our choice to be there despite knowing we too will be burned. Judged. Afflicted. And sometimes abused. But no healing was ever cheap, and this work ain’t for the faint of heart.
In the meantime, we draw strength from the smiles.
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Thank you to the adopters. May blessings come to you through these amazing animals.
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