08/06/2026
“One of the Rojas kids” is what I hear while they’re announcing the winner of a raffle basket filled with 5 bottles of wine.
I took the basket out of confusion more than anything else. A few mins later I brought the basket back up for them to call another name.
“One of the Rojas kids” is what I promptly hear again. Because my little mother fu***rs would put their names in for booze. Multiple of them.
Let’s be clear, those little fu***rs are 11 & 13, and they wanted to know which one of them gets the basket of booze.
Thank you to everyone who came out and celebrated DHD and our dogs! A special shout out to Caitlin, Galia & Kristen for organizing everything and working so hard. Thank you to City's Edge Chicago for hosting us again this year, and thanks to those that donated to our raffle! My children would have gladly enjoyed the booze.
On another note, there has been a lot of talk regarding our relationship with CACC and what the future holds. The first thing I will say is that DHD’s commitment to local dogs has not, and will not waver. Until our local shelters are empty, we will never bring dogs in from out of state.
But right now our very small shelter space needs help. Even if we wanted to pull from CACC, we can’t. Foster and adoption returns are at a level we’ve never witnessed before and we can’t risk pulling and having someone quit.
We have been in our shelter space for a year and a half, and we have learned a lot. We’ve saved more dogs than ever before but we’ve also had more failures than ever before. The current status of rescue tells me that we can’t keep going as is, but doing the same more slowly doesn’t seem to be the answer either.
We need to do something different. There’s a way for us to continue rescuing local dogs, and there’s a way that we can work as a community to do so. We don’t have to come to a screeching halt and we don’t need to do the same thing but slower. We can do this better. And that’s when a lightbulb went off.
Stay tuned for the next post which will help to detail the direction in which DHD will be going. We have an out of the box idea that will focus on our local dogs and saving more, just doing it in a whole new way that’s never been done before.
Our commitment is, and will always be local. With that, we just welcomed a new guy. He’s been to CACC twice previously and was about to land himself there for a 3rd time. Thankfully some of our volunteers worked together to prevent that, and he’s settling into his new foster home. Previously named, Orzo at CACC.
Welcome to DHD, Beans. 💜
