06/10/2026
I’ve fu**ed myself over. Up the ass, without l**e, and I have a dry bu****le.
Social media is a very important part of rescue. DHD became known and *loved???* for the vulgarity that is, DHD. Although I find most people don’t, won’t, or can’t read, people came to our page to read. Even the people who don’t seem smart enough to read. Words posted on our page need to matter, because people are reading them.
But I fu**ed that up.
The more we’ve grown, the less time I have to write creatively. And I’m a slow fu***ng writer to begin with. I know it’s hard to believe… but this humor, elegance, and eloquence doesn’t fly out of me. It takes work to be this classy/trashy.
Even if things are perfect, managing more dogs just takes more time. But things are rarely perfect, and when I’m short on time, writing takes a backseat. Taking a backseat turned into procrastination, and procrastination turned into rather being dead than writing. And things only got worse from there. I don’t talk about mental health much but I’ll be honest when I say I was struggling.
Things have been very bad and there’s no amount of Tito’s that was going to help. Things weren’t funny anymore, and I couldn’t even fake funny for social media. I withdrew from most everyone.
But withdrawing from social media can have long term consequences, and although I physically couldn’t manage to write, I know it’s my fault if we’ve lost our audience and engagement. All I can do now is be honest about everything that’s happened, ask for grace, and hope to gain our audience and engagement back.
It was hard to be transparent in the moment so I chose to be silent and pull back on everything. Things got so bad I’ve honestly contemplated not continuing rescue at all, or then maybe just continuing at such a small scale that it would mainly be myself and a few of my main fosters. I don’t know what the future holds but I do know that we're not done yet.
Without going into too many details on everything I want to at least allow our audience a little insight on what has been happening. I’m not going to go into all the details because it’s simply too much.
You’ve supported us to get us to places I never imagined would be possible, and now I owe you an explanation as to why it looks like we fell off the face of the earth. Our audience deserved to read about all the amazing things we were doing, but I couldn’t give you that. My head has been in a very dark place for far too long, and nothing about the s**t we were dealing with was funny. I couldn’t even find humor in the hell.
In December of 2024 we took the biggest risk of our lives (professional and personal) and moved into our shelter space we appropriately named, The Pit. We thought this space was going to help us rescue better. We were wrong. The condition of the building was much worse than we realized, and there was a rodent situation we didn’t know about until we had reached the point of no return. The extent of the rodent situation was unfortunately a very big deal. We just didn’t know how big of a deal, at that time. And truly didn’t know the extent until quite some time later. For those that don’t/didn’t know, we didn’t just work in this building. We lived upstairs. We were in it 100%. We spent 100% of our day in the building and never actually got to leave “work.”
We knew s**t was gonna be hard, and we were gonna be overwhelmed, but we just needed to put our big girl panties on (even though I don’t wear underwear and if I did, it most certainly wouldn’t be something as cute sounding as “panties”), and we needed to work each day to make improvements. No one was going to save us from this mess so we took it one day at a time.
In January of 2025 (6 weeks after we took on the biggest risk of our lives) an incident occurred with a volunteer and one of our dogs. The incident alone was enough to rattle anyone but the incident then turned into a lawsuit. DHD, myself personally, and our fosters were sued. This incident that happened in January of 2025 was officially resolved a few weeks ago. Nearly 2 years after the incident, the lawsuit was over. This lawsuit caused our insurance not to renew us, and this lawsuit prevented us from finding insurance because we were officially high risk.
We spent all of 2025 taking it one day at a time. Like rescue-holics are supposed to do. Each day we moved forward assuming the lawsuit would resolve, because the facts regarding the case would matter. I was wrong.
We tried to stay business as usual because we now had much larger expenses (the shelter), and I had quit my full time job to rescue full time. I had given up my union job with health insurance, for this pile of hot, wet, dog diarrhea. And with the stress of everything we were going through, come some health issues. Which is super fu***ng fun when you don’t have health insurance.
By the end of 2025 I was getting tired. We were concerned about having volunteers come into The Pit to help us (on account of the lawsuit by a volunteer) and this rodent situation definitely wasn’t resolving even though I was told it would take time.
By the time we reached April of 2026, I was done. The Pit was supposed to help us rescue better but in reality, it allowed people to be less accountable for the dogs they said they wanted. When people decided that a dog was an inconvenience to them, they wanted that dog gone immediately. When you have a shelter, people treat you as if you have endless space. Previously when fosters went on vacation volunteers would step up to help regularly, but even that changed. People were not stepping up any longer so we were constantly over capacity. At one point we had something like 11 dogs being “returned” even though we never had those dogs to begin with, and we only had 8 kennels. This was not a large-scale shelter operation. This shelter had 1 employee, and 1 volunteer. Those people lived there 24/7 and it was misery.
This is the point of the story where a tiny shelter with good intentions turns into a large-scale hoarding operation. I can literally see how that happens, especially when your mental state is already so fu**ed. Thankfully, I am smart enough to know how to read, and it was time to pull the plug. In May of 2026 we ceased pulling. We focused on the “returns” and only resumed pulling in July but at a much slower pace.
As excited as we were for this space, we couldn’t have predicted how people would treat us once we had it. We couldn’t have predicted the lawsuit, and we couldn’t have predicted that rescue and rodents would consume our every moment.
We made the decision to leave The Pit. I had some good ideas for what we could do with the space and we hoped if we put even more effort into the rodent situation that when we left it would improve. We’ve been gone for a minute now, and it has not. And we will no longer put any money into that god forsaken building. So, that’s a fun fight now. Stay tuned for updates on that.
Now that I’ve explained a bit of the s**t show, I’ll catch everyone up.
7/15 CACC Oto (Dabba)
7/15 CACC Crash Bandit
7/15 CACC Margie (Mahalia)
7/16 CACC Doug (Camper)
7/16 CACC Joshua
7/21 CACC Pixie (Cookie Jar)
7/23 CACC Clarice (Lafawnduh)
8/6 CACC Porky
8/8 CACC Sawyer (Tomarillo)
8/19 CACC Mabel
8/22 CACC Teric (Bear-Donovan)
8/27 CACC Bodhi (Sock Puppet)
9/10 CACC Clarence (Matic)
9/15 CACC Appa (Zeus)
9/27 NWRNT Dottie
9/27 NWRNT Goose (Demon)
9/27 NWRNT Maverick (Ghost)
9/30 CACC Bea
10/3 CACC Noah
10/3 CACC Milo
10/3 CACC Jet-Puffed
10/3 CACC Gertrude
What we believed was going to help us rescue better turned out to be a living nightmare. And I say that because we lived there. There was no way we could continue down this same path. We were killing ourselves, and the requests for help never stopped coming. We needed to be in the public and engaging people, we needed to be able to focus on fundraising, and we needed to be able to focus on the future. But we were simply spinning our wheels, and certainly weren’t doing a good job at that.
So, we are back to strictly being foster based. The simplicity of that is truly so much better, and I never fu***ng thought I’d say that. While we did save more dogs than we ever had, that was coming at a huge cost.
We are going back to the basics and I just hope we can gain back our engagement again. Rescue isn’t pretty but DHD was here to let you know all about it, and to find the humor in the hell. I can only hope to bring back the humor in the hell. With a few less (NONE) rodents this time.
~ Dayna 💜
