GUIDE DOG DALE NEEDS HELP

Dear Puppy Raisers:

Many of you know Guide Dog Dale. This was our first graduate guide dog 4 years ago.

Dale is currently ill with an unknown kidney problem and is at the UW veterinary school of medicine. As you can imagine, the bills for Dale are growing on a daily basis. OccuPaws has been asked for financial assistance for the Vet bills. The OccuPaws' contract with graduated dogs is that the user of the Guide Dog pays any and all veterinary bills for the dog.

The OccuPaws mission statement is that OccuPaws provides guide dogs to the visually impaired. It does NOT allow OccuPaws to support working Guide Dogs. Our fiduciary duty is to our puppies, current raisers, Guide Dogs in training and the salary of our Guide Dog Instructor. And, as a practical matter, we do not have the funding to pay for veterinary bills of our graduated dogs in perpetuity.

That said, the Board would like to help in ways that we legally can. We will be contacting our Facebook friends, Constant Contact mailing list, and you our blog readers to see if you would like to donate funds to Dale.

Any money donated needs to be earmarked specifically to Dale, and donated through OccuPaws to receive the charitable tax deduction. If further financial assistance for Dale's medical care, and organizes a one-time fund raising event specifically for Dale, we at OccuPaws will certainly assist her all we can at this event.

The Board wanted you to know what we can all do to help Dale. If you would like to pledge, you may pledge using the following e-mail address, with DALE DONATION in the subject line. dalefund@occupaws.org.

You may also use pay-pal with earmarking to DALE DONATION at http://occupaws.org/OnlineDonation.htm

Thank-you