Shining a spotlight on local pet rescue 

Alpine View Pet Spa is a local business specializing in dog boarding and grooming services for local dogs.

However, the owner's love of helping our four-legged friends doesn't stop there, as they have integrated a small pet rescue into their home.

Rescued Paws is a family-run and operated business that rehomes dogs that have been surrendered because of incompatibility with their previous owners or other special circumstances.

Kyla Janes has been rescuing dogs for about 5 years and loves what she does.

“The reason that I wanted to start the rescue side of the business was that a lot of times we have families that are struggling mentally and dogs act as a lot of comfort for them. So a lot of it came down to the fact that I want to create a support dog program and ideally help rescue these dogs. We rehabilitate them and help with adoptions so they can help people,” she said. 

Janes and her family have seen a very high adoption rate over the five years of operation. However, recently they have seen a spike.

“There's a huge spike in dogs that are four and under, a lot of these dogs are what we're kind of categorizing as our COVID dogs. People are back to work now and the dogs are in their teenage years and young adolescence. They have lots of behaviour and needs, and they're still really high energy and people are finding that they don't have what it takes to maintain a pet life as well as their own balanced life.”
 
This spike has been made even greater recently as the same ‘COVID' dog’ phenomenon is not isolated to Strathmore, and dog shelters from across Calgary are getting filled up.

As Janes and her adoption house expand, she noted that the need for support from the community grows as well.

“We're getting a lot larger network, so we're seeing a lot more various types of behaviours coming to us now. It just started as helping to rehome pets and we've kind of gotten to the point now where we're going to be getting our charitable status and starting to do some fundraising to hopefully get a secondary building started for our rescue, just because we have a big demand in this community.”

Janes and her family are also in need of volunteers and foster homes as they expand and grow both their business and their pet rescue.

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