Puppy love found online

Just like online dating, sometimes a click of a mouse can change your life forever.

And that was certainly the case for the Smith family and their new four-legged addition Tank.

Tank had been rescued by Red Collar Rescue, which is based in Biggenden, 339kms north-west of Brisbane and a town that boasts a population of 845!

As a rural organisation, the rescue group struggles to find foster carers and as a consequence many rescue dogs have no option other than to live in a shelter environment. Unfortunately this was the case for Tank, a homeless hound who spent months patiently waiting for his forever home under Red Collar’s care.

In a bid to gain some help, the rescue group contacted PetRescue to see if the team could assist in connecting more of the group’s needy pets with loving, new owners.

Always up for a tech challenge, the PetRescue team worked with Red Collar Rescue to trial an innovative new listing technique to enable pets to be better seen in interstate locations. And now that the results are in, PetRescue’s best tech heads are busy working on a permanent way to roll this out, in a bid to give all interstate pets better visibility on the website and more chances of finding love.

Fast forwarding a couple of weeks, and when Sally Smith, who lives just outside Melbourne, undertook a website search to find her new family member, Tank’s beautiful face popped up.

The rest, as they say, is history, and with some help from PetRescue’s amazing sponsors Jetpets, Tank broke out of the kennels and winged his way over 1700 km to Melbourne, where he was collected at the airport by Sally and her husband Chris.

“We could hear his tail wagging before we even saw him,” says Sally who has had rescue dogs and cats all of her life.

“When we released him from the crate, it was love at first sight and my husband just adored him immediately. We’ve had him a month now and he is just the perfect dog, my husband takes him to work every day and he is just so gentle with our five-year-old daughter. We even took him to a four-year-old’s birthday last week and he was absolutely perfect, everyone fell in love with him.”

And another dog who was put forward for the listings trial – Tahnee – has also found her perfect home locally, at the same time giving rescue group a much-needed morale boost.

“The adoption of Tank and Tahnee truly felt like a massive victory at a time when we really needed one, so thank you for being part of that team achievement,” says Chris from Red Collar Rescue.

“We will most definitely continue to make use of the multiple-location-listings and we really appreciate PetRescue’s interest in working with regional organisations like ours.

“We have been active members of PetRescue for years and have always found the website by far and away the most efficient way of re-homing our pets, largely because it has allowed us to reach far beyond our country area to a nationwide audience.

If you'd like to see all the amazing dogs available for adoption at Red Collar Rescue, click here.

Looking for a new family member to join your home? Find dogs, cats and other pets in your area with the click of a button!