Austin Boxer Rescue Seeks Fosters, Volunteers

This tiny building is the South Congress Veterinary Clinic, and it’s home to a handful of boxers in the care of Austin Boxer Rescue (ABR). ABR is a nonprofit boxer dog rescue serving the entire state of Texas. It was founded by ABR president Jenn Pope in 2005 when she sought to adopt a boxer and found she had to go to Houston or Dallas to find a rescue. “There was just a need for [ABR],” Pope says. Now, ABR is one of the only boxer rescues in Texas, and it’s the largest.

According to Pope, ABR sees about 575 dogs come through its figurative doors every year. Why figurative? The rescue’s Austin “kennel”, the South Congress Veterinary Clinic, can only host a handful of dogs. ABR has a larger kennel, located in Hewitt, TX, which holds about 30 more dogs – but not nearly the 100 it would take to house all the dogs in ABR’s care at any given time. So where are the dozens of other boxers?

In foster care. 

ABR relies on a huge network of foster volunteers to house most of its dogs. Most fosters live in Austin or San Antonio, with a handful scattered in other cities as well. “The fosters are vital to ABR because when a dog goes into foster care, it has a huge, positive effect on the dog’s wellbeing,” said Carol Eskew, ABR’s fundraising coordinator. “When a dog is in a foster home, it gets the constant love and attention that it simply would not get in a kennel. We especially love it when we get fosters who have children, or cats, so we can acclimate the dogs to those situations.”

ABR relies on volunteers, rather than staff, because it gets almost the entirety of its funding from corporate sponsorships, individual donors, and fundraising events, and each dollar goes toward the dogs. “The fact is, we hemorrhage money each month,” said Eskew. “One routine surgery for one dog can cost $6,000-$10,000. And that’s not even for emergency surgery.

“We get a certain amount from grants, but the overwhelming majority of our money comes from adoption fees, and donations and fundraising. We take on so many expenses, and we keep the doors open each year, but it’s a hustle.”

“We are the largest nonprofit rescue in Texas,” Pope says. “We don’t have anyone on staff. We pay people for their time spent at the Hewitt kennel cleaning and feeding dogs and things like that, but no one is on a payroll. Everyone involved in ABR does it on a volunteer basis, no one is taking home a paycheck for what we do. That includes people who check our email, who rehabilitate dogs, who vet adoption applicants, who organize fundraisers – all of it.”

Eskew explained that the Hewitt kennel was actually entirely paid for by fundraising and donors. “We needed a larger kennel, there was just no way around it. And to purchase what we needed would cost $300,000. When we decided to purchase it in 2019, we had a third of that. And with fundraising events, we did raise the rest and the kennel is now entirely in our name.”

In a city overwhelmed with homeless dogs, ABR is doing all it can to free up space in other shelters. When ABR can step in and take boxers from these larger shelters, it frees up space for non-boxers. In September of 2022, one Austin shelter, Austin Animal Center, was inundated with more than 700 animals. The city has around a dozen other shelters, each typically filled to capacity. A 2022 article in the Austin Chronicle reported that many of the city’s shelters were at over 100% capacity. There are a couple of reasons why.

First, until 2021, Austin was the largest city to designate as a no-kill sanctuary for animals (Los Angeles took the title that year). This means that animals in the city’s shelters are not euthanized for space-saving purposes. This places a huge responsibility on Austin shelters to accept as many animals as possible, but also leaves shelters in a position where they are over capacity.

Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions across the country, shows that evictions in Austin were at record lows between April 2020 and January 2022, with filings ranging from as low as 8 to a high of around 50 per month. By March of 2022, however, Eviction Lab’s data shows evictions in the city were back to – and, in fact, superseding – pre-pandemic levels, with 1,060 filings that month, up 77% from the historic average of 599.

The KVUE article states that many Austin shelters saw an influx of animals as people anticipated losing their homes and having to move to places where their furry friends could not go with them, such as family and friends’ homes, temporary rentals, or shelters. And any of these Austinites who were fostering pets were now unable to do so any longer, leaving the shelters to house the dogs instead.

So, ABR makes it as easy as possible to foster, so they can continue to take in more dogs. ABR provides all fosters with monthly flea, tick, and heartworm prevention, as well as spay and neutering services. The organization also takes care of other medical expenses, such as surgeries, shots, and more, for foster dogs. Fosters can even request food, bedding, and other supplies from ABR.The organization’s Silver Hearts Program allows people to become “forever fosters” to its senior dogs (age 10 and older). Silver Hearts are not put up for adoption; instead, ABR looks for a family that can foster the dog through the end of its life, all the while providing the medical attention, food, and supplies the dog requires.