The Tallahassee Parrothead Club held its annual Pup Crawl event Saturday to raise funds, supplies and awareness for animals in need. Over the past three years, the organization has made gradual changes and improvements in its efforts by partnering with local charities.
The Parrothead Club helps these charities by fostering animals for them or helping to transport animals to ensure they get the needed funds to help as many animals in need as possible.
The organizations that were chosen for this year’s event were Tallahassee Big Dog, North Florida Rescue and It’s Meow or Never. All of these groups work extremely hard to rescue abused, unwanted animals, and to rehabilitate and find homes for them.
Sherri Wilson, first mate at Tallahassee Parrothead, spoke about what she hoped to get out of the event and the club’s future plans for events like these in the months to come.
“This year we decided to step it up a notch by having live adoptions and trying to reach more people in the community,” Wilson said. “We want to promote the need for these organizations to get the help so that they continue the great work they do. The goal was to find homes for several of these fur babies and simultaneously allow each of these groups to have the capacity to take in more animals and save more lives,” she said.
“Rescue is very expensive and not easy to do without proper funds and volunteers, so we hope to raise even more money for our future plans and add more rescue groups,” Wilson added.
Alyssa Brown, a third-year student in Florida A&M’s animal science pre-vet program, attended the event and saw the importance of what was being done to help animals in need.
“It was an amazing event to attend,” Brown said. “There are so many animals in need of forever homes. I wasn’t able to adopt but they still allowed donations of pet food and supplies.”
She went on to explain the benefits of adopting for both the animal and the person or family that takes them in.
“Taking responsibility for an animal’s overall health and well-being is very important and shouldn’t be taken lightly,” Brown said.
“Not only does it make the pet happy, but those who take them get to add another piece to their family or discover a friend for life.”