Tammy Belden volunteers for Homeward Trails, an animal rescue organization based out of Arlington, Virginia. Though she has only worked with Homeward Trails for the past year, she has already assumed the role of go-to foster “mom” for hard cases (read, big dogs with problems).
Before volunteering with Homeward Trails, Tammy worked as a dog foster for the Loudoun County shelter. There, she would walk into the shelter and say, “Which dog needs it [a foster home] the most, because they’re all cute to me.”
That is how Tammy ended up bringing home Baxter, a 120 lbs mastiff mix with a penchant for destroying furniture and anything else within reach.
“He had the biggest jaws of any dog I’ve ever met,” she said. “Then one day, he just started to try to kill people.” After a Christmas Day incident in which Baxter attacked an 80-year-old woman, Tammy decided Baxter had to go. “At the time we lived in a neighborhood that had about 60 toddlers in it,” she said. He could not be trusted.
She took Baxter to her own veterinarian so she could be with him for the euthanization.
“The vet said he would have to muzzle him because there would be two shots, and the first one would sting,” she said. “They put the muzzle on him, and after the first shot, Baxter rips off the muzzle and goes for the vet’s throat. I threw myself on top of him. Then, he passed out and they were able to do it. The vet told me he was just a ticking time bomb, that it was only a matter of time before he went after me.”
Undeterred and feeling bad that she could not rehabilitate Baxter, Tammy took on the shelter’s next most undesirable dog, a Shar-Pei mix that had languished at the shelter for over six months. “Sneakers,” according to Tammy, was both homely and hyper. She calls it a “failed foster” experience because she and her husband adopted the dog themselves. Sneakers ended up being one of the best dogs Tammy ever had.