Events - Special Upcoming Events!

For those of you who follow our News Blog, we want you to know that we have some GREYT special events coming up in August! We will be posting about all of these events as we get closer to each one, but we wanted to let you know that there are a lot of opportunities to get together with FFGR, Inc. and have some fun (that is, outside of our regularly scheduled meet and greet events). All of these events are already posted on our Calendar of Events for August; if you are interested in attending any/all, you can get more information (along with specific addresses and site links) by going to each event's listing.

Saturday, August 6: We will be hosting a very special meet and greet event. The folks at Dogs and Company in Columbia, Maryland, invited us to come in with our hounds and talk to their customers about greyhound adoption. We will have a number of volunteers at this event in addition to most of our hounds looking for homes. This event will start at noon. Stop by to say hello and meet our hounds. This promises to be a very exciting event since we have a lot of volunteers coming and the store employees and manager has been awesome about advocating on our behalf!

Saturday, August 13: Our organization is having a HUGE FFGR, Inc. family yard sale at the home of Jo and CL Long in Adamstown, Maryland. All of our volunteers have been collecting items to sell for some time; we have almost filled a whole trailer! The yard sale starts a 9 a.m. and will run until 5 p.m. Jo and CL have a three-acre, fenced-in property; this nice yard will be available for all volunteers to bring their hounds to have a good time while we make money for the hounds. If you want to be involved or have items to sell, please call Jo at 301-874-5911. They can make arrangements to have you drop off to the trailer any time. The more we have the more we will sell. We hope that you will come by and see what we have and say hello! As always, all that we sell goes directly to helping the hounds!!

Saturday, August 20: Join FFGR, Inc. at a fun event and another fund raising opportunity! Our volunteers will be at the Chick-fil-A fast food restaurant in Martinsburg, West Virginia for Spirit Night! Come to Chick-fil-A and eat dinner between the hours of 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. and 20% of the sales will be donated to FFGR, Inc.! We will have a number of volunteers at this event along with information about our greyhounds. We will be able to speak with people about greyhound adoption. In addition, one of our volunteers will be wearing the Chick-fil-A cow costume to help bring people into the restaurant! This event promises to be a LOT of fun! Come out and have dinner with us and earn money for the hounds at the same time!

Keep checking back for more information as we get closer to the date of each event. Be sure to mark your calendars and help us get through the "dog days of summer!"

Focus on Fosters - Maggie

We love senior dogs!!! And Maggie is a very special senior dog (she will be nine years old August 2). She ran in to some bad luck when her adopters moved into a small town house and could not take her with them. She had been in her home for over five years when suddenly she found herself without a home!

When Maggie came in to our program, she was quite upset as any uprooted dog would be. It took her awhile to relax but when she did, she turned into one of the funniest greyhounds ever! Maggie was used to being the only dog in her house; therefore, when she suddenly found herself surrounded by other dogs in her foster home, she had quite a shock! However, it didn't take her long to decide that this arrangement was quite suitable and even more fun!

Maggie has a very outgoing and happy personality. She has to be in the middle of everything. She certainly knows who she is and is very happy with that! She can walk into a room and light it up. She gets along with all of the other dogs in her foster home, although at times she can get a little snarky if someone invades what she considers her space. It's very short lived; she may grumble a little and get up, turn around, find her spot again and before you know it, everything is just fine.

We enjoy having Maggie here. She brings a lot of laughter and smiles. She loves going outside and heads right up the stairs in the yard to look down on the other dogs. It's as if she is telling everyone that she is the queen!

We decided that, if Maggie was a human being, she would belong to the Red Hat Society! She is a diva in her own right and does just what she pleases. Fortunately for everyone, it includes making everyone laugh out loud.

Maggie is totally up to date on all of her shots. She has all of her teeth (Yay!) and her recent senior blood panel came back just perfect. She is supposed to be cat safe, but we have not done any testing.

We love Maggie and we hope that some special person will notice her and give her that real "forever" home she so deserves. She is on Craiger's List on our web site.

Special Needs Hounds Available Now

In 2008, our organization established Craiger's List . Craiger's List is named in honor of a very special greyhound that graced our lives for a wonderful, but all-to-brief, period of time. Craiger died of lymphoma shortly after his third birthday. He touched us deeply and permanently. We wanted others to know how giving a special dog a home can be so rewarding. Craiger will always be in our hearts and we hoped that by giving other special needs and/or overlooked dogs a chance for a loving home, that we would honor Craiger's life. We work with other groups, adoption kennels, racing kennels, farms and even people who cannot keep their special needs hounds. These dogs are placed on Craiger's List and we look for forever homes for them. All people adopting a greyhound from Craiger's List are experienced greyhound adopters and make a lifelong commitment to the hound they adopt.

Although we have worked hard and have found homes for hundreds of greyhounds since our group was established, we have had our most satifisying experience finding homes for the hounds we placed on Craiger's List. We have always felt that the "overlooked" dogs also deserved a chance. Therefore, in 2009, we enhanced our mission to work hard on behalf of these deserving animals and concentrated more on finding homes for those left behind. There are many people who can talk about how fulfilling their adoption of special needs hounds has been and we have met many wonderful people in the process who understand that the best dogs are sometimes the ones that get overlooked.

When Craiger's List dogs are placed, the ENTIRE adoption fee is sent as a donation directly to the Morris Animal Foundation, Greyhound Project, which researches cancer. To date our group has found homes for 55 greyhounds from the list and donated $9,525 to the Morris Animal Foundation on behalf of cancer research!!!!!

You can click on the title of this post if you want to see the greyhounds that we currently have available for adoption. If you are interested in any of these special hounds, please fill out our adoption application and note the name of the dog that you would like to adopt. We will contact you to discuss your application. These are all wonderful dogs and they deserve special homes. We require that all potential adopters be knowledgeable about dogs in general and greyhounds specifically. In some cases, we will provide additional incentives for adoption, but that will be disclosed at the time the adoption is approved. Please give one of these special hounds a chance. We guarantee that you will be rewarded beyond your greatest expectations!! Please note: ALL Craiger's List dogs are fostered before being placed.

Rainbow Bridge - She Didit Herway (Emmy)

January 19, 2002 - May 19, 2011

We are sorry to report that one of our adopters has lost her beloved greyhound. Emmy was diagnosed with a fast-growing and inoperable mass in her abdomen that ended up cutting off her colon and bladder from being able to eliminate waste. She was painlessly euthanized May 19, 2011 after weeks of tests and meds to help.

Meisha Krutar adopted Emmy in September of 2006. Although Meisha is in the military, she always found a way to have Emmy with her no matter where she went. They were constant companions; therefore, Emmy's death has had a big impact on Meisha.

We are sorry that Emmy is gone, but we know that she had the most loving home with a caring and responsible adopter. Meisha is an example of why we do what we do.

Run with the angels sweet girl.