No Veteran Should Have to Choose Between Getting Help and Keeping Their Pet

Veteran Pet Support Services is the Military Animal Project’s answer. Emergency boarding, short-term fostering, veterinary care, and pet supplies for veterans and their household pets, at no cost to the veteran, when life becomes unpredictable.

We have sat with a veteran who nearly turned down a rehab bed because he had no safe plan for his cat. That bed had taken months to secure.

That is the choice too many veterans are quietly making. Get help, or keep your animal. Nobody should have to weigh those against each other, and with this fund in place, nobody has to.

Our immediate goal is to fund 45 nights of emergency boarding – $3,000 – by midnight, September 30. Reaching that goal will help meet the needs in front of us right now. And with approximately 60 requests coming in each month, the need doesn’t end there. Every additional gift helps ensure VPSS is ready when the next veteran calls.

Macho is an 11-year-old Boxer, and he is the heart of his owner Ray’s world. Ray is a veteran, and Macho is his prescribed emotional support dog, his constant companion through everything.

Earlier this year, Ray suffered a serious fall and broke his hip. Surgery, a short recovery, then a second fall from complications that sent him straight back to the hospital for another operation. And suddenly Ray was facing a problem he never expected. He had no one to care for Macho. Animal control picked Macho up, and Ray was told the shelter could only hold him for a limited time.

So there was Ray. Flat on his back, unable to walk, unable to drive, unable to make the one phone call that would fix it. Terrified he was about to lose his best friend.

Another veteran told him about Military Animal Project. Within days, our team launched what somebody started calling Operation Breakout Macho, and the name stuck.

A volunteer drove to the shelter and signed Macho out before the hold expired. From there he went straight to a groomer. Not sentimental, but necessary, because weeks in a shelter are hard on an 11-year-old Boxer. Somebody paid that bill.

Then he went to a boarding home our team arranged and vetted, where he stayed safe and well cared for through every week of Ray’s rehabilitation. Somebody paid that bill too, night after night, for as long as it took.

And on the day Ray was finally settled back at home, two volunteers loaded Macho into the car and drove him there themselves.

Afterward, Ray sent our team this:

“I truly felt like I was going to lose my baby, and I don’t know what I would have done without you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

That thank-you isn’t ours. It belongs to the donors who paid for every step of it — shelter pickup, grooming, weeks of boarding, the ride home. Ray’s only job through all of it was to heal.