The best rescue I’ve ever come across
These guys are the best! I was involved in rescue myself until my health meant I could no longer help much, and it does mean that I know a good (and bad!) rescue when I see one.
This a family run, foster based rescue. This means that the dogs will either live with Martin and Thea or in vetted foster homes, where they will be thoroughly assessed.
It’s impossible to totally accurately assess a dog who is in kennels, or in a shelter in another country. You can certainly get a really good idea of what a dog is likely to be like (as long as the U.K. rescue visits any foreign dogs if it’s bringing dogs over - beware - many don’t even meet their rescuers, let alone the dogs!) With experience, it’s possible to get a reasonably reliable assessment done (also beware, many of the rescues bringing foreign dogs in do not have experience!)! It’s only in a foster home environment that a true assessment can be done.
Therefore, you can be confident that with Midlands Dog Rescue, what you are told you are getting, character wise, is what you will get.
Sure, idiosyncrasies will come out over the time, usually these are delightful (as in the case of my June).
We adopted June on February 24th 2025, so it’s almost her gotcha day, and I have nothing but good things to say about the rescue. June is an absolute joy, she’s an ancient chihuahua, she has one tooth, her tongue hangs out - to me she is the most beautiful girl you ever did see. She’s so precious, and MDR took her from the council pound, where some callous people had dumped her. She had little chance of salvation, at her age, and not many people would have taken her out, most rescues would have walked on by and picked out the dogs that they knew would be easily adoptable, the young friendly ones, the breed dogs, the fluffy ones. June was so incredibly lucky that she was seen by these lovely people, who couldn’t bear to leave her there, despite knowing that she was likely to cost them money, despite knowing that not that many people would adopt an older dog like June (she was terrified so was a tad snarly bless her). She had black gunk dried into her fur because of having no teeth (I have to wash her face every day with a baby muslin cloth so it doesn’t get sore, if I miss a day it starts building up around the base of her whiskers, and she’s not shy of telling me what she thinks if I have to rub a little!)
Anyway, safe to say, she wasn’t the most adoptable of dogs, but it’s testament to the characters and the hearts of these wonderful people that they took her out.
We are getting another one from them soon and I can’t wait!
I will be forever grateful to MDR for my little Junebug, and urge anyone looking for a dog to try them first.
Please donate if you possibly can, they really need the support as their work is worth all the riches in the world.