Woof Love: RESCUING UNWANTED PUPS, BUILDING FAMILIES
BY RYAN LAWRENCE
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ine years ago, Rose Hamilton was walking her son, Jadon, to Zane North Elementary School on a chilly February morning with her 2 ½-yearold daughter, Kyleigh, in tow. Suddenly, she stopped in her tracks. Another mom had a little black puppy. Kyleigh hadn’t interacted with a dog before. Rose asked the fellow parent, who was fostering the pup, for permission and, suddenly, Kyleigh Hamilton had a new best friend. “I still have the picture,” she said. “Kyleigh is wearing a purple coat, there’s a little snow on the ground and the puppy is hip high on her. And then she’s got her hand around her.” Rose sent the photo via email to her husband, Mark. “You don’t play fair,” he responded. Roxy (the dog’s name now) came to visit the Hamilton family on a Saturday shortly after the meet, and she never left. She found a new home, with Rose, Mark, John Mark, Jadon, little Kyleigh Hamilton and the rest of the family. About six weeks later, the Hamiltons welSPRING 2021
comed Rusty, another rescue puppy, into their home, too. Roxy needed someone she could play a little rougher with. “She was a really easy dog,” Rose said of Roxy. “Which tricks you into another one.” Rose Hamilton laughed. A chance meeting with a puppy at a school playground quickly led to adopting Roxy, then one dog turned into two, and soon she was volunteering as a foster for a rescue group, and then somewhere around a half dozen dogs a year became about 30 a month when she started her own rescue and now, nearly a decade after running into Roxy at the schoolyard, Rose Hamilton has helped save more than 1,000 dogs’ lives. Woof Love Rescue is a foster-based dog rescue organization based out of the Hamiltons’ home in Collingswood. It launched in August of 2017, a handful of years after Rose Hamilton had gained experience as a regular foster for another local rescue organization. But, in reality, Woof Love’s genesis was in the serendipity of meeting Roxy and then a conversation just a few months later, when Roxy and Rusty had made themselves at home with the Hamiltons. 16
“We’re looking at them one night and my husband turns and looks at me and he said, ‘How could anybody throw this away? How does this happen? How are these dogs, that are part of our family, trash to somebody else? How is that? How does that happen?’” Rose recalled. “And you know, we kind of talked about it. I said, we have to do something.” “Something,” initially, was fostering. Then, 3 ½ years ago, it became Rose Hamilton finding her true passion in running her own animal rescue organization, Woof Love, with a logo she has tattooed just above her wrist. Hamilton and her loyal network of foster moms and dads throughout the Delaware Valley – she estimated there are around 40, most are local and all are within an hour’s drive, so they can use the same veterinarian to keep the pups healthy and growing – have volunteered countless hours to saving lives and dedicated themselves to promoting animal welfare. The majority of the dogs arrive at Woof Love from Animal Aid USA, an organization that drives custom rigs – with heatplease see WOOF, page 17 08108
