Shelter dogs are a cause that is near and dear to most everyone’s hearts, even if we mute the television or change the channel any time those horrible Sarah McLachlan commercials come on. We make sure to adopt when we want a new pet, maybe we donate food and supplies or cash, and we wish we could do more.
Well Eugene Bostick, an 80-year-old retiree in Fort Worth, Texas, used his free time to do more – and now he is the conductor of the cutest, floofiest train in the world.
Eugene and his brother, Corky, have seen firsthand how many dogs in their city need help and homes. They live at the end of a dead-end street, which is apparently where terrible people go to dump dogs they no longer want. So he and his brother began to take them in until they could find homes.
He told Dodo,
“We started feeding these abandoned animals, letting them in, taking them to the vet to get them spayed and neutered.
We made a place for dog rescues to live.”
The dogs, though, seemed to need more enrichment in their lives, and as Eugene watched another man hauling rocks behind his tractor, genius struck.
“I seen this guy with a tractor who attached these carts to pull rocks. I thought, ‘Dang, that would do for a dog train.’
I’m a pretty good welder, so I took these plastic barrels with holes cut in them, and put wheels under them and tied them together.”
Voila! A dog train – and nobody was happier about it than the dogs.
“Whenever these adorable dogs hear me hooking the tractor up to it, man, they get so excited.”
He didn’t stop until there were enough carts for all of the dogs he and his brother care for, either, because those pooches didn’t need to be left behind a second (or third) time.
“All of a sudden, a couple more dogs showed up. I said, ‘Oh, that’s not enough room’ – and that’s when I came up with THAT.'”
The dogs at their makeshift shelter and rescue look to be some of the happiest puppers I’ve seen in a while – if their tongues wagging in the wind aren’t proof, I don’t know what is – and they get rides on their dog train a couple of times a week.
I imagine that people turn out to wave and smile at the cutest parade in town, and maybe even inquire after the dogs on occasion, too.
Eugene just may be a genius – maybe other shelters need to take note and pull their available hounds through the streets on occasion, too, just so people can get a good look.
After all, it’s harder to ignore a problem after you’ve looked it straight in its melty brown eyes.
“All of a sudden, a couple more dogs showed up. I said, ‘Oh, that’s not enough room’ – and that’s when I came up with THAT”
Now, the 80-year-old retiree takes his rescued dogs on a train ride twice a week.
Keep going Eugene! We love this about as much as we can love anything!
