About Us

Save A Dog is a humane society whose primary focus is rescuing and rehoming abandoned dogs. We began in 1999 as an all-breed, all-volunteer dog rescue group and ran out of our founder's home for nine years. Finally we have a lovely facility and kennel which we are renting to own in Sudbury, Mass. Save A Dog is a privately funded 501(c)3 organization. Our Tax ID number is 04-3476937.

Save A Dog was founded by husband and wife team, Shirley Moore and David Bernier, of Wayland, Mass. After volunteering at local shelters and seeing the detrimental effect that kennel life had on some dogs, they decided to begin fostering and to build a foster network for the dogs they took in from local and remote dog pounds. They targeted many of the big city shelters and would load up their vans with many adoptable dogs, foster them, provide medical care and a holistic protocol, and put them up for adoption to approved homes. Save A Dog has grown over the years and now we have over 100 volunteers who help on an as-needed basis, and approximately 25-30 volunteers who help on a weekly basis.

With millions of pets being euthanized annually, our goal is to save as many lives as we can even though we are a relatively small humane society. One way to maximize the number of lives we can save at one time is to bring in groups of a dozen or so dogs at one time. In rural West Virginia and Tennessee, the plight of dogs is heart-breaking. Puppies are thrown in dumpsters, drowned, or left in a box in the woods to die. We work with several humane societies in the south who are overwhelmed with dogs. They foster the dogs for us prior to sending them up for adoption. The dogs we receive from rural humane societies all would otherwise have been put to sleep. We also take in local dogs who are in need on a regular basis.

One of our primary goals is to educate people in our community about pet overpopulation and the need to "adopt" rather than "buy". In doing so, we provide friendly, good-natured, dogs for adoption. There is no need to go to a breeder when one out of every three dogs who end up in a shelter is purebred. In some cities, 60% of the dogs are purebred, including "designer dogs".