By Vince Agnew, Player Engagement Insider
Houston Texans third-year linebacker Max Bullough and his wife, Bailee, have dedicated their time and home to save the lives of as many dogs as possible.
For the NFL’s My Cause, My Cleats campaign this week, Bullough will be rocking an all-red cleat designed by Nike during Sunday’s tilt against the Green Bay Packers. In blue text, the cleats will display ‘Adopt, Don’t Shop’ on one foot and ‘Save A Life’ on the other.
The inspiration of the design comes from the organization K-9 Angels that he and Bailee work closely with in Houston both during the season and off-season. K-9 Angels rescues dogs from high-kill shelters around the city, taking them directly from the euthanasia lists. The key behind this movement is that the dogs cannot be taken from those lists without K-9 Angels having a foster home or adoptive family to claim them.
This is where the Bulloughs and other volunteers come together to void the time stamp placed on these dogs’ lives.
A major challenge when fostering these animals is to not become attached, but help them to live their lives, and not only that, but to live their lives knowing love is a reward greater than pain.
In Houston, approximately seven out of 10 dogs that enter shelters will be euthanized. Harris County Animal Shelter in particular gets about 60 dogs a day from owner surrender and strays, however this shelter only has capacity for about 120. Though these shelters do all that they can, these staggering numbers prompted the Bulloughs to notice and take action.
How did you get involved with K-9 Angels?
Max Bullough: We initially got involved because of my wife, Bailee. She read about all of the sad statistics and we started fostering a few dogs. That lead to us volunteering at K-9 Angels on weekends and we became more and more involved from there.
I really have to give a lot of credit to Bailee. She is the one that got me interested and kept us in it. She does a lot of the work when we foster a dog during the season. It is harder especially if you get young dogs, and she does an unbelievable job.
What is the process to foster a dog?
Max Bullough: We just got done with three puppies. They were six-week-old, lab-pit mixes. We had them for about five days and that was a pretty short one. Typically they are about two weeks.
After you apply and are accepted, fostering is generally an easy task. The rescue will set you up with crates, medication, food and beds.
Basically what you do is foster the puppies in your home from Monday to Friday and then they go to the adoption center on Saturday and Sunday. Hopefully they get adopted over the weekend but if not, then you get them back on Sunday night and keep them for another week. You just open your home to them and show them what living the good life is like until they find their forever home.
I’d say we’ve fostered 25 dogs with us.
What are your goals going forward to continuing helping this cause?
Max Bullough: We are going to continue to foster as much as we are allowed. God-willing that I am still playing in the NFL for a while, during my career we want to get more involved in terms of starting our own charity or even a dog rescue. We would love to start something educating people about the importance of spaying and neutering and the number of dogs that we can prevent from being euthanized just by doing something like that.
It’s really an open book; there are a lot of different angles and ways to go about making a change. For now we are going to keep doing the most that we can through K-9 Angels and then see what the future holds.
Why is it important that the league creates initiatives like this?
Max Bullough: It gives a chance for the players to show what they are involved in off the field. There is not as much news about stuff like this as there is about other negative things. When you look around the NFL, the vast majority of guys are great people who go on the field on Sundays and perform at a high level and then they go and do good in the community too.
When you read the list just on the Texans you can see how many different causes and how many different things there are that we can help, that everybody can help. It goes for everything like cancer, helping inner city youth, saving dogs and more.
It’s important to recognize the kind of people that are players in the NFL, but more importantly it’s to bring awareness to all of these issues so that we can better the situations of people, or in this case, dogs.
Those are the messages that are going to get across this weekend.
Everyday around the country, thousands of animals are euthanized simply because of irresponsible breeding, a lack of rescue shelters and foster homes. K-9 Angels has saved and adopted over 900 dogs in 2016 and over 3,000 since their opening.