Hours before they were both scheduled to be euthanized in July at a high-kill Atlanta shelter, Kala and Keira were rescued — just two hours after a touching photo of the pair was posted on social media, breaking hearts around the world.
In the photo, taken by the Etowah Valley Humane Society and posted on the Angels Among Us Pet Rescue Facebook page, Kala, a brown terrier mix, clings to the neck of her cellmate, a black-and-white Boxer mix named Keira.
“I’m Kala. This is Keira. We’re so scared in here,” reads the photo description, which is as moving as the photo itself.
“Can you see our faces. Keira knows what will happen. You can see it in her eyes. She’s putting on a brave face for sure, but I can feel her heart beating fast while I’m clinging to her. If no one saves us, someone will take her away from me. I’ll see her as she goes down the hallway. She won’t come back and I’ll cry. They’ll come for me next and I won’t be as brave. We’ve comforted each other while we were here. She gave me hope when I had none. Now it’s over. Unless…”
Exactly two hours and six minutes after the photo was posted, Kala and Keira left the shelter — not via the euthanization room, but with a man who took them to Angels Among Us Pet Rescue, a nonprofit dedicated to saving the lives of pets in high-kill shelters in northern Georgia.
After spending three months in a foster home, the two have finally found a forever home with longtime friends and roommates, Wendy and Pam.
“I picked up People magazine last week, after following the story on the hugging dogs, and knew I just had to call,” said Wendy, according to an update Oct. 26 on the Angels Among Us Pet Rescue Facebook page.
Wendy had recently lost two senior dogs, so the timing was perfect.
“It just fell together,” she said. “We turned our tears into smiles with these two young, playful dogs.”
Kala and Keira are very happy with their new dog moms, as you can see in the photo.
“Now we get to hug them all the time!” Kala “wrote” on Angels Among Us Pet Rescue’s Facebook page. “That’s just our thing and they love that about us. I don’t even remember that shelter or our life before we became Angels. All the good people made us forget the bad stuff that happened to us. Now here we are. A family and home to call our own.”
Wendy said she plans to start a Facebook page to keep everyone up to date on Kala and Keira, and to raise money to help Angels Among Us rescue more dogs from high-kill shelters.
Until then, if you’d like to make a donation to Angels Among Us Pet Rescue, click here.