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Get-A-Wag places FREE toy breed puppies and adult dogs to become therapy dogs for children and adults having special medical, emotional, or financial needs.
Get-A-Wag is self-supporting: 5% of each puppy sold to be a pet by our toy dog foundations is donated to fund the placement of Get-A-Wag puppies by our breeders. We usually donate two or more per month.
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History of Get-A-Wag |
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How the Get-A-Wag program got its start.
Get-A-Wag was created to give special children the puppies they might not be able to get another way.
It was soon expanded to include adults, facilities, and military families.
Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagles started in 2002 to develop a smaller breed of beagle. In the process five distinguishable toy breeds were born through careful merging of different dog traits. These breeds are recognized to be child safe and free of medical problems.
The Get-A-Wag program was founded in 2010. Our team of breeders early recognized the gentle nature of their dogs ideally suited them to be therapy dogs. But they were generally unaffordable to the families that undergo financial hardship of medical or emotional problems. There would need to be a program developed to put these pups into the homes of special need kids and increase public awareness that these dogs make ideal Emotional Support Animals.
The plan to be a self-funding charity was developed. Every puppy sold would have 5% of its price go to the Get-A-Wag fund. This money was used to reimburse the breeder as adoptive fees for the donated puppy. These fees covered food and housing and care for the pup's upbringing. It also allowed us to adopt out older puppies that were not sold. So every puppy within our breed foundation gets a great home.
Children and adults are nominated through an online application form. Those with the greatest need for emotional support go to the top of the list. Those showing unusual need and having a willingness to share their stories of hardship and challenge are chosen and their pictures and testimony is published online. The puppies are then hand delivered or air shipped to them.
'A dog is smarter than its tail',  but if the tail were smarter,
then the tail would 'wag the dog'.
Our goal is to go 'Not For Profit' in 2012, our ten year anniversary. This will allow us to get sponsors so that we can place more puppies every month. It dawns on us, if we had enough sponsors, we could afford for all our puppies to go out through this program! This turns our original goal, to make a better kid-safe dog breed, into a secondary purpose. Because our new conviction to promote our breed as ideal for therapy dog transcends our first intent to simply breed dogs.
Placing therapy dogs with special children and adults becomes our greater purpose life.
It validates us, letting our dog breeders understand that this is the reason why we have dedicated so much time, energy, and effort into this work. Many times our own family life suffered for it. The work of nurturing little pups was all-encompassing. But now we see it as a worthy sacrifice: We are not just building a dog breed. We are building an organization that will have potential to affect the lives of many people.
Through the Get-A-Wag program we meet human's need for companionship with dog's need for connection. Two totally different species bonded together because dogs want and need to make humans happy. Dogs don't need to be trained to please us...they are born wanting to do this. A bond that is based on absolute trust.
We, the breeders of Get-A-Wag Toy Therapy Dogs, are honored to place our puppies with you and we hope you get all you hope for from your therapy dog.
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'A dog is smarter than its tail', but if the tail were smarter, then the tail would 'wag the dog'. The expression 'wag the dog' was elaborately used as theme of the movie. 'Wag the Dog', a 1997 film starring Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman, produced and directed by Barry Levinson.
To 'wag the dog' means to purposely divert attention from what would otherwise be of greater importance, to something else of lesser significance. By doing so, the lesser-significant event is catapulted into the limelight, drowning proper attention to what was originally the more important issue.
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