Sharon's Story

I brought my first stray dog home at the age of 9 years old, and so

it began, climbing over fences to sit with the dogs in the city

council pound, picking up injured birds, taking newts home from

the science lab at school and so on.  I absolutely love nature and all

living creatures. I’ve always felt very close to all in it and all its

beauty...especially dogs!  

At 17 years old, I volunteered to go to Romania to work with the

orphaned children that had really touched my heart. As I was so

young at the time, I was below the volunteers age for that

particular charity and I could not go. I remember being very

disappointed.  Ever since then I’ve had an emotional interest in

Romania and the way of life, the hardship many of the people and

animals have to endure on a daily basis.  Years later I studied to be

an attachment leader within school - part of the uni course was to

look at the effect the orphanages were having on the children. At

this point, I was already volunteering as a fosterer for dogs in the

UK and Ireland, as well as working full time, studying, being a

single mum to my 4 children and caring for my own dogs.  

I decided to look into the plight of the street dog once again, I was

shocked at the vast number of dogs on the streets, in public

shelters and kill shelters, it had got worse not better. I made a few

enquiries to people I knew in rescue and decided to foster

Romanian dogs too. I initially did this through a UK based charity. I

adopted my first Romanian street dog in Feb 2016, she’s my

soulmate and often my teacher too (I now have 5 Romanian dogs

of my own plus two UK rescue dogs). 

I became very frustrated with the lack of aftercare with the charity

and found myself giving back up to dogs that people had adopted

through them. After a couple of years taking dogs from Romania

and re-homing through word of mouth I decided to set up

Love4dogs. I visited Romania on a few occasions and saw first-

hand what incredible work the rescuers were doing out there. We

have a great working relationship and trust each other. 

Over the next few years I worked with a few friends and had a

couple of foster people help me out occasionally but mainly ran it

on my own until February 2020 when I was joined by a lovely

rescuer. We have built Love4dogs up and have a wonderful,

compassionate and fun admin team with a brilliant foster team in

place too.

 We are hoping to continue to support our lovely rescue friends in

Romania and save as many dogs as possible and build Love4dogs

to enable us to continue the support we offer and expand into

greater things. 

Sharon x