Wrigley’s Animal Rescue Grant

A Special Dog Named Wrigley

From his dog mom, Kyla

“I adopted Wrigley in February 2012, from a shelter in Richmond. He came to that shelter years before I ever laid eyes on him, in a cardboard box with seven of his brothers and sisters. Someone left them there overnight. The staff arrived in the morning and found eight puppies waiting for them, and took every one of them in.

His brothers and sisters were adopted, one by one. For whatever reason, Wrigley was the last one left.

Eventually a family took him. It didn’t work. They emailed the shelter for over a year telling them they didn’t like him, that he wasn’t fitting in, that they wanted to bring him back. Every time, the shelter wrote back and said: not a problem, bring him back anytime. It went on so long the shelter assumed it was just talk. Then one day they returned him.

I had seen Wrigley more than a year earlier, in an ad on Craigslist, and emailed to ask if he was still available. They wrote back and said he was already gone. I was so sad about it. So when he turned up at that shelter — the same dog, back again — I knew it was meant to be.

On the day I picked him up, as we were walking out the door, he barked. I must have made a face, because the woman at the shelter said, “Oh God — I was hoping he wouldn’t do that until you got him home.”

She had reason to hope. Wrigley’s bark was not a pleasant sound. It was blood-curdling. It was, I would come to learn, a weapon. But I wasn’t about to hand him back over a bark, so out the door we went.

He was not, at that point, an easy dog to love. He was angry. He was hurt. He had decided he wasn’t going to love anybody again, and he bit. He bit a lot. He bit me a lot.

We worked through it. It took a long time. Every single day I told him the same thing: I will never abandon you.

He was a scruffy little thing. He looked like the Tramp from Lady and the Tramp, if the Tramp had actually looked homeless. He was very pleased with this look and had no interest in improving on it, and to be fair, it suited him — right up until it snowed.

Snow caught in the scraggly hair on his legs and along his underside and balled up there, and by the time he came back inside he’d be hung with dozens of little nickel- and dime-sized snowballs, welded on. You couldn’t shake them off. You couldn’t pull them off. You either melted them, rinsed them out with warm water, or waited them out. He’d stand there jingling with ice, utterly unbothered, and I never once managed not to laugh at him.

He lived at first with me, my then-boyfriend Josh, and Josh’s dog Kaiser. Wrigley had no interest in being part of a dog family. He wanted to be the only dog. He got jealous when I gave Kaiser attention instead of him, and he was wily enough to outsmart Kaiser and take his treats and steal his toys. When Josh and I broke up, there was never any question about who was taking which dog.

After that, Wrigley was my best friend. He was my little shadow. If I moved, he moved. If I got up to go to the bathroom, he trotted along behind me and waited outside the door.

He was also a complete pain in the ass.

If Wrigley wanted something, Wrigley got it. One night while I slept he scaled a table, found a box of a dozen chocolate donuts, and ate all twelve. I woke up to him vomiting and drove him to the emergency hospital. That was the first of three emergency trips for chocolate. After the third I stopped going, because I understood by then that he was going to eat chocolate no matter what I did, that he was apparently impervious to it, and that he was simply going to have to live with the consequences of his choices.

He was also, frankly, abusive. He loved being scratched and petted, and when he decided that was what was happening now, that was what was happening now. He’d sit down beside me and hit me with his paws — hard. You would not think a dog that size could hurt you. He could. He had claws, and he would rake them down your arm, violently and with real force, until you put down whatever you were doing and gave him cuddles. It always felt a bit like paying blood money, giving in just to stop the assault. But underneath it, all he was ever asking was to be told he was loved.

And then there was the barking. He saved it for the worst possible moments. I could work quietly all day and not hear a peep out of him — and the instant a Zoom call connected, or the phone rang for a prohibition hearing, or I sat down to give a media interview, he would plant himself in front of me and let loose. He didn’t want me focused on anything that wasn’t him. During the pandemic I had to put him outside for Zoom calls, or buy him off with a bully stick, or take the call in the basement. I ran entire IRP hearings while walking laps around the inside of my own house, because as long as I was moving he wouldn’t bark. He’d just follow.

His other party trick was humping people’s legs. Anyone’s. Every house guest’s. Once I was giving an interview to a major news station in my living room, mid-answer, and Wrigley strolled up, mounted the reporter’s leg, and went at it enthusiastically while the camera rolled. She was a consummate professional and did not break. The camera guy was gone. I was mortified, but I finished my answer, because I wasn’t about to let him ruin a good point, and then I peeled him off her leg. She thought it was hilarious. I have never fully recovered.

And yet. For all of that — and it was a lot — he was the sweetest dog I have ever known.

He always knew when I was suffering. He’d come and press himself against me, and if I was crying he would lick the tears right off my face. Part of me suspected he was in it for the salt. But he kept at it until I was laughing, and it worked every single time, so I don’t think the salt was the point.

Other times he’d just come and rest his head on my leg, or wedge it into the little crook of the chair between the armrest and where I was sitting, and look up at me. One of those looks was all it took. However bad things were, that look told me everything was going to be all right.

His favourite activity was murder.

At six o’clock one Sunday morning I woke to horrible growling outside my bedroom window. I’d let Wrigley into the yard a little earlier. I went out and found he had cornered two raccoons on the back deck — and the growling was coming from them. I ran inside to find a weapon, because I was going to have to fight two raccoons off him. The best I could do was a broom and a winter jacket for armour. By the time I got back outside, Wrigley came trotting around the corner of the house, tail wagging, grinning, drenched head to foot in blood. I carried him inside and checked him over. Not a scratch on him. All of it was theirs. I never saw another raccoon at that house again.

When the house got mice, Wrigley handled it.

But his masterpiece was the crow. A juvenile crow landed in our backyard to rest its wings while it was learning to fly, and Wrigley found it. He was barking; its parents were screaming and dive-bombing him; he did not care in the slightest. I ran out, saw what was about to happen, and knew there was no version of this where he listened to me. He never listened to me. He would actually seek out my opinion first and then become more determined, because frustrating me was part of the fun. He loved me, but I was not the boss of him, and he made sure I knew it.

I called my mom, who was visiting, to come help. She ran at him to grab him, and you could see it in his eyes — he knew he had exactly one lunge. One shot, one opportunity. He took it. He caught that crow and snapped its neck, and then paraded the body around the yard while its parents attacked him, and me, and my mother, who they had reasonably concluded were accomplices.

For years afterward, every crow baby season, the crows came for us. They dive-bombed us. They followed us. They called ahead to other crows down the block to warn them we were coming.

The other thing he loved was running away. He wasn’t running from me; he was going on an adventure. I know this because sometimes he’d get out of the yard without my noticing and I’d only find out when he turned up outside the gate, barking to be let back in.

But if I caught him mid-adventure, at my parents’ place or a friend’s, and went to collect him, he’d look at me and understand that I had come to end it. He’d run about three-quarters of the way to me, stop, and blast off in the opposite direction at top speed. That was the happiest I ever saw him — the moment he’d fooled me into thinking I’d won.

He was so fast. The fastest dog anyone had ever seen. We had a big yard that wrapped all the way around the house, and he would tear around it so fast he was just a blur going past the windows. Put him against greyhounds and I think he’d have beaten them outright.

He should never have been running like that. He had a bad heart.

Wrigley was born with a defective mitral valve. He should have deteriorated; he simply declined to. He held at stage B2 with a grade 4 murmur for seven or eight years. His radiologist was fascinated by him, because most dogs progress within two years of diagnosis and Wrigley just refused. Even at the very end, at the vet’s office days before he died, the vet said to him: Well, Wrigley, all these years we thought your heart would be the thing that took you out — and here it is, still going as strong as ever.

In December 2018 he nearly died anyway. I came home from a friend’s birthday to a house covered in vomit — more than I could believe a dog that size could produce. He’d been off for a few days, but this was something else. He wouldn’t stand. I put him outside and he just sat there. I took him to the emergency vet that night and they suspected leptospirosis, which meant blood tests and an isolation chamber. This was pre-pandemic, so watching vets suit up in full hazmat, booties, a water tray, two sets of doors, was a lot to take in.

After two days they told me he wasn’t responding, that he was in acute renal failure, and that I should put him down.

I was not rational. That was my dog, and I was not going to let some mystery bacteria they couldn’t treat take him. I told them I would take him to the children’s hospital and get him dialysis — if they can dialyze a baby, they can dialyze my dog on the same machine. The vet looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I told him he didn’t understand who he was dealing with, that I am the most persuasive person he would ever meet. I got out my phone, found a clinic in California that did canine dialysis, and told him I would charter a plane. I told him I would spend every penny I had to save this dog’s life, and I meant it.

At which point the vet admitted there was, in fact, a place in Vancouver that did dialysis for dogs, and that it was extremely expensive. I said: great, call them and tell them I’m on my way.

I drove across town with Wrigley on the passenger seat, sobbing the whole way, bargaining with him and with God, promising him that if he lived I would take him for a long walk every single day and feed him the best food there was. (I did not keep the walk part.)

A technician ran out and took him from my arms. He stayed in their ICU for a month.

They couldn’t actually give him dialysis in the end — by the time he arrived he’d lost so much weight and had so little blood volume that he wouldn’t have survived it. So it was intensive IV fluid therapy instead, which was its own tightrope, because his heart couldn’t take much fluid. Too little and his kidneys wouldn’t recover; too much and he’d go into congestive heart failure. I visited once or twice a day, sat with him, petted him, watched him get better in millimetres. A few times they called in the middle of the night and I drove over to say goodbye.

The day I knew he was going to live was the day I showed up and they told me they’d had to move him out of his kennel, because he had figured out the latch. He was also now in a double-sized cone, duct-taped on and tied to his collar, with extra wrapping up both front legs, because he had worked out how to pull his own IV and his feeding tube, and how to undo or slip out of an ordinary cone.

They put him on the floor instead. He observed that his lines all ran to an IV pole, and that the pole was plugged into the wall, and chewed through the cord. And escaped.

So they moved him into a giant enclosure meant for 110-pound mastiffs — seven kilograms of Wrigley in a mastiff pen — and he broke out of that too. In the end they engineered a lead anchored to the ceiling of the enclosure so he could walk around inside but couldn’t reach the door. That held him until his release.

He destroyed a truly impressive amount of medical equipment during that stay. They now have a rule at that hospital, named after him — the Wrigley Rule — about how IV wiring has to be secured. That is his legacy.

He went to my parents’ for two weeks afterward for daily subcutaneous fluids; my mom is a retired nurse. The vet predicted two more years. He got seven. The vet also predicted his kidneys would never fully recover. They recovered completely — end-stage acute renal failure to no evidence of kidney disease at all — and stayed that way until ordinary old age caught up with him.

In 2023 he had 16 cm of bowel removed over a suspected cancer, which thankfully it wasn’t. The surgeon said that between his age, his heart and his early kidney disease he’d need three days in hospital. At a day and a half they phoned and said I’d better come get him, because he didn’t want to be there and he was well enough to go. It was the same hospital as the ICU month, and he was already back to his old tricks trying to break out. He was under strict orders not to run, jump, or climb stairs. The first thing he did when I opened the car door was launch himself into it. The staples held. That dog was not going to not jump.

That was him entirely. Wrigley did what Wrigley wanted, whether or not it was good for him and whether or not anyone approved. And somehow he was wily enough that nothing could take him out. Not two raccoons. Not a deadly bacteria. Not major abdominal surgery he was far too old for.

It took a brain tumour.

He saw more of this province than most people do. He stayed in more hotels than I can count, including the nicest hotel in British Columbia, more than once — and yes, he peed on the floor there, more than once. Small towns in the Kootenays. The north. All over Vancouver Island, which he loved best, because my parents have a big yard in the woods and there was no end of things to smell.

At our old house, his spot was under the rose bush in the front yard, right beside the gate. From there he could see the whole yard, anyone coming down the street, and the front door in case I appeared in it. He’d lie under there wagging his tail, chewing a bone, curled up with the little pony doll he loved.

In his final days he travelled from as far north as Smithers all the way back down to Vancouver — over 1,150 kilometres — and then across to Victoria for his last week.

I had a trial in Williams Lake that could not be adjourned. My mom came and gave him his fluids and took him to her place. I spent the whole week terrified he’d go without me there, that I wouldn’t get to say goodbye properly. But she sent me videos of him pottering around the yard, sniffing everything, tail going, eating voraciously, looking for all the world like a healthy, happy dog.

When I got back and went to collect him, my parents were out. He was inside in his crate. I opened the door and he didn’t get up. He just looked at me — relieved, and so tired.

I think he had been holding on all week because he knew I was coming back. I promised Wrigley I would never abandon him, and I never did. He waited until I was there.

And then he was ready.”

About the Grant

Wrigley’s Animal Rescue Grant is a $2,500 annual award from Deandra Grant Law to one registered animal rescue organization in the United States or Canada. The grant is unrestricted within the purpose described in the application, meaning the recipient may use the funds for the specific need identified in their submission.

One grant of $2,500 is awarded each year on February 16 which was Wrigley’s “Gotcha” Day. Applications are accepted year round. There is no application fee.

Wrigley was Canadian, and rescues on both sides of the border are welcome to apply.

A note on currency. The grant is $2,500 in United States dollars. A Canadian recipient will receive the equivalent amount in Canadian dollars at the exchange rate in effect on the date the funds are sent, less any bank or wire fees charged by the receiving institution. Please build your budget in your own currency and tell us which currency you are using.

Who Can Apply

To be eligible, an applicant organization must:

• Hold current registered charitable status:
  • United States: 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the IRS, in good standing and not automatically revoked.
  • Canada: registered charity status with the Canada Revenue Agency, in good standing, with a charitable registration number. A Canadian nonprofit corporation that is not a CRA registered charity may still apply, and should say so in the application along with its incorporation details.
• Have been in operation for at least one year as of February 1 of the award year.
• Have as a primary purpose the rescue, fostering, sheltering, rehabilitation, or adoption placement of animals.
• Be based and operating in the United States or Canada.
• Be able to accept the funds directly, preferably by check or PayPal. Fiscally sponsored projects and individuals are not eligible.
• Have a person authorized to sign on the organization’s behalf complete the application.

Who Cannot Apply

• Individuals, including individual fosters and rescuers not operating under a registered organization.
• For-profit breeders, boarding operations, or veterinary practices.
• Organizations whose tax-exempt or charitable status is suspended, revoked, or lapsed.
• Past recipients of Wrigley’s Animal Rescue Grant within the prior two award cycles. A rescue that received the grant on February 16, 2027, for example, would next be eligible for the February 16, 2030, award.

Note: an organization is not required to be a dog rescue. Cat rescues, equine rescues, farm animal sanctuaries, and wildlife rehabilitation organizations are all welcome to apply.

Key Dates

Applications are accepted year round, and the award cycle runs on the same calendar every year.

Because applications are open year round, there is no wrong time to apply. An application submitted between February 17 and February 1 is considered for the award made on the February 16 that follows. An application that arrives during the February 2 through February 15 review window is held and considered in the next cycle.

Applications are considered for one award cycle only. An organization that is not selected is welcome to reapply in a later year, and is encouraged to do so with updated information.

How to Apply

Provide the information below and email it to texasdwigal@gmail.com with the subject line “Wrigley’s Animal Rescue Grant Application”.

Attach the following:

• United States applicants: a copy of your IRS determination letter, or a screenshot of your current listing in the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search.
• Canadian applicants: a copy of your CRA notification of registration, or a screenshot of your current listing in the CRA List of Charities. If you are an incorporated nonprofit without CRA charitable status, send your certificate of incorporation instead.
• Two to five photographs of your work that we may use if you are selected. Optional but encouraged.

The Application

Section 1: Organization Information

• Legal organization name
• EIN, or CRA charitable registration number, or incorporation number
• Mailing address, including province or state and postal code
• Website or Instagram
• Primary contact name and title
• Primary contact email
• Primary contact phone
• Year the organization was founded
• Is your organization currently in good standing with the IRS or the CRA, and with your state or province? (Yes / No)

Section 2: Mission and Operations

• What is your mission? Describe your organization’s purpose and the animals and community you serve. (250 words or fewer)
• How long have you been in operation, and what has that time looked like? Tell us when you started, how you have grown or changed, and roughly how many animals you have served since founding. (250 words or fewer)

Section 3: Use of Funds

• How will you spend the grant? Be specific. Tell us what the money buys, who it helps, and when you would spend it. (300 words or fewer)

Section 4: Story

• Tell us about one animal you have rescued. Share a single rescue story that shows what your organization does. (300 words or fewer)

Wrigley’s Animal Rescue Grant is a charitable giving program of Deandra Grant Law. Applying for or receiving the grant does not create an attorney-client relationship with the firm, and the firm provides no legal advice or legal services as part of this program.