Founder of Three Counties Dog Rescue in Bourne, Gyll Mauchline, looks to the future after lockdown

Well, so now we know the earliest that we can be back in business. The April date still seems some way away but at least we can start planning for a resumption.

Sadly we will have missed the opportunity to sell some lovely winter coats and other winter accessories through our charity shop so these will need to be packed away for later in the year. We have got lots of new items to sell though so it will be a bumper opportunity to bag a bargain when we finally open again. This time we hope it will be for good.

On the dog rescue front, although we have not been able to rehome, we have taken in several dogs that were looking for new homes. We have not updated our website as we didn’t want to encourage enquiries that we couldn’t meet.

Closer to the reopening date we will set out on our Facebook page and our website the rehoming enquiry process to follow so we can resume in as orderly way as possible. We had experience of doing this at the end of the original lockdown.

The difficulty for us is that we have been receiving many enquiries during the latest lockdown period, often for the same dog or cat. We don’t want to disappoint people so we will need a process to filter enquiries first for general suitability and for us subsequently to contact people to fix follow up appointments. We hope people will understand that we will do our best to satisfy the demands but remembering that the interests of the dogs and cats will always come first.

It has been a grim last 12 months for many reasons but with summer on the way and future prospects for all looking much better we hope that we can get on with developing Three Counties Dog Rescue’s resources to cement its future for the long term.