One of the things we always think about with Fluffy is resources. Compared to most other dogs, he receives a lot of medical care - and relatively speaking a LOT of blood products. His recent illness sure made that amount go through the roof!
That said, Fluffy does "pay his own way." Because he was the inspiration behind Sun States (see http://www.sunstates.org/ for more info) he may have used up about 100 or 150 units of CRYO and a half-dozen units of red cells, but so far he's been responsible for the generation and dissemination of about 5,000 blood components! Way to go, Fluffy!
Sun States will be firing up our donor program in Tucson in the next few weeks. We do all the stuff the human blood banks do - test for infectious diseases, divide the blood into components, and perform typing. One donation can be divvied up into up to four different components - red blood cells, platelets, and plasma products (cryoprecipitate and cryo-poor plasma). That means one donation helps a lot more dogs than just Fluffy!
Of course, all our dogs are volunteers! Not so with every blood bank - watch out. Some of the larger so-called "animal blood banks" the Humane Societies for dumps and presses animals into service against their will. They live their lives in cages, being blood donors, and don't really get to do anything else. If they don't want to donate it doesn't matter - they are given sedation! Oh, and like all farms they use a vacuum pump to extract the blood faster (90 seconds for 500mL of blood) - Imagine how that would feel if you were the blood donor!
But they have gotten themselves exempted from Freedom of Information Act requests, so no one knows how many animals die from these procedures every year. They boast about "saving animals from euthanasia" but in reality they are running a blood farm with slave donors. Check out
Sun States does it differently (which is why they hate us so much and have worked for so many years to put us out of business). Our donors are volunteers! We form cooperative relationships with rescues sometimes, but we don't take blood from unwilling animals, we don't mandate terms of service (though we like repeat donors!), and we don't use sedation or vacuum pumps with dogs!
Not every dog wants to donate, and that's OK! You have to respect that. It's a gift.
Anyway, if you're in the Tucson area and you want to help a non-profit who wants to save the lives of Fluffy and a whole lot more dogs without exploiting animals be sure to drop us a line! You can contact us at rick@sunstates.org or larry@sunstates.org.
Larry
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