this article has places listed that you can donate to, but i’ll also put direct links to some of these places in this post:
Maui United Way
Maui Strong Fund
Maui Food Bank
Maui Humane Society
my family is based in Oahu, but i consider all the islands my home even though i physically haven’t stepped foot on them before. seeing all the homes and history and memories being lost in this hurts.
if you are unable to donate, don’t feel guilty—doing things like spreading the word and making people aware of the situation helps as well. thank you for whatever you can do! mahalo
UPDATE: removed Maui Mutual Aid Fund for now because upon further research using the charity checking sites provided by this gov site, it doesn’t appear in results unlike the others listed. so i advise caution for now if you decide to donate there! they may still be legitimate, but i want to exercise caution.
I think this is such an important conversation to have because, especially people who work with some of the breeds who legitimately do have more energy, they kind of chain themselves to this schedule that can be really brutal and disruptive for the humans.
I saw a TikTok video where this incredible woman has so much devotion to her Malinois and she’s describing the schedule, and she’s like, “This is everything that we did today and look at how much energy he still has.” And my heart was broken for her because talk about somebody who is committed to their dog, and having it disrupt her entire life because nobody had taught her to recognise that chronic stress in her dog and that she didn’t need to give him more stuff to do.
She needed to teach him how to rest. And we’ve also seen people saying, “You should never adopt a Husky unless you’re willing to run that dog for four hours a day.” And I was just like, that’s a bad thing to say for Huskies everywhere because talk about dissuading people from adopting these dogs.
Yes, they do need to run. They are high energy dogs. But I have a friend and a student who, for a living, is working with actual working sledding dogs in Alaska. And I was talking to them about it and they were like, “The only time our dogs run four hours a day is during competition season, and we have to work up to that, and we work down, and the rest of the year, it’s like an hour a day because we teach our dogs how to rest.” And I was like, that is what people need to hear about Huskies. That’s what they need to hear about Malinois. Right? When dogs have been trained and conditioned to work – I’m talking about physical conditioning – when they have been trained to do a job, of course, they can perform for hours, and hours, and hours a day, and that’s not harmful. But the belief that they have to do that, every dog of that breed has to do that, is harmful. And those working dogs are also taught how to complete that stress response cycle and come down from that state of arousal.
— Emily Strong, Enrichment for the Real World, #4 - Dr. Chris Pachel: Moving Beyond Diagnose & Prescribe