Many of us, at one point or another, have lamented the fact that we don’t have the time to do everything we want to do. Sometimes, part of the “everything” that gets cut from the program for lack of time is volunteering for a cause about which we feel passionate; there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Then some of us learn about Jaime McKnight, and we feel simultaneously even worse and totally inspired. Because her dedication to saving the sort of senior dogs that many people (and shelters) assume are unadoptable seems to defy the laws of space-time.
In addition to her primary full-time job working advertising for a local magazine and her other full-time gig heading up a pet-sitting business, McKnight singlehandedly runs the nonprofit Pawlicious Poochie Pet Rescue out of her St. Pete house. She primarily rehomes older dogs — mostly smaller breeds — that end up in shelters because their owners are moving, or it’s getting too expensive to maintain their health, or, worst of all, the dogs’ owners are breeders, and the dogs themselves have outlived their usefulness.
“People need to know what’s happening,” says McKnight. She cradles Luna, a tiny, tawny chihuahua mix. “Here’s a dog that’s completely paralyzed, with birth defects, bred over and over, puppies taken by C-section. Ticks, fleas, rotten teeth, kept in a cage, then when she couldn’t make babies anymore, they dumped her on the street. And [her puppies] are the dogs people are buying in puppy boutiques, off Craigslist, from ads in the paper.”
McKnight has always loved animals; her first job was cleaning kennels at the vet’s office down the street. Three years ago, she rescued her first owner surrender, a senior Italian Greyhound named Lucy. Her experience caring for Lucy led her to begin leading food drives for local rescues and educating people about the joy and benefits that come with owning an older dog. She says they started Pawlicious Poochie together.
“I took her everywhere to show that seniors had a lot of life. She was great with kids, awesome with everybody,” says McKnight. “I got my 501c3, started rescuing dogs, and dedicated myself to seniors, rescues, the critically ill.”
Going into its fourth year, Pawlicious has earned a national reputation for pulling older dogs off death row — the nonprofit saved 105 last year — and for successfully rehoming bonded pairs of senior dogs that McKnight refuses to split up. (A recent duo came all the way from California.) The rescue has also become somewhat famous for its extremely active Facebook page, and McKnight’s penchant for dressing the dogs in cute outfits and bedazzling them with bejeweled bindis. It’s a savvy social-media move — Pawlicious Poochie’s Facebook page has more than 40,000 “likes,” and McKnight’s frequent videos can draw thousands of views and comments — but she says it all stems from a desire to pamper animals that, after the lives they’ve been forced to live, deserve more than a little luxury.
“My whole thing is, I want to be positive and fun, because of all the bad stuff out there,” she says. “I do the sparkles because these dogs have suffered unimaginable abuse and neglect, and they should have the best. The best clothes, the best food. People say it’s over the top, but it should be. It shouldn’t be mediocre for these dogs.”
Because she focuses on seniors, McKnight occasionally takes in a dog that will live out the rest of his or her life with Pawlicious, because they require too much or too specialized care — like Luna, or online community favorite Splinter. She also regularly incurs vet bills that can climb into the thousands of dollars, a development that necessitated a fourth career at Partridge Animal Hospital.
“On Saturdays I work at the clinic to pay down my debt,” she says. “Basically, I’m able to run up my bills there because I’ll be there to work and pay it down when I’m 95, if I live that long.”
The support McKnight has inspired for Pawlicious can sometimes be as much a complication as a boon. People have left animals on her doorstep (once during a Thanksgiving family dinner), and she’s now caretaker to a couple of tortoises and pigs as well as her constantly shifting menagerie of canines. But she remains committed to her initial focus on rescuing senior surrenders. Her ultimate goal is to create a true no-kill facility for these exploited, cast-off and tragically underappreciated dogs.
“For me, the older they are ... I just love that,” she says. “It’s so neat to see how they still have a zest for life. It doesn’t faze them that they’re blind, if they’re deaf. They’ve got a story to tell, all those little gray hairs. They just want to be loved.”
