Pet adoption, animal hospitals, pet boarding, teaching children to love animals and more can be found at www.animalcenter.org .

"Where people help animals and animals help people."  Helen Woodward Animal Center's passionate belief that animals help people and people help animals through trust, unconditional love, and respect, creates a legacy of caring.  Sharing this philosophy with others, the Center inspires and teaches, locally and globally, the importance of the animal-human bond.

Helen Woodward Animal Center was founded as the San Dieguito Animal Care and Education Center in 1972 with its primary focus on pet adoption and humane education.  In 1986 the Center was renamed after its founder, Helen Woodward, and program offerings were expanded to include Pet Encounter Therapy, Therapeutic Riding, and AniMeals. These programs helped further our goal of serving as a place where “people help animals, and animals help people” by bringing people and animals together for the mutual benefit of both.  In 2017, the Center added Pets Without Walls to provide no-cost vet care to the pets of the homeless population in San Diego. Since then, we have added additional services including a top-rated boarding facility, a state-of-the-art equine hospital, an affordable small animal hospital for the public, and a designer resale store. 
Helen Woodward herself would be proud of the over 10,000 pets and more than 90,000 people these programs touch each year, and that the Center continues to teach and provide programming for all of San Diego County, across the nation, and globally the importance of the human-animal bond.

Helen Woodward Animal Center

We are a 501(c)(3) organization that provides funding, food & supplies to other animal rescues in need.

We are a 501(c)(3) organization so all your donations and support are tax deductible! We will provide funding, food and supplies to other animal rescues in need. Through our efforts, dedicated rescues can be alleviated of fundraising burdens thus allowing time to better assist the thousands of animals they rescue, care for and find forever homes for.

Rescue Dogs

We rescue and rehabilitate unwanted, abandoned and neglected dogs and find them loving happy homes. Visit our website at www.bajadogrescue.org

Baja Dog Rescue is a 501c(3) non-profit organization that is run by a group of dedicated volunteers. We rescue and rehabilitate unwanted, abandoned and neglected dogs and find them loving happy homes. We are a No-Kill animal rescue and we literally give them a second chance at life. And everybody deserves a second chance. We need your help to continue to save the lives of so many wonderful and loving dogs. Good-hearted humans can make all the difference! People who befriend, feed, foster, and bring these dogs back to good health are rescuers. Each one of our dogs is socialized, vaccinated, and treated for any medical or behavioral conditions. It's what you'll read about here - the work of rescuers who live in Baja California or in the San Diego, California area. We save street dogs and find them homes. You may never see such a deep devotion as these grateful dogs feel for a human who is simply kind to them. They radiate joy and it's contagious -- their adopters catch joy from them all the time. We have helped over 11,000 dogs to date, and have a fully equipped veterinary on site that is staffed 24/7 for treating dogs with cancer, renal failure, parvo, distemper treatments, heart failure, eye diseases, skin disease, GI tract diseases, etc

aja Dog Rescue is an American run 501c(3) non-profit organization that is operated by a group of dedicated volunteers in the Baja California area. We are a no-kill shelter that rescues and rehabilitates unwanted, abandoned, and neglected dogs from the streets and local pound and find them loving happy homes; we literally give them a second chance at life. We currently have almost 200 rescued street dogs at our facility where they receive the medical attention, food, and love needed to be ready for adoption here in San Diego and all over the U.S.
What We Do

Sheila2Since the founding of Baja Dog Rescue, in 2010, we have rescued almost 12,000 dogs from some horrific conditions, in Mexico and California. We are a non-profit, 100% no-kill shelter. We operate on donations from the public and the time and money of our volunteers. We have raised funds to put rescued dogs through chemotherapy and to repair broken bones from car accidents or abuse. We aggressively treat puppies for Parvo, to our knowledge we have the highest survival rate of any rescue group in operation (85%). Many of our dogs are found starving or injured on the side of the road, often near death from being beaten and discarded by their owners. These dogs are typically days, if not hours, from death. We are the last resort for many of these dogs, other rescues will not take them due to the severity of their condition. The shelter is also used as a home for many dogs that are considered unadoptable. They continue to get the food, love, and medical attention needed to enjoy their lives. Baja Dog Rescue partners with  where we are found every Saturday holding an adoption event. We are a rescue partner with the County of San Diego and are authorized to pull dogs from shelters. We rescue dogs that have been scheduled to be euthanized. We have a wide network that we use to rescue, treat, and rehome our dogs. We have a 50,000 sq ft shelter with almost 150 dogs inhabiting it at any given moment. We promote our available dogs, adoption events, and rescue operations through our Facebook site and our website. We go through almost 700lbs of dog food a week in addition to medical and cleaning supplies. All of our adoption fees and donations go right back into buying the food and medicine for the dogs at our shelter. We rely solely on the generosity of the public, our volunteers, and our own funds to keep the shelter repaired and to take care of the dogs.
Our Challenges

As a 501c non-profit, all volunteer organization we face many, many challenges, including feeding our dogs. We go through almost 600lbs. of dog food per week, and since our shelter is based in Baja California we receive no assistance from the Rescue Food Bank here in the U.S. All of our adoption fees and donations go right back into buying the food and medicine for the dogs at our shelter. No one in our organization takes a paycheck, and we rely solely on the generosity of the public and our own funds to pay for repairs to our shelter and major surgeries. We always welcome visitors and volunteers to our shelter. Volunteers can help walk the dogs, clean up pens, and help socialize or pups.
Making Our Dogs Ready

The dogs you see on this site have followed a clear, health-restoring process before we consider them ready for adoption by a friendly, caring human family. As rescues, they arrive with some fairly predictable physical problems, but many also have suffered at the at the hands of hostile humans or as victims of other, meaner street dogs. The result is a dog who must be made physically healthy, introduced to other animals, and gentled until they understand that some humans are friendly. Almost any dog, even those most damaged by sometimes truly awful mistreatment by ignorant or hostile humans, responds to gradual gentling by someone who understands how dogs think and react. Dogs have been domesticated for many thousands of years. The dogs who could not or would not coexist cooperatively with humans were removed from the gene pool, often by brutal means. As pack animals they still have much of the wolf in them, but responding to kind humans who feed and interact with them is in a dog’s blood, a bone-deep response for them. They want to be liked and praised by their humans.  Those are the two traits we rely on, when rescuing our dogs. When enough gentling, socialization around other dogs as well as (where possible) cats, and physical health treatment have made our fosters healthy, we have a veterinarian do a final examination and we post the puppy or dog on our Ready to Adopt page. Take a look – somewhere there you will spot a puppy or a rescued dog who will be a fine addition to your household.
The Volunteer Approach

dog rescue san diegoYou might notice we mention volunteers a lot. It’s because that’s what we are. We don’t make money from this work. In fact, most of us spend our own resources to keep the work going. Volunteer rescuers tend to get to know each other and to help each other when they can. Some of us banded together to form Baja Dog Rescue in order to work together a little more closely than independent volunteers normally can. Our association lets us share resources and contacts, and provide mutual support. Most of us live in an area stretching from San Diego to the southern end of Rosarito, along the Pacific coast. Many of us have worked for years with other organizations in San Diego and the Los Angeles area, in a growing network of animal rescue volunteers. We’ll use this website as a place to let you know about the dogs that are ready for adoption. Those posted on the Ready to Adopt page are out of quarantine. They’ve been made healthy, “socialized” (that is, gentled out of fear or aggressiveness around humans and other animals), neutered if they’re old enough and certified as healthy by a good local vet. Every one of them now waits for you or someone like you to accept the love they offer. Many feel secure for the first time in their short lives and all are ready for the “forever home” we know awaits them


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