b'It was at Pegasus where Mike would meet and becomefastfriendswithYannickBge.HehadquithisjobinGermany, and drove to Warsaw to find out where and howhe could help. It was a propitious encounter once the imme-diacyoftransportingdogsovertheborderbecameclear.You cannot drive a rental car across the border. You mustownthecar,saidMike.ThecarYannickdrovefromGermany to Poland was his own. Through the consortium of international rescue organi-zations, they crossed into Ukraine at Medyka and returnedto Poland with 50 dogs and cats via various border crossings.Mike and Yannick brought 24 dogs and six cats back, andalso assisted a Swedish group with bringing 20 dogs from ashelter in Kyiv over the border to Poland.Twice a day, volunteers would head to various designatedpoints in Ukraine, leave the supplies they had brought withthem, load up with dogs and cats, then drive back across theborder to Pegasus. Many of the dogs and cats were pets ofpeoplewhowerenotabletogetbackhomewhentheRussians started bombing. Many could not safely evacuatewith their pets. There was a mass exodus of 50,000 peopletrying to get on a train that did not allow animals. Do I staybehind with my animals and put my family and children indanger? Or do I go, and leave my pets behind? Taking a chance,people tied their pets to poles before getting on the train. Ona very small scale, some of those people were reunited withtheir pets in Poland.Sleepwasacommodity,grabbedinfitsandspurtswherever anyone could find a spot. Usually it was on thefloor of a warehouse. The longest Mike ever stayed in oneplace was two nights in a rowin a car at the Polish borderwith a van full of dogs and cats. They had arrived at thePolish border around 10:00 p.m. Border check points werebecoming harder to navigate every week. Polish authoritiessuddenly felt that too many dogs were coming into Poland,even though Poland was merely a portal to transport the dogsto France. On this particular night, a veterinarian at the bor-derwantedtocheckeveryanimalcrossingintoPoland.Volunteers stood in line outside in the cold. The dogs andcats were inside heated vehicles. They werent happy, but theywere alive, Mike thought to himself. Finally, at 5:00 a.m. thefollowing morning, they were able to cross the border.When he could, Mike was also making phone calls tolarge, animal advocacy organizations, asking for help withdonations of money. These are well-known United States-based organizations who are experts at fundraising, and whohad already collected millions of dollars for humanitarian aidinUkraine.OrganizationsliketheNorthAmericanVeterinaryCommunity(NAVC),theAmericanKennelAssociation (AKC), Humane Society of the United States(HSUS) and American Society for the Prevention of Crueltyto Animals (ASPCA).The problem was, none of these well-intentioned organ-izations had people on the ground in Ukraine to fully graspthe situation.40 THE NEW BARKER'