Doggies and Dinosaurs

One thing I've always wanted to do in Kanab, UT is to visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. It's the largest no-kill animal shelter in the US, housing an average of 1700 animals.

The Sanctuary owns 3700 acres, and leases an additional 33,000 acres from the BLM. With an annual income of $47 million, these animals live pretty well!

The WINs got a free bus tour of the grounds. In addition to dogs and cats, they also take in horses, burros, birds, rabbits, goats, and pot-bellied pigs. We started out at the Visitors Center where there was a nice fish pond.

They first took us to the building that houses the small dogs. These are the most easily adoptable pets, and they brought out some adorable dogs for us to cuddle.

In addition to taking in 4,000 homeless pets from Hurrican Katrina, they took in 22 of former NFL quarterback Michael Vick's abused dogs. They brought out one of those dogs, Ellen, who wagged her tail for the entire 10 minutes. She just loved people. I didn't know pit bulls could be this friendly.

Next on the tour were the cat facilities. Wow! I never saw so many cat beds and toys.

But the spot they liked the most was in the rafters.

Everything was very organized.

And of course not all of these animals get adopted. There are several very large pet cemeteries, with lots and lots of wind chimes.

On another day we went on a 4-wheel drive trip to the Moccasin Mountain Tracksite, near Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.

It is a beautiful spot, but the attraction is fossilized footprints of dinosaurs. We came here because we'd gotten a brochure on the location of the footprints. Unfortunately, we all forgot to bring our brochures. (We're old...)

So we decided to find them anyway and did pretty good.

We found several. This is a "slip" track of a Kayentapus dinosaur, made when he walked down the steep slope of a wet dune face.