Cross Country Team Trained Alongside Shelter Dogs To Help Them Get Adopted
Luis Escobar is a man who makes the most of his life.
An avid runner and now-retired high school cross country coach in Santa Maria, California, Escobar has experienced some incredible things.
For instance, he was featured in the 2011 book “Born to Run,” which chronicled his and other runners’ experiences racing through the Copper Canyons of Mexico.
While Escobar knows how to live large, his heart is in his community and his coaching.
In a 2016 interview with Running Warehouse, Escobar was asked what his favorite part of coaching was.
“Life-long personal friendships,” he replied. “Creating opportunity for my community. Watching people achieve their personal, social and athletic goals.”
In 2016, Escobar created a new opportunity for his community when he teamed up with Stacy Silva, the Santa Barbara County Animal Shelter’s coordinator, to bring their two passions together in a unique and impactful way.
Together, they organized a “Dog Run” to help the animals in the shelter relieve some of their pent-up energy, as well as allow St. Joseph High School cross country runners a chance to love on the dogs.
It all started after Silva noticed the cross country team running near the shelter.
“Geographically, we’re very close,” she told KTVU in 2018. “I thought, ‘Why aren’t they running our dogs?'”
“These are dogs!” Silva told CBS News. “They want to run, they want to play.”
“You’ve got a bunch of dogs that are in cages, and want to be outside running, and I’ve got a group of high school students that love to run,’” Escobar said. “Perfect match.”
In August 2016, Escobar took a group of students to the shelter, where they were each assigned a dog to run with.
“When the dogs realized that they were getting out of those kennels and to go outside as a group, it was just happy chaos,” Escobar said.
Escobar filmed his students running with the pups and posted the video to his Facebook page, where it quickly went viral.
The goal of this run was to raise awareness about “the plight of shelter animals,” CBS reported, and with one viral video, Silva and Escobar managed to accomplish just that.
“I am not sure who was more excited and having the most fun…the dogs or the kids,” Escobar said in the caption.
The video quickly garnered the attention of many news and media outlets, and Escobar ended up being featured on Rachel Ray’s daytime TV show and the PBS program “Shelter Me.”
Not long after the first dog run, the dog apparel company Ruffwear donated several new running harnesses to the shelter.
A video posted by Escobar to YouTube thanking the company for its generosity featured Silva and one of the shelter’s animal control officers trying the new harnesses out on one of their adoptable dogs.
Silva was grateful as well, and said she believed the partnership with St. Joseph High School was helping her dogs get adopted.
“[The dog] doesn’t have all this pent-up energy it’s trying to show you, just because you’re now paying attention to it,” Silva told CBS.
Nearly three years later, this story is still inspiring people across America.
Yet it’s perhaps the students themselves that were touched the most by the whole experience.
At the end of Escobar’s viral Facebook video, a 16-year-old student named Josh Menusa can be seen carrying an exhausted terrier named Fred.
When Menusa returned to the shelter one week later, Fred’s response won his heart.
“The moment he saw me, oh he starts crying, and I’m like ‘Oh my goodness, he just needs to come with us,’” Menusa told CBS.
Shortly after, the Menusa family adopted Fred as their new dog.
“It makes a huge difference,” Silva said of the program as a whole.
While she may have been talking about the shelter dogs, there’s no denying the fact that this clever partnership positively changed the lives of the high schoolers as well.
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