SC animal rescue was a calling for its owners, a godsend for sick and injured animals | Opinion
They’ve sold the farm and moved to Missouri.
Dwane and Karen Ede Wilkins shouldn’t disappear like that without us saying a word.
Here’s my word.
What they had on seven acres at the end of dirt road near Ridgeland wasn’t a farm, per se. It was a dog pound. It was called Maranatha Farm Animal Rescue.
The name, meaning “our Lord has come,” was a reflection of Karen’s faith.
The farm was a reflection of a big problem. It was part of the loose network of nonprofits and county government agencies dealing with a glut of stray, abused and abandoned animals in Beaufort and Jasper counties.
It’s a never-ending task that reveals the best and worst of humankind’s treatment of animals, and it can get overwhelming.
Maranatha Farm was an all-volunteer nonprofit with the goal of sparing the lives of down and out dogs by taking them in — day or night, rain or shine — and then finding a solid home for them. The focus of the farm became sick and injured animals.
To Karen, who left the farm probably twice in 18 years, it was a calling. It was a calling that ended due to her rapidly declining health, Dwane said.
The farm was sold to the children of a neighbor and the last dog was adopted out right after Christmas. Dwane and Karen loaded up their earthly goods and their five dogs — down from a high of 14 — and moved to be closer to his family, he said.
The farm operated on donations and a corps of volunteers. Dwane said they could not have done what they did without the help of Dr. Ben Parker at Coastal Veterinary Clinic in Bluffton.
What they did was help heal and adopt out 2,100 animals since they started keeping close records, and perhaps double that over time, Dwane said.
Volunteers did home checks before a dog was released to its new home. Volunteers helped keep up the farm. It could hold up to 75 dogs, divided into different areas by size, age and temperament. Volunteers washed dogs and hauled them out to weekend adoption events at pet stores.
The first and longest-serving volunteers were John and Barbara Emerson, a couple from Sun City Hilton Head — people old enough to know better. He did the taxes and kept the books. She was the vice president and chief bottle-feeder for yapping and peeing puppies who were rescued from abandonment, misery or euthanasia.
Barbara was no doubt the volunteer who hand-fed Brae Brae, a puppy with a broken tail that we adopted from Maranatha Farm 11 years ago. Brae Brae remains the world’s most stubborn animal, but has enjoyed life to the point of running figure eights when she was younger and rolling on her back on her walks these days.
But a black-and-white pit bull that they named Buckshot became the mascot of the outfit. “Buckshot was one of our first rescues who was injured,” Dwane said. “He was hit on Christmas Eve.”
They got a call that a puppy had been hit by a car in the Levy area. The dog bit the fire out of Dwane on the side of the road because it was scared.
An X-ray showed that Buckshot had not been hit by a car. He had been shot. A pellet from an air rifle was lodged next to his spine. Dr. Parker got the pellet out, but the puppy’s back legs were paralyzed. They guessed he’d live about a year.
Buckshot lived 10 years.
Dwane made him a wheelchair out of PVC pipes and wheels from an old golf push-cart he found at the dump.
To Buckshot, the junk wheels might as well have been from a Lamborghini as he rolled full-tilt through life. “He loved everybody,” Dwane said. “There wasn’t a soul he ever met that he didn’t love.”
And that gets to the heart and soul of our local animal rescuers. Dwane said he learned “that I’d rather be around animals than people.
“They’re forgiving. They trust you to no end. They’re loyal. The love animals have for you, really I can’t explain it.
“They’re everything a person should be.”
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.
