In today’s episode I talk to Justine Garratt. Justine is the founder of Santerpaws Bulgarian Dog Rescue.  Justine was brought up in the Cornish countryside surrounded by a variety of animals. Brought up in the seventies, she enjoyed the life of freedom, and making the most of these times, being out in the evenings and making tree houses, yet as she got older with little prospects of a decent job in Cornwall at that time, she looked at the police force and the prison service, applied for both but chose to pursue a career in the prison service. Her entire professional life was within the prison service, and in 2013 she took early retirement. She says she always imagined when she left the prison service that she would leave the UK and start afresh somewhere abroad. When she finally left her job she departed for Bulgaria, with all her belongings in the back of a horse box, and her three dogs. After three weeks of working on her new home, she took some rubbish to the local skip and inside found six newborn puppies.   She decided that they couldn’t be left there and brought them home.   After that incident, the locals started to dump puppies on her doorstep, throwing them over her hedge, knowing she would look after them and after a year, while talking to her friend in the UK, she asked her how she would feel about setting up a charity, and so Santerpaws was born. The establishment has the capacity to house one hundred and fifty dogs, and roughly always has at least fifty animals waiting to come in.   They have homed almost seven thousand dogs in ten years. Justine talks about some of the terrible conditions that the dogs she rescues arrive in and how she and her team help to find them their forever homes, some of them having been neglected for years For more information on Santerpaws and their work visit: https://santerpawsbulgarianrescue.com/ For more information on Mimi Novic visit: https://www.miminovic.co.uk