Remember Me Thursday Celebrates 11 Years Of Advocating For Orphan Pets

SAN DIEGO, CA — Representatives from multiple animal shelters will meet in Balboa Park Thursday evening for a candle lighting ceremony for orphan pets as part of the Helen Woodward Animal Shelter's 11th annual Remember Me Thursday.

Observed on the fourth Thursday in September, the campaign each year has celebrity sponsors to advocate for adopting animals. This year, actors and mother and daughter Andie MacDowell and Rainey Qualley are the spokespeople for the event.

"We've always had some kind of pet," MacDowell said. "We had cats or dogs, and the love that my children received from them I understood deep to my core. I also loved watching my children return that love, understanding and the responsibility of having a pet."

Qualley releases and writes music under the name Rainsford. She is a lifelong lover of animals volunteers to help foster kittens in Los Angeles. She has three cats named Jesus, Myrtle and Wizard, one dog she adopted from Helen Woodward Animal Center named Arlo and five backyard chickens.

"I lived in Montana as a young child where we had horses, cows, chickens, pigs, bunnies, dogs and plenty of cats, which I've always had a particularly soft spot for," Qualley said. "Loving animals as much as I do, I've been vegetarian for 17 years now. It brings me so much joy to take care of animals."

According to the Woodward Center, last month, Qualley visited to record a PSA for the Remember Me campaign and to tour the facility. Both MacDowell and Qualley will post on social media to encourage their followers to support animal adoption.

"This day was started to be a voice for the voiceless," said Helen Woodward Animal Center President and CEO and Remember Me Thursday creator Mike Arms. "If we can get the whole world talking about rescue on this one day each year, we can create quite a noise.

"When we have the support of incredible celebrities like Andie MacDowell and Rainey Qualley, we can grow that voice even louder and send it even further," Arms said. "There is no way to accurately express the gratitude we have to these incredible individuals whose celebrity power is truly saving lives."

The annual event has been supported by 190 countries with hundreds of thousands of individuals and more than 1,000 separate animal welfare organizations around the globe holding candle-lighting ceremonies of their own.

From 5 to 7 p.m. in Balboa Park, multiple local animal shelters will light candles near Nate's Point Dog Park on Sixth Avenue. The ceremony will include a remembrance of hero dog Plato, "a Shiba Inu blend who turned his passion for hide and seek into a lifesaving skill," a statement from the animal center read.

For 10 years, Plato, along with his dog dad, Michael Fradin, tracked and rescued more than 65 missing pets in the Santa Cruz area. Fradin rescued Plato himself from an abusive owner, and the Shiba Inu tracking dog became a staple of the Boulder Creek, California community. Plato died earlier this year from heart complications brought about after searching for lost pets in the CZU Lightning Complex Fires.

"His legacy continues on in his adopted dog brother Keno, who learned to track from the late hero pup," the statement reads.

— City News Service