The elderly man pushed the wheelbarrow full of dogs up the rutted dirt road in the Corralejo community to where Rosey’s Wish Sterilization Clinic was set up for the day.  He also had with him a half-dozen puppies crammed into a flour sack.

The dogs were not theirs. Technically.

The street dogs had found their way to the man and his siblings, and their 94-year-old father, and they just couldn’t turn them away. The aging family lives in a cobbled structure that barely stands in good weather, leaks mercilessly in the rainy season — water pools on their bare concrete floor and on their beds — and offers no comfort from wind or cold, nor in hot summer months.