Wienerspiel founder says organization will ‘retire’ but support for animals continues

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – A local non-profit that has a history of helping animals and making meaningful changes in the law has announced it will cease operations as an organization but individual support for animals will continue.

Wienerspiel has helped to raise funds for non-profits that help homeless, unwanted, and neglected animals as well as advocating for animal care in city and state governments. The organization also hosted an annual wiener dog race and costume contest to help raise money for area animal groups.

“This has been a great effort and well done. Wienerspiel as an organization will retire this month but as individuals, we will continue to support our local animal nonprofits, shelters, and rescuers. Therefore we will not be holding our races this year. The support for the races for the past 15 years I have run them has been overwhelming but it is time to shift to different priorities such as family, travel, and a less structured lifestyle,” said Judy LeUnes, President and Founder.

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“Thanks to everyone who has helped Wienerspiel become a valuable organization in our community which has had a great impact locally and statewide. We were able to work successfully with the City Council of College Station and their staff and the City Council of Bryan and their staff to help pass the Humane Retail Pet Store Ordinance placing these cities as the 8th and 11th cities respectively in the state of Texas to have such an ordinance to help stop puppy mills from selling puppies or kittens in pet stores in each city. We have worked successfully with other state nonprofits to pass Legislation successfully during our Texas Legislative Sessions. We have held fundraisers and held our wiener dog and wanna’ be races to raise funds to award to heavily vetted animal nonprofit organizations in the Brazos Valley,” said LeUnes.

“No one organization can do this alone. We are fortunate to live in an animal-loving community. Our races each year take up to at least 250 volunteers to pull off an event with 6000 people statewide and hundreds of dogs! Without the student and community volunteers, such a wonderful event would not happen. In addition to the volunteers, we must thank the many businesses and individual sponsors who believed in our mission of helping support the human/animal bond which helped Wienerspiel donate funds to other animal nonprofits. Thanks also to the media for their overwhelming support as sponsors and for providing media stars as announcers. In 2007, as the founder of the Wiener Dog Races in our community, I loved researching with my husband how to put on the best races in the state as we researched for 3 years. Our College Station races became the most popular and most well-run statewide,” said LeUnes.