Little Boy Blue (22 page)

“We stood there at Gaston County’s shelter one day in North Carolina, and family after family was walking in with crates and crates of puppies and kittens,” Jane Zeolla of Lulu’s Rescue told me. “One man said, ‘Well, we’re moving and we can’t take them with us.’ I asked him and his wife if they understood that when dogs are surrendered by their owners, the shelter doesn’t even have to wait. They can kill them immediately. The wife was in tears. She had no idea. She thought the shelter would try to find the puppies a home.”

That’s also what a family in Jackson County, Mississippi, thought when they relinquished a six-month-old Bulldog/ Labrador mix named Chloe to the county’s animal shelter on a Monday morning. The family had wanted to raise the puppy, but Chloe was spending so much time in a crate that the mother felt guilty. “My main thinking,” the mother wrote on a Facebook page that she created for the pup, “was while she was small and cute, she would find herself a home that would love her and take great care of her.” The workers who received Chloe at the shelter remarked about how adorable she was. The mother had taken care to bathe Chloe that morning, to make her more appealing to potential adopters who could give her a better life.

The mother reconsidered that night during a tear-filled conversation with her ten-year-old daughter, and by the time the shelter opened at 10
A.M.
the next morning, the mother was en route to retrieve Chloe and bring her back home. But the puppy was already dead, killed less than twenty-four hours after arriving. The
Ocean Springs Gazette
reported that the shelter’s holding capacity was maxed out, and that all dogs who get surrendered are “guaranteed to be euthanized within a quick period of time.” The mother was shocked and asked if she could at least retrieve Chloe’s body to give her a proper burial. She claims that the shelter workers handed it to her in a trash bag and told her to have a nice day.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I thought more about the big picture,
How on earth did we get to this point, of the lucky few like
Blue and Izzy and Summer being snatched from the brink of death
while the masses are killed every day? If so many people are dog lovers like me, how did the system become so warped and dysfunctional
in so many places?

For the answer to that question, I’d have to look not to the people trying to create change all across America today, but instead to the people who were leading the fight back in the era of America’s Civil War.

6
Beckham’s Act in Alabama was scheduled to go into effect in January 2012. The law is named for a dog who was nearly gassed in a Cullman County shelter, and who now lives with a family in Maine.

7
The Louisiana state Legislature passed a gas chamber ban in 2010. It is scheduled to take effect in January 2013.

8
For insight into how the world of shelters intersects with the world of medical research, check out the book
How Shelter Pets are Brokered for Experimentation: Understanding Pound Seizure
by Allie Phillips.

9
Dunfee made it in time to save Tanner, a chocolate Labrador who arrived at her home covered in ticks and fleas, and with dried blood in his ears. “The shelter did absolutely nothing to care for this guy,” she says. “I can’t believe they couldn’t even bathe him.” Tanner got adopted less than two months later. He’s now among the fifty or so dogs she has helped to save in just four years, including a black Labrador named Shadow who was found on the streets of South Florida and now lives with his family on a motoryacht in the Bahamas.

From Humble Beginnings

On February 8, 1866, a fifty-three-year-old man named Henry Bergh walked through the storm-soaked streets of New York City. This son of a wealthy shipbuilder was headed toward Clinton Hall, which stood at the triangle of Astor Place, East Eighth Street, and Lafayette Street, in what today is known as Greenwich Village. Despite the unpleasant weather in the dead of winter, the hall was packed with people, many of them from the well-to-do social circles that Bergh frequented. It was a time when draft horses were regularly beaten in the city streets to make them pull carts at a faster pace, an era when the mere thought of a shop selling organic dog treats would have been met with an incredulous chuckle. And yet, Bergh had managed to create a groundswell of interest for the lecture he intended to give. The place was jammed with people eagerly awaiting his report on “Statistics Related to the Cruelty Practiced on Animals.”

Just two months later, Bergh was at the state capitol in Albany with a petition signed by a hundred people. That was enough, along with his “Declaration of the Rights of Animals,” to help him win a charter from the New York State Legislature to create the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. On April 19, 1866, just two months after his lecture in Manhattan, the state legislature passed a law that prevented cruelty to animals. It authorized Bergh, through the newly founded ASPCA, to enforce that law.

This was America’s first humane society, the first organization of its kind given legal authority to investigate and make arrests for crimes against animals. The ASPCA’s large-scale efforts would be followed in 1877 by the creation of the American Humane Association, in 1954 by the launch of the Humane Society of the United States, and in 1980 by the formation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Each of these organizations today has its favored target efforts, which include eradicating puppy mills, stopping medical experimentation, prosecuting dogfighting, shuttering factory farms, ending the fur trade, and engaging in legislative lobbying. Some of the nationwide groups are regularly criticized for failing to offer enough direct financial support to shelters like the one where Blue was found, as well as for giving aid to shelters that continue to kill more dogs than they save. All of these groups, however, do offer at least some kind of support to shelters or campaigns that are intended to save dogs’ lives.

These nationwide organizations, as well as most local and state SPCAs, rescue groups, and private shelters, originally arose because private citizens did not like what they saw happening to animals in their local communities. The folks at Lulu’s Rescue today aren’t all that different from who Henry Bergh was so many years ago, simply wanting to put some muscle behind the idea that animals should be treated with respect and kindness. Unlike in Bergh’s time, though, today’s activists aren’t always seeking to create an official, state-sanctioned infrastructure. They are instead working to change what they see as an existing infrastructure that has become desperately twisted from its original mandate several generations ago.

Most parts of the United States today have animal-control centers that serve several towns within a county or a single large city. The job of these centers is just what their name states— animal control. The dogcatcher, or animal-control officer, is typically hired to enforce leash and licensing laws, to prevent the spread of diseases like rabies, to protect people from vicious animals, and to eliminate stray dogs from the streets. The job description does not include easing the nerves of frightened puppies like Blue, nor does it always require seeking permanent homes for healthy dogs who are perfectly adoptable. Instead, the animal-control officer is required to keep the dogs for a state-mandated holding period—usually two or three days for strays scheduled to be killed, or five days for dogs who will be sold to federally licensed brokers and used for medical experiments. In the most crowded shelters, as well as those that make no outreach or rescue efforts, these holding periods are the only safeguard a dog’s owner has if she wants to reclaim a lost pet. For dogs like Blue, the holding periods are nothing more than a final few days trapped in a cage before death.

The way that the worst animal-control centers are run is counterintuitive to the natural bond that most people instinctively feel toward dogs, and that most dogs instinctively feel toward people. For some dogs, the experience of being inside these centers also alters the natural ease that they feel toward humans in general. Newborn puppies, like most newborn animals, are not innately afraid of people. Puppies are usually absolutely content not only to go to people, but also to be touched and petted and held by them. For some dogs who spend time in the worst animal-control centers, though, it becomes far harder for them to trust. As Blue got older and overcame his initial skittishness, I noticed that his distrust of certain people never fully left him. That same bit of cautiousness I’d seen on Blue’s first day home, when he belly-crawled across my neighbor’s yard to meet her teenagers, was a seed of caution that, so firmly planted in his soul as a baby, would grow like an unwanted weed later in his life.

One of Blue’s favorite things to do is visit our local dog park. It’s a fenced-in old baseball field that’s now full of agility equipment for dogs to run around, through, and over. Dogs are allowed to romp off leash and play with one another by racing and wrestling to their hearts’ content, and there’s even a fake fire hydrant available should they feel the need to give it a spray. As with any dog park, there are always at least as many pooches as there are humans on any given day. When we visit, Blue takes a minute or two to get his bearings with all of the dogs, and then he runs around the place like it’s a Willy Wonka factory made entirely of liver and rawhide. He is immediately friendly with just about every person he meets at the dog park, men and women alike, and will wag his tail for two hours straight if I let him stay and play that long. He goes to people inside the dog park like a pinball bouncing from one person to the next, and he lets them pet him from ear to toe without so much as a curious cock of the head.

At our other local parks, though—where dogs must be leashed and not everybody has a pooch—Blue is far less trusting. If someone approaches during one of our afternoon walks, and that person is also walking with a dog on a leash, then Blue will go over and say hello with his tail wagging. Sometimes he gets so excited that his entire butt starts to wag. It is as if the very presence of the other dog has given the person at the other end of the leash a canine seal of approval.

On the other hand, if someone approaches us on the trail without a dog, then Blue moves to my side and uses me as a physical barrier between himself and the oncoming person. He hangs back until he gets a sense of whether the person might be a threat to his safety, and he sometimes won’t allow himself to be touched unless the person kneels down at his level. The older Blue gets and the more people he meets, the more he’s becoming a tougher judge of character. A day at the park with Blue is often like watching a father size up a daughter’s first boyfriends, knowing full well that some mean a lot more harm than good.

It’s easy to see how Blue’s natural instincts could have been honed into this more cautious state by the people he met in North Carolina. The human-animal bond is mercilessly quashed, in dogs and people alike, when shelter policy is to not even give the “less-desirable” dogs a walk. And once the legally mandated holding period ends in animal-control facilities across America, then animal control takes precedence over animal welfare. That can even be true if the local SPCA serves double duty as the region’s animal-control center, and it’s how a sweetheart of a pup like Blue or Izzy or Summer can end up just a few hours from being killed in a taxpayer-funded facility. The people running these shelters are, according to the letter of the law, quite simply doing their jobs by disposing of the dogs in their care as more and more arrive, day after day.

A rescue worker told me that she once asked a young woman at a North Carolina shelter with a high-kill rate how she could wake up every morning and go to work, knowing that her job would require her to kill healthy, adoptable dogs. “I didn’t ask her to be judgmental,” she told me. “I really wanted to understand how she can do this every day. Well, she got tears in her eyes and said, ‘I give them lethal injections. At least I know they’re being killed in a humane way, that they’re not being thrown into a gas chamber or starving to death where somebody left them tied to a tree.”

A shelter worker having to make that distinction is certainly a far cry from the vision that Henry Bergh had back in the 1800s, when the ASPCA became America’s first rescue organization.

And that same distrust that dogs like Blue can learn is not altogether different from the distrust that shelter workers often develop toward the public at large. People like me, who consider dogs to be members of the family, can’t conceive of ever handing Blue or any other dog over to be euthanized except in cases of extreme sickness, like when my Beagle mix Floyd got so old and weak that he could no longer even drink water. I’d no sooner relinquish Blue, Izzy, Summer, or any dog in my family to an uncertain future than I would my own mother, father, or sister.

But there are plenty of people in America who drop off their dogs and puppies at the shelter door in much the same way as they toss a bag of tattered clothes into the pile at Goodwill. There are rural shelters in North Carolina, for instance, that have maybe forty cages inside, but that receive upward of seventy dogs on some days. The people on the receiving end, inside the shelters, routinely see dogs left to die because the pups had an accident on a carpet, or because they chewed a favorite shoe, or because the owner grew tired of their company, or because the owner failed at basic training and blames the dog for bad behavior. Shelter workers learn to recognize local dog owners who fail to spay and neuter their dogs, and who then leave puppies by the dozens at the same shelter door during the course of several years.