Little Boy Blue (23 page)
Shelter workers can quickly, and understandably, learn to resent the public as a whole. They often meet people who aren’t just irresponsible with dogs, but who are sometimes downright cruel. The same sense of helplessness that I felt during just a few hours in those shelters overcomes many workers who endure the conditions inside on a daily basis. It’s only natural that they come to distrust, and even dislike, the people they feel are creating this never-ending crisis. From the eyes of shelter workers, the public is not seen as a source full of willing adopters for dogs like Blue and eager fosters for dogs like Izzy and Summer. Instead, the public is seen as the callous, heartless source of all the dogs the workers themselves are hired to kill.
By this logic, the gas chambers are an unpleasant but necessary solution to the problem of a thoughtless community at large.
So it continues today in America’s worst shelters. Large national organizations collect donations and then give grants to help some of these struggling local facilities, trying to support the ones whose directors are working to overcome the institutionalized problems of the system as a whole. The Petfinder Foundation, for instance, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars for shelter improvements in all fifty states during 2009. In the second quarter of 2010 alone, the ASPCA gave more than $3.3 million in grants and services to help animals across the country. This money is a godsend for shelters that are on the path to reform, of course, but it does nothing to address the problem in shelters whose directors are resistant to change. The worst shelters in America today are as brutal for some dogs as the streets of Manhattan were to horses when Henry Bergh created the ASPCA more than a century ago.
Luckily, as with so many things, history has a way of repeating itself. Animal lovers are just as adamant today as Bergh was in the 1800s that cruelty, in all its forms, be eradicated. They simply see a different solution to the problem in modern times, a path that has evolved in ways that Bergh never could have anticipated, thanks in large part to the creation of the World Wide Web. Instead of building shelters to house dogs like Blue, today’s activists are stitching a nationwide net of volunteers who work together across state lines. For the first time in American history, dog-rescue volunteers are beginning to function like a modernday version of the Underground Railroad.
It’s impossible to say when the first volunteer rescue group was formed to work in conjunction with shelters, instead of from within them. It’s also impossible to determine the number of rescuers who serve as part of the national network on any given day. They do not originate from a centralized source, but instead rise up independently in similar ways. Like-minded people from the Atlantic Ocean clear across to the Pacific Coast see the same things happening in their communities, and they want to help the dogs and puppies so desperately in need. They are everyday people, just like me. They’re like dandelions growing simultaneously across a 2,500-mile-wide piece of the planet, all reaching up and out toward the same flicker of sunshine.
While more than 13,000 self-described rescue groups are listed on the Petfinder website alone, in some cases, volunteers who contribute to the network aren’t affiliated with any organization at all. Lulu’s Rescue in Pennsylvania, for instance, once received a call for help from a couple in South Carolina who would describe themselves as neither activists nor volunteers, but who contributed to the rescue network nonetheless. They had found a two-year-old Boxer/pit bull mix with golden fur and a white chest. She was a sweetheart of a dog even though she had been tied to a tree, was visibly malnourished, and was being used for target practice by a boy with a shotgun. The couple took in this dog, named her Apple, and tried to figure out what to do with her since they already had two dogs of their own. They’d read about local shelters killing more dogs than were saved, so they reached out to rescue groups nationwide. They offered to drive Apple anywhere from Greenville, South Carolina, as far north as Amherst, Massachusetts, if a rescue group could find her a loving home somewhere in between.
I myself once received a call from a woman who shopped at my favorite pet store and learned from its owner that I was writing this book. The woman had been helping friends in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who were recovering from the massive tornadoes that struck the region in April 2011. She would never be counted in an official registry of rescue workers, but she certainly was contributing to the nationwide network. “It was bad enough, what happened to the people in the storm, but then I went over to the local dog shelter,” the woman told me. “I had no idea the situation was so bad—and that it was bad before the tornado even hit. When I learned about what they have been doing to these dogs, I tried to charter a private jet to get the dogs out. I came back to New Jersey and have been finding homes that are willing to take them. I will do whatever I need to do to get them transported up here to safety.”
Sometimes, volunteers who contribute to the network are not even adults. In Burke County, Georgia, after authorities found squatters living in a local house, volunteers from Old Fella Rescue were called to help. The authorities had their hands full with the dozen or so children who were living in the house, and who had never been to a doctor or a schoolroom in their entire lives. Old Fella’s volunteers were asked to gather up the countless cats and kittens living in the same house. During the two weeks that it took to collect all the felines, the volunteers kept seeing a single dog on the property who looked ragged, but otherwise seemed healthy. They called him Sarge because he barked and barked, like a sentinel standing guard, and he would not let any of the volunteers touch him. They brought him food for days, tried to calm him down, and were at their wits’ end when Sarge took a liking to a rescuer’s seven-year-old daughter. Sarge felt protective of her, just as he had of the kids who’d lived in the house. It was the seven-year-old who got Sarge to follow her calmly into a rescue volunteer’s truck. That was the beginning of his journey through the cross-country network to a foster home and, eventually, his permanent home on a private cove in Massachusetts, where he lives happily today.
These small-scale beginnings of the rescue mind-set are no less noble than the large-scale effort that Henry Bergh sought to inspire back in the 1860s, but today they are emerging in an entirely grassroots way. They are neither directly sanctioned by, nor are they seeking legal authority from, state legislatures like the one in New York that Bergh petitioned to create the ASPCA. Instead, they are coalescing by finding one another via word of mouth and the Internet, the way Rhonda Beach in North Carolina found Lulu’s Rescue in Pennsylvania after pulling Blue out of the shelter to safety. The current heroes to so many dogs like Blue are part of the social media generation. And they have, since about the year 2007, begun to go viral.
If there are just three people like these volunteers working with each rescue group on the Petfinder website alone, then there are nearly forty thousand people supporting this effort across the country. That’s more people than are enrolled every year at the University of Southern California, Boston University in Massachusetts, or DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. And that’s only the rescuers listed on a single website. It doesn’t count the innumerable people like the South Carolina couple who saved Apple, the woman who was willing to fly dogs to New Jersey from Alabama, the seven-year-old girl who saved Sarge, or even the couple who drove Blue to meet me in their RV full of rescued pups. It also doesn’t count everyday people like me who both adopt and then agree to foster—and I’d helped to save three dogs inside of six months.
All of this is a glorious thing to see if you’re a fan of grassroots populism, but the way the rescue network has evolved also comes with inherent perils. The complete lack of government oversight, the ignorance about health and safety regulations, the different laws in every state—all of these things mean that dogs like Blue, Izzy, and Summer are relying on individual human beings to do the right thing, every single time. People have different opinions about the right and wrong ways to treat a dog. People can take shortcuts when they think nobody is watching. They can become lost in the flood of desperate dogs and try to save them in ways that inadvertently cause them additional harm.
As I realized just how much of the rescue network is held together by nothing more than trust, I couldn’t help but return to my thoughts about the way that Blue was treated as a foster dog at Annie Turner’s house. I was caring for Izzy and Summer just the same way I cared for Blue, ensuring proper veterinary care, giving them plenty of walks and training, and making sure they felt safe and loved. The way that Blue was treated as a foster dog at Annie Turner’s house was better than being killed in a gas chamber, of course, but as the director at Person County Animal Control had told me, the system of rescue left an awful lot of room for error. I began to realize that I agreed with him on that point. It seemed to me that where there is no official oversight, only the goodness of everyday people can prevent harm.
I didn’t think that Annie Turner had in any way intended to cause Blue harm, but I also didn’t think that what he’d received at her home represented my definition of appropriate foster care. The more I learned about the rescue movement in general, and the more time I spent learning about the fostering process with Izzy and Summer, the more I realized there are precious few people in a position to know the full story about any rescued dog. Unless you take the time to verify and scrutinize everything you’ve been told, it can be tough to know the real truth about anyone and anything happening along the rescue path.
That means there are just a handful of people in a position to seek help when something may be frighteningly amiss, as was about to happen to me next.
A Tough Call to Make
It’s an excruciating thing, deciding the actual moment that you want to become a Benedict Arnold. When I’d ventured to North Carolina to learn more about Blue, my primary goal was to learn everything that I could about his story. My secondary goal was to thank the people who had helped him, including Annie Turner. I’d treated her like an old friend even though she was a woman I’d spoken to a few times on the telephone. Because of our shared relationship with Blue, I’d felt like we were kindred spirits. I’d never imagined that I’d walk into her home later that night and see anything that gave me serious concern. She was the president of a local animal protection group, for Pete’s sake. It had not dawned on me that what she’d called “fostering Blue” might look more to me like something dangerous. I was neither prepared nor equipped to deal with what I had seen.
My first instinct was to consult with people smarter than I am about rescue, to get their advice. I mentioned what I’d seen to the team at Lulu’s Rescue in Pennsylvania, as well as to Rhonda Beach in Person County. Both immediately expressed serious concern and offered to help find the dogs other fosters and permanent homes.
I next consulted family and friends, who were split on the issue. Some suggested that I keep quiet; these dogs may not be in a perfect place, but at least they’re still alive, and this woman had played a critical role in saving Blue’s life. I owed her a pass. Others urged me to make a phone call immediately, lest my silence lead to innocent dogs suffering further stress or possible harm. I owed the dogs at least that much.
During the previous thirteen years of my life, I’d have ultimately come to a decision by talking things over with my husband. With the divorce, though, our “speaking” had become limited to e-mail exchanges that usually ended by me telling him to go, well, do things that aren’t fit to print here. I tossed and turned in bed, looking over at the empty pillow next to me, and often ended up clicking on the television to ease my insomnia. I found myself watching all-night marathons of “Confessions: Animal Hoarding” on cable. The more I watched, the more I realized that what I’d seen in Turner’s house looked really similar to what I was seeing on the TV. I researched the backgrounds of hoarders and learned that they usually had suffered some kind of severe trauma, which fit Turner’s life story like a puzzle’s key corner piece. I came to understand that reporting someone who appears to be hoarding dogs is actually helping not just the dogs, but also the person. A lot of good people who mean well—as I believed she did—end up trying to save a lot more dogs than they can actually handle.
I happened to be wading karma-deep in all of this moral vacillation right before the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My home is in the New York City media region, and the authorities were on high alert. The week that I returned from North Carolina, my local television and radio programs were consumed by a marketing campaign that urged citizens to help police avoid another tragedy. Advertisement after advertisement urged: “If you see something, say something.” The phrase began to echo like the chorus of a catchy tune that I could not get out of my mind.
Beyond the question of whether to say anything at all was the question of whom I might actually say something to. My instinct was to make the phone call, but the local authority on the matter was Person County Animal Control. The building was just a few minutes’ drive from Turner’s property, standing at the ready with a gas chamber and a 95-percent kill rate. I didn’t want any of the dogs going right back to that shelter where they’d started, and I could never live with myself if I became the person who caused them to be killed by asphyxiation. I was sure they didn’t deserve to be there or to die that way any more than my boy Blue did.