Little Boy Blue (25 page)

“Can you tell me,” I practically begged her, “what on earth I can do to make sure these dogs are okay?”

She smiled knowingly. She had the face of a mother who realizes her child has been cut from the football team before the kid figures it out for himself. She shook her head, and she slowly adjusted the napkin in her lap.

“You can’t do anything,” she said. “And nobody is going to help you. The big organizations are useless. They collect a lot of money, but they don’t actually save the dogs. That’s why we’re all driving back and forth to the South on the weekends. We take off our jewelry, put on our shabbiest jeans, find a beat-up old car that won’t draw any attention, and go into these places to get the dogs out. That’s what you can do—drive down there, get the dogs out, and find them good homes up here.”

I asked her if she thought I’d done the right thing in calling the Humane Society.

“Those dogs had a better chance of staying alive at that woman’s house,” she said. “Even if she’s a hoarder, sometimes a hoarder is the only chance these dogs have. The rescuers have to be hoarders to get as many of them out of the shelters as they can. I would never have made that phone call. You only made the situation worse for all of those dogs you saw.”

Needless to say, I did not order dessert. I barely was able to keep down the dinner I’d just eaten. I drove home in a panic and spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what I could do to actually achieve the goal of helping those dogs. I realized that I had quite a lot in common with Annie Turner at that point. I would have hoarded the dogs in my own house until adopters could be found if I thought it might keep them out of the gas chamber.

By morning, I’d decided that I could at least try to hold the HSUS to what the representative had initially implied, that the group would offer assistance to Person County Animal Control should a large number of dogs need to be seized. Director Ron Shaw had generously given me his personal cell phone number when I was in North Carolina in case I needed help while I was there, what with my New Jersey license plates and all. I’d never dialed it—until now. I called at precisely 9:01
A.M.
, hoping to catch the ex-Marine right after he came on duty for the day.

He picked up on the second ring and seemed surprised to hear from me. He also seemed surprised when I told him that I was the person who had told the Humane Society about the dogs at Turner’s house. He immediately said, and rightly so, that he could not comment on an ongoing investigation.

“I understand, but that’s not why I’m calling you,” I told him. “Do you remember in your office, when we talked about how some rescue groups are good, and some seem to be not so good, and there seems to be a lot of room for error? I just want to make sure you’re being given the same information that I’m being given. I want to make sure the Humane Society has told you that they have funding available to provide assistance like makeshift shelters should a large number of dogs need to be seized. I want to make sure you are aware that you don’t have to simply kill all of those dogs for lack of space if they end up being brought in.”

Shaw went silent for a few moments before saying, “I have not been given that information.”

I thanked him for his time and hung up. It would not have surprised me to see actual steam blowing out of my ears like I was a cartoon train speeding over a cliff. I sent a strongly worded, though carefully polite, e-mail to the HSUS representative. I cc’d Shaw so that he would know how to reach her directly. I wrote that I wanted the representative to make sure Shaw knew all of the resources that the HSUS had available, because I felt personally responsible for making sure these dogs would be all right. I wrote that I wanted the representative to understand that Person County Animal Control already has a 95-percent kill rate and no extra space for more dogs, and that Shaw himself had verified that information for me.

The representative replied immediately. She said that she had been in constant contact with the officer working under Shaw’s jurisdiction, and that the officer was well aware of how the HSUS could help.

However, she added, none of that mattered anymore. The officer had gone back the night before to try yet again to get inside Turner’s house, but it appeared that Turner had been tipped off about the investigation. The representative implied that the tipoff may have been my fault, because I’d asked Lulu’s Rescue and Rhonda Beach what to do about what I’d seen, and to help find homes for any dogs who needed to be seized. Small rescue groups, she told me, talk to one another. They are not always to be trusted. Word can spread faster than an oil slick, and sometimes it’s awfully hard to tell which people are more slippery than solid.

No matter the reason for the tip-off, the representative said, the investigation was now stalled. When the officer had tried once again to get into Turner’s house, he’d arrived to find an entirely new situation. Turner would remain on their watch list, as well as on the radar of Person County Animal Control, in case she actually was hoarding or doing something else dangerous to dogs. But as for what I’d seen, there was really nothing else that anyone could do.

The dogs, the representative told me, were inexplicably gone.

Safe Haven

Sometimes in dog rescue, well-intentioned people just get in over their heads. I’d certainly managed to do exactly that with a single phone call about some pups I thought might need help. Annie Turner may have done it after spending so many years trying to save dogs from her local gas chamber that she simply couldn’t stop taking more in. But in some cases, it doesn’t take grand ambitions to find yourself in a situation you can’t resolve. In at least one case, it took only a few cute puppies for a woman to look beyond the rescue world as I understood it—and to introduce me to what I can only describe as the promised land.

That woman’s name is Jodi Pope. She explained to me by telephone that she once found a couple of Labrador puppies near her home in Burke County, Georgia. The pups were just four weeks old, adorable as all get out, and perfectly healthy. She figured she’d bring them home as fosters and that, like Izzy and Summer, they’d be requested by adopters inside of a week or ten days.

“We ended up having them for six months,” she told me. “We went every weekend to adoption days, posted them on the Internet, did everything we could think of—and we could not find homes for these dogs. We even drove to the nearest city, Augusta, which is forty miles away. And do you know what we found? About twenty rescue groups showing up there every weekend, and not enough people to adopt all the dogs.”

After half a year had passed, Pope was looking for a better solution. She spent that summer working the Web to make connections, and eventually, she found several shelters up North that were willing to work with her.

“There were three of us who had started Old Fella Rescue here in Georgia, and we brought up eight dogs the first time, including those Lab puppies,” she recalls. “The next transport, we had thirteen dogs. Then it was twenty-one. Now, in 2010, we’re averaging thirty-five dogs a month. We’ve probably sent almost five hundred dogs up North, because we realized that the county above ours is killing about fourteen thousand dogs a year. So now I’m coordinating transports for other rescues in our area, too. We work with a lot of great shelters, especially Northeast Animal Shelter in Massachusetts, where they promote the dogs like crazy. I’ve driven there and seen people standing in line to see which dogs we’re bringing. We’ve had near fistfights by people trying to adopt our dogs, there’s such a desire for them up North, for these dogs and puppies that people in our part of Georgia leave in Dumpsters.”

When Pope mentioned Northeast Animal Shelter to me, my ears perked up. It was as if somebody had just asked me whether I wanted to go for a walk at the p-a-r-k. I had heard again and again about this particular shelter in Massachusetts that rescuers all across the South feel is
the
example of the gold-standard way station for dogs like Blue who are in transit to permanent homes.

And it came to exist, I learned in a telephone call, because a woman named Cindi Shapiro happened to read
The Wall Street
Journal
on Thursday, March 6, 1970.

Shapiro was just twenty-five years old, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School whose entire education had revolved around preparing her to run a health organization. But she loved animals, so her eyes gravitated naturally toward one particular front-page headline. “With Right Tactics, It’s Easy to Market A Three-Legged Cat: Little Animal Shelter Succeeds By Imitating Big Business.”

The article, by staff reporter William Mathewson, told the story of Alexander Lewyt (pronounced LOO-it). At the time, the resident of Long Island, New York, was sixty-six years old and best known for having invented the Lewyt vacuum cleaner. It was sold door-to-door following World War II with a promise to homemakers that it would not interfere with the reception on their big-box radios or black-and-white televisions. This was a huge marketing hook in its day. Lewyt’s vacuum cleaner was no small shakes. He was featured in the 1952 book
America’s
Twelve Master Salesmen
alongside Conrad Hilton, who founded the hotel chain that bears his name; James Farley, who is credited with turning Coca-Cola into a global brand with help from the U.S. military; and Max Hess, Jr., who would eventually sell his family’s Hess department store chain to Dillard’s, Bon-Ton, and May Department Stores (now part of Macy’s).

The
Journal
article explained how Lewyt became involved with North Shore Animal League on Long Island in 1969, when his wife talked him into donating $100 after receiving a funding request. Lewyt got curious about how his money would be spent, so he paid a visit to the twenty-five-year-old shelter. It was open only two hours a day on five days of the week, had one full-time employee, and barely had enough cash flow to keep the lights on. “They were also acting as the local dogcatcher,” Lewyt told the
Journal
, “and they were losing money on every dog they’d catch.”

Lewyt thought that was a pretty dumb way to run an operation, so he taught the shelter’s directors about direct-mail campaigns. Working with Publishers Clearing House, which was near his home and the shelter on Long Island, Lewyt produced a letter featuring a photograph of a puppy and a kitten. The letter asked its 28,000 recipients, “Would you give a dollar—just $1—TO SAVE THEIR LIVES?” Lewyt got a celebrity endorser to donate his signature, too. It was singer Perry Como, whose Christmas specials were as much an annual television event in the late 1960s as the all-day marathons of little Ralphie on
A
Christmas Story
are now.

That mailing brought in $11,000, which is the equivalent of about $67,000 today. Within the next five years, the shelter’s staff grew from one to twenty-five employees, its hours of operation increased to every day of the year, and its advertising budget alone was earmarked at $50,000 (about $125,000 in cur- rent dollars). That’s why
The Wall Street Journal
had taken notice. Lewyt was running the shelter as if it were a corporation—work he would continue until his death in 1988. “We have the same concept as bringing any product to the public,” Lewyt told the
Journal
in 1975. “We have our receivables, our inventories. And if a product doesn’t move, we have a promotion…. Most animal shelters are run by well-intentioned people who don’t know anything about fund-raising or running the place like a business. The only reason they don’t go broke is that a little old lady dies every year and leaves them something.”

That was all that Cindi Shapiro needed to read.

“This article was an epiphany for me,” she recalls. “It put together everything that I wanted to do with everything I’d been trained to do.”

Shapiro found Lewyt’s number in a thick printed phone book, called him unannounced, and said she wanted to do what he was doing near Manhattan, only up in Massachusetts. He spent the next forty-five minutes berating her from his end of the phone line—the way a father might snap at a daughter who says she wants to turn down a corporate job offer and instead become a painter of abstract expressionist art. Lewyt told Shapiro that rescuing animals was a lifelong commitment, and that the work could be absolutely heartbreaking. He tried to scare off the fresh-faced college graduate by insisting there wasn’t a darn nickel of money to be made.

“When he was done, maybe just because I was still on the line after all that, he invited me to Long Island to see what he was doing,” Shapiro told me. “I met his wife. I stayed at their home for a weekend. I visited his shelter. I tried to write down everything I saw to learn how things worked. At the end of the weekend, he told me he’d always wanted to know whether his concept could be duplicated, and that I was the first person he’d met who had a shot at succeeding. He told me, ‘I’m going to give you the ten trials of Hercules, make you do things like a financial projection and a marketing study, to see if you can do it.’”

She went home, took out her typewriter, and did everything he’d asked. The business logistics he demanded for the creation of a sustainable shelter were a far cry from the criteria placed on the majority of animal-control centers in the United States today, but then again, Shapiro was not the type of person to don canvas work gloves and toss a sweet puppy like Blue into a gas chamber. Her heart told her there was a better way, and her Ivy League education, along with Lewyt’s example, gave her the skills to find it.