Little Boy Blue (26 page)

Not long after Shapiro completed Lewyt’s feats of mental strength, he sent her a check for $5,000. She rented the basement of a veterinarian’s office with room for just ten cages. In the early months, when she couldn’t place dogs quickly enough, she fostered them at her own home. “We’d have orphaned puppies at the dining-room table during dinner parties, dogs giving birth in the living room,” she recalls. “Bless my husband’s heart, he supported me.”

That was in 1976, a full thirty-five years before I stepped foot into the current incarnation of Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Massachusetts. I drove along the New York-to-Boston corridor on Interstate 95 just as so many rescue groups do with dogs like Blue, only instead of puppies in my passenger seat, I had a notebook filled with questions. As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw not a single hint of the organization’s humble roots. The building wasn’t exactly a glimmering skyscraper, but it sure was a heck of a lot bigger and nicer than any other shelter I’d seen so far.

Today, Northeast Animal Shelter is located inside an old Honda dealership that Shapiro and her sister, Executive Director Randi Cohen, raised funds to convert into a facility that can accommodate more than a hundred dogs and cats at a time. The renovations took two full years, with Cohen overseeing the project by learning everything from local zoning laws to the ins and outs of air-handling systems. In her previous careers, Cohen had been a remedial reading teacher and a travel agent. Like Shapiro, she simply did what needed to be done to make the shelter vision a reality.

The doors opened at the new facility on May 21, 2008, with supporters cheering all the way down the red brick walkway and into the asphalt parking lot. By August 2010, Northeast Animal Shelter was celebrating its 100,000th adoption. Less than a year later, it would experience its biggest moment of success, finding permanent homes for forty-three dogs and cats in a single day. There are now fifty-three full- and part-time workers along with more than two hundred volunteers supporting the New England shelter, where some 90 percent of the dogs arrive every month from rescue groups in Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, California, Indiana, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico. The shelter’s budget—all of it privately generated through direct-mail campaigns, online donations, fund-raisers, and adoption fees of about $295 to $395 per dog—has grown from Lewyt’s original $5,000 check to some $2 million per year.

Although Shapiro started out saving local dogs in the 1970s, she began transporting rescued dogs from across the country in 1993. She got the idea after an attorney friend called her about a shelter that the friend’s parents ran in Nebraska. They had more dogs than they knew how to handle, and puppies were going to be killed for space. This was before cellular telephones and fax machines, so Shapiro sorted things out by snail mail and landline telephone. She arranged for fifteen puppies to arrive from Nebraska by way of a commercial airline’s cargo hold, and she personally met them at the airport at nine o’clock at night, with her three children in tow. Within two days, she had found homes for every last one of the pups who had previously been slated to die.

In that moment on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport, Shapiro became one of the first Americans to lay the groundwork for today’s nationwide rescue network. In its first five years, the effort that Shapiro dubbed Puppies Across America saved five thousand dogs. As of 2010, her shelter was saving more than four thousand dogs each year.

It’s an effort that the local rescue community in New England now appreciates and even celebrates, but that, in its early days, was met with intense scorn.

“We’d go to rescue seminars and have to sit alone. Nobody would talk to us,” recalls Betty Bilton, a member of Northeast Animal Shelter’s Board of Directors and a twenty-five-year veteran of the organization. “They thought there were dogs dying in the Massachusetts pounds while we were bringing in more dogs from out of state. Well, the only dogs that were dying here were vicious or so sick that they couldn’t go back into the community. We didn’t care where the dogs came from, but at first, we were the only people who thought that way.”

Bilton, in working with Shapiro, was among the first Northern shelter workers to approach shelters in the South about creating rescue partnerships. She initially met with resistance and distrust that seemed ridiculous to her, but that she soon came to expect as standard.

“I was in Kentucky once, and I went to a shelter where they were going to put a bunch of puppies down, and they wouldn’t give them to me,” she recalls. “They said, ‘You’re from Massachusetts? Near Boston? You’re just going to sell them to the universities there for medical experiments.’ They weren’t finding homes for them, but they wouldn’t give them to me, either. And it’s not just Kentucky. I remember a lady from West Virginia driving all the way up here with a van full of dogs that she had saved, and she sat in that van crying in our parking lot. Just absolutely weeping. She was afraid that we sounded too good to be true. She was exhausted. She had fought to rescue those dogs. She had driven all that way. For her, giving those dogs over to us required a massive leap of faith.”

Today, the primary criticism Northeast Animal Shelter faces is that it does not accept every dog who needs a home. Shapiro says no-kill facilities that accept every dog in need would be ideal, but that her shelter—like many rescue operations nationwide— is not equipped to do so. She cannot, for instance, take a dog who has bitten a child in the face. It’s not a dog who can be adopted back into the community safely, so it is not a dog Northeast Animal Shelter will accept into its program. Other dogs who are routinely denied include pit bulls, since they are so difficult to place with families because of stereotypes about the breed.

Being able to make that choice is a luxury that is not available to public facilities like the one where Blue, Izzy, and Summer were found. They have to make room for every dog who comes in, if not by finding adopters, then by killing the dogs already in the cages.

Even still, Bilton says, it is just as psychologically challenging for her to choose which dogs to accept into the Northeast Animal Shelter program as it is for volunteers in Blue’s home state of North Carolina to choose which dogs to save from the gas chambers.

“I have this dream, this horrible dream,” Bilton told me, her eyes gazing at the floor as she gently laid her hands in her lap. “I’m in the woods, and I’m standing in a river, and there’s this waterfall up ahead. A puppy is in a cardboard box, and he’s about to go over that waterfall. And I look at him, right into his eyes, and he looks at me, and he talks. That little puppy talks. He looks right at me and says, ‘But you promised.’ And then I wake up. After all these years, after all the dogs we’ve saved, I just can’t get rid of that dream.”

The fact that a shy dog like Blue made it out of a shelter like Person County’s and all the way to a safe home with me is evidence that the longtime work of people like Shapiro, Cohen, and Bilton is beginning to make a real difference for desperate dogs across America. Northeast Animal Shelter is no longer alone in its nationwide efforts, with smaller groups like Lulu’s Rescue in Pennsylvania now rising up to help the cause. In years past, a dog like Blue wouldn’t even have had a chance. Today, the actual process of his cross-country adoption was practically routine for the people involved.

And yet, as thankful as I am to be able to give Blue a safe and loving home, some activists are still opposed to the changing national landscape that brought him into my life. Jenny Stephens of North Penn Puppy Mill Watch in Pennsylvania, for instance, told me by telephone that even today, she shares a lot of the same concerns that Bilton says her team encountered in Massachusetts several decades ago. As great as I think it is that Blue was saved, and as fascinating as I find the growing movement that is saving dogs like him every day, there are some advocates and critics who say rescues should focus on their own backyards instead of following the nationwide-transport model.

“In 2009 alone, we had more than 70,000 dogs entering the shelters in Pennsylvania,” Stephens told me, unable to hide the frustration in her voice. “Now, if we already have 70,000 homeless dogs in Pennsylvania, then why the hell are these rescue groups bringing more into the state? Not every one of these rescue groups is reputable. They’re in it to make money, and lots of money. They go down South and bring back pregnant dogs and puppies because they know most people want a puppy, and they can sell them for the highest fees. They’re leaving perfectly adoptable three- and five- and seven-year-old dogs to die in the shelters up here because they’re harder to sell. These dogs from the South have heartworm. They have medical problems that we didn’t used to see up North, but that are now spreading to the dogs up here. People think the problem is just in the South, but it’s not just there. Pennsylvania is in the North, and these overcrowded shelters are a problem here, too. We have so many puppy mills in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio whose dogs end up in these shelters. The average family that goes on a site like Petfinder is trying to do a good thing and adopt a dog, but they have no idea what’s going on behind the pictures. There are serious issues behind these pictures, issues that are convoluted by multiple states and really powerful lobbying groups and cash being paid for puppies and all kinds of money being funneled to politicians.”

It is of course hard for me to hear activists like Stephens talk with such disdain for groups like Northeast Animal Shelter, which has saved so many dogs. Michele Armstrong hears similar criticisms directed toward Lulu’s Rescue about dogs like Blue, Izzy, and Summer, and she always replies by telling detractors that the need in the South is quite simply much greater than it is in the North.

To me, it seems clear-cut that everything Stephens says is rooted in fact, but that even still, if not for the efforts of such groups, then hundreds of thousands of dogs like Blue would not be safe in homes today. I really don’t care where Blue was born or found. And I’d have no problem with a transport moving in the opposite direction, if a person from Oklahoma were willing to adopt a dog from New Hampshire. Blue is learning new tricks at school, going for walks to the park every day, and cuddling on my lap as we sit on the sofa together. Without the work of cross-country rescue volunteers, he would be a lifeless carcass in a trash heap.

One thing upon which activists like Shapiro, Armstrong, and Stephens all agree is that shelter dogs have been unfairly maligned for many years as less valuable or less worthy than purebreds, when in fact they are often wonderful dogs like Blue who have simply found themselves in a tragic situation. The idea that shelter dogs are worth paying for, and worth saving no matter their origins, is a good thing—and it’s an idea that is continuing to spread across the country as more and more dog lovers become educated about stories like Blue’s. I know that I, for one, will never again question the validity of paying $400 for a shelter dog. Knowing what a great dog Blue is, I’d have been stupid not to pay $1,000.

“I’ve noticed a real change, especially in the past few years,” Shapiro told me. “North Shore Animal League on Long Island was doing transports with vans all those years ago, and we were the first to ever use commercial airplanes starting about fifteen years ago. Today, you have lots of transports of all kinds going back and forth, including private jets and RVs. Now, while all of that was evolving, things haven’t changed so much up here. People still get up every day, brush their teeth, take their kids to school, and spay and neuter their dogs. It’s automatic. And things haven’t changed much in the South, either, where the lack of spaying and neutering is still a real problem. But what I’m starting to see now, just in the past few years, is that when I walk on the beach up North the majority of dogs are no longer pure- breds. Most of them are mixed breeds, and when I ask where they’re from, the owners say out of state. It was not that way when I started in 1976. Transports would never have worked then on the scale that they are working today because all of the people wanted purebreds. We haven’t solved the cultural, religious, and economic problems that these dogs face in the South, but we are starting to see some changes in attitude there just like we have seen in the North. There are rescues opening down there, too. It used to be people from the North who moved down there and started rescues, but now people who are from there are opening rescues. That’s new. And we also seem to have reached critical mass in the North with our message that shelter dogs can be excellent pets. The affluent people up here who used to only have purebreds now have an awareness that mixed breeds are sometimes just unfortunate victims, and that they can be absolutely terrific.”

After several hours spent talking with Shapiro and her team while touring Northeast Animal Shelter, I realized that the very building where we were standing had a lot to do with their success. It took me a while to notice, but I felt different than I had at any of the publicly funded facilities I visited. I felt calm and relaxed, and I had a genuine sense that any problems the dogs faced were completely under control. When I realized how this feeling came over me, I started thinking about the building itself. It conveyed an incredibly different presence than the publicly funded facilities I’d visited, starting at the front door.

The first thing I noticed when I walked up to Northeast Animal Shelter’s gray building with green trim was the hours of operation, posted clearly next to the entrance. While Person County Animal Control had hours from 9
A.M.
till 4
P.M.
Monday through Friday when Blue was there, Northeast Animal Shelter is open from 10
A.M.
till 8
P.M.
Monday through Friday and from 10
A.M.
till 6
P.M.
on Saturday and Sunday. The hours are intended to make it easy for working people with school-age children to come inside and adopt dogs at their convenience, as opposed to at the convenience of a strict forty-hour-per-workweek staff.