Saving Gracie (10 page)

Chapter 11: The Soft, Cool Feel of Grass

For four months, Shaw had watched over nearly 200 of the dogs from Mike-Mar Kennel. She checked on them each morning when she arrived at the Chester County SPCA and again each evening before she left for the day. She sat on the floor with the dogs, petted them, and reassured them, “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Bearing that responsibility had proved to be more stressful than any assignment she’d ever taken on before. But watching the animals blossom emotionally more than made up for it. She would never forget the day a few weeks earlier when she tossed a couple of tennis balls to the Bulldogs. She did it on a whim, not expecting much of a reaction. To her surprise, the dogs went wild for their brightly colored new toys. They nosed them, tossed them around, and chased after them madly. Watching them, Shaw smiled so much her cheeks hurt.

That evening, after she told her husband, Bobby, about the dogs’ antics, he got on eBay and ordered a thousand tennis balls, enough to shower the dogs with them. Then Shaw went to Kmart and bought a cartful of Christmas toys that had been marked down to twenty-five cents apiece.

If the Bulldogs preferred the tennis balls, the Cavaliers and the Papillons favored the squeaky Christmas toys. The toys helped bring them around. Now, when Shaw climbed into a kennel to sit, the dogs cuddled in her lap. Their coats still reeked of urine, but the odor didn’t bother her. “Just for them to come out of their shells like that, it was great. It was so great,” she said.

And now that Wolf and his partners had pleaded guilty, the case was over. Done. Soon the dogs would be leaving the SPCA and all the other shelters they were scattered in, destined for permanent homes at last.

Animal lovers across southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware who had followed the case were just waiting for the go-ahead. The dogs had been in custody for 138 days. They deserved good homes, and local residents were more than ready to provide them. It didn’t hurt that instead of going for upward of $2,000, these dogs would be available for just an adoption fee.

A few issues remained, however. Several breeders had stepped forward to claim some of the Bulldogs and the Havanese. SPCA staff needed to resolve who owned which dogs. They also wanted to screen would-be adopters before sending them home with any of the puppy mill dogs. These animals were going to require patience and work; people looking to adopt them needed to know that. SPCA spokesman McDevitt reminded the public that none of the dogs was housetrained or accustomed to walking on a leash.

“We’ve had these animals for five months and we want to make sure they go to loving, permanent homes and people are willing to make a lifelong commitment,” he said.

Finally, the shelters needed to microchip the animals, examine them medically again, and give them each a bon-voyage bath.

The case had cost the Chester County SPCA $256,000, much of which it managed to recoup through donations. Other shelters asked to be reimbursed for the costs they’d incurred caring for Wolf’s dogs, but the Berks County Animal Rescue League, the shelter that took in Dog 132, refrained from doing so. The Rescue League didn’t even ask to be reimbursed the $1,600 it spent on surgery to repair Babs the Bulldog’s ingrown corkscrew tail. Executive director Harry D. Brown III knew what it was like to have to ask other shelters to house rescued dogs until a case was resolved. A couple of years earlier, his organization had removed fifty-two Pit Bulls from a bad breeder and had to parcel thirty-two of them out to other shelters. He wouldn’t have wanted those shelters calling him up and saying, “You know how much it costs me to keep your dogs?” and he vowed not to do that to the Chester County SPCA.

Brown had given the SPCA his word that his shelter would help out as long as needed. “Financially sometimes it gets rough,” he acknowledged. “I always look at it this way: As long as we have enough to survive, we’re happy. We’re not looking to have a three-million-dollar bank account. If, by the end of the week, my bills are paid and my employees are paid, even if there’s nothing left, we’re okay.”

His lone request to Chester County was that, when the time came, the Animal Rescue League be allowed to find homes for the twelve dogs it had taken in. The dogs had been through hell already. He wanted to make certain they had the best chance possible to enjoy what remained of their lives.

The following week, the
West Chester
Daily Local
announced that on Thursday, June 29, the Chester County SPCA would begin adopting out sixty of Wolf’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and twenty-five Papillons. The adoption fee of $100 included an examination by one of more than seventy-five local veterinarians who had stepped up to care for the dogs, and would also pay for vaccinations, deworming, and spaying or neutering. In fact, instead of going home directly with their adopters, the dogs would be taken to a veterinary office, spayed or neutered, and then released.

On Monday, June 26, the
Reading Eagle
ran a similar article about the puppy mill dogs being kept at the Animal Rescue League. The newspaper recounted the story of Wolf’s dogs for readers who weren’t familiar with the case. Accompanying the article were three photos of Cavaliers. Two of them showed the dogs getting shampooed. The third showed Pam Bair sitting outside a run, hugging three of the Cavaliers. One of the dogs was in her lap and two more were standing on their hind legs, gazing up at her with soulful eyes. Interested parties were asked to fill out an application, including information about their income, housing, and pet history.

•  •  •

Six weeks earlier, the veterinarian for the Berks County Animal Rescue League, Carl Veltri, had treated the dogs again. At 2:34 p.m. that day, a vet tech carried Dog 132 into the examining room. The paperwork filed that day listed her as Invoice Number 166008. It noted that she was a Spaniel, Cavalier King Charles. Color: Unknown. Female. Weight: 16.8 lbs.

The Cavalier’s teeth were in sorry shape, rotted down to quarter-moon-shaped stumps. Veltri pulled all but five of them. The cost of the dental work came to $198.20, but the veterinarian discounted his fee by $99.10. The Cavalier was better off with no teeth than with bad ones. Shelter techs had realized belatedly that she and several of the other dogs were having difficulty chewing their food because of their worn-down teeth. Besides that, all the built-up bacteria on their teeth threatened to work its way into their systems, causing heart and kidney disease.

After her teeth were pulled, Dog 132 was able to chew her food more easily. The medication and baths eased her itching skin, and the eyedrops curtailed the stinging in her eyes. Physically, she was starting to come around. But Bair was looking for something more intangible in this little dog. A flicker of trust in her new caregivers, perhaps. A recognition, however subtle, that life might, in fact, offer a bit of promise.

The dogs had their kennelmates, but they needed to socialize with other dogs, too. A few weeks into their stay, the shelter staff decided to spring them from their kennels, two dogs at a time, to explore the rest of the boarding wing. Dog 132 avoided human contact on the days she was let out, but she sniffed noses tentatively with the other dogs as they peered out of their kennels, and after a time she trotted down the aisle in the direction of the kitchen and the laundry room. “Finally,” Bair thought, “she’s acknowledging there’s life beyond her cinderblock cell. We’re making progress.”

One afternoon Bair placed four of the Cavaliers, Dog 132 included, in one of the larger kennels at the far end of the boarding wing. In no time the dogs seemed delighted to be in one another’s company.

No one knew what made the difference. They only knew that after two and a half months in their care, Dog 132’s personality finally began to emerge. The efforts of the kennel techs were starting to pay off. Sandy Lambert, one of the techs assigned to the boarding wing, was struck by the difference just five minutes of attention could make in the life of a rescued dog. Once they got over their fear, Wolf’s dogs seemed grateful for everything they’d been given.

One sunny afternoon in April, the techs escorted six of the dogs to a grassy area at one end of the Rescue League building and—for the first time since their arrival—turned them loose. The dogs sniffed one another. They’d been in close proximity to their former kennelmates, but were seldom able to actually see one another. The dogs began checking out the soft, cushiony grass. Their paws were no longer tender; it had been weeks since they had been forced to stand on wire. Still, the spongy ground must have felt miraculous. And the smells! Dogs’ noses are up to 100,000 more sensitive than humans’, and the grass offered a cornucopia of aromas to investigate.

Minutes passed. The dogs seemed baffled. They watched and waited, perplexed. The grass felt wonderful, but now what? If this were a Disney movie, Dog 132 would have picked up her paws and begun to frolic in the warm spring sun. She would have rolled on her back and mouth-wrestled a playmate as her dangly ears lay stretched on the ground.

But in truth, no one remembers the tricolor Cavalier doing anything dramatic that day. Only that she mingled. She sniffed her surroundings. In her own quiet way, she seemed to enjoy the chance to explore a tiny patch of the outdoors.

“Who knows?” Bair thought to herself when her colleagues herded the dogs back inside. “Maybe she’ll come around someday.”

Chapter 12: Deciding on a Dog

Linda jackson had never been crazy about dogs. She’d tried to overcome this; four years earlier, she’d given in to her kids and purchased a celebutante–style Yorkshire Terrier puppy. It hadn’t worked out. At two and a half pounds, Spike had an ego the size of a Bull Mastiff. He soiled the carpet, chewed holes in Linda’s sixty-dollar leather sandals, and bolted out of the house every chance he got. And he yapped incessantly. One night, when a friend called, the kids were hollering and Spike was barking so loudly that Linda could barely hear herself. “What is
going on
?” her friend asked.

Finally, Linda had had enough. She returned the Yorkie to the neighbor she’d bought him from, and Spike ended up with a new owner who was much more forgiving of the little dog’s high-maintenance personality. But 15-year-old Ryan, 12-year-old Erika, and 9-year-old Julia were furious that Mom had given Spike away. Linda felt horrible.

When Julia announced that the family was going to get another dog to replace Spike, Linda refused to consider it. “No, we’re not going to get another dog,” she corrected her daughter. “We failed this one.” Besides, the family still had a cat, an affectionate gray shorthair with green eyes. Kitty would have to do.

But Julia was relentless. She constantly played Nintendogs, a video game in which players feed and walk virtual dogs, even guiding them through obedience training. And night after night, Linda watched her youngest sprawl on the couch with a children’s book about dogs, researching the perfect breed for their family. “How about this one?” Julia would ask, showing her a picture of a Corgi. “How about this?” pointing to a demure-looking Dachshund. All three kids lobbied for an English Bulldog.

“I’ll know the right dog when I see it,” Linda told them.

By the time Julia showed her a picture of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Linda’s resolve had begun to soften. She had to admit, the little dogs with the large, expressive eyes and dangling ears were appealing. They were the size she preferred—twelve to eighteen pounds—and their personality seemed ideal. Cavaliers were considered intelligent, loyal, cheerful, and even-tempered. They were renowned lapdogs, said to have so captivated Britain’s King Charles II in the mid-1600s that he’d issued a decree allowing the diminutive spaniels to enter any public building in England. Cavaliers’ charm was indisputable.

“Breed buzzwords: Gentle. Affectionate. Sporty,” the chapter of the book on Cavaliers said. Accompanying the description was an illustration of a Cavalier and a bubble of words above it that had the dog saying, “I get my best exercise getting on and off laps.”

All right, Linda told the kids, she would check into a Cavalier. But ten minutes of research on the Internet and she wished she’d never opened her mouth. Cavaliers were a flavor of the month, it turned out. A registered puppy from a reputable breeder could easily run $1,500 or more. There was no way Linda could afford to spend that kind of money.

Scrolling online one evening, she stumbled across what sounded like a good deal: Cavalier puppies for sale for $700, plus $200 for shipping. But the breeder in Texas acted evasive when Linda contacted her to ask about her kennel. And the idea of shipping a dog sight unseen made Linda uneasy; friends warned her against transporting a puppy hundreds of miles. If something went wrong with the puppy, what recourse would she have? Suddenly, what had sounded like a bargain now seemed too good to be true. “Face it,” she told herself, “a Cavalier just isn’t in the cards.”

She was debating how to break the bad news when, on her way to work the next morning, she stopped, as she usually did, at a local coffee shop in her hometown of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and reached for the
Harrisburg Patriot-News
. The rack was empty; the paper hadn’t arrived. She picked up the
Reading Eagle
instead—the local paper for a bigger metropolis thirty-seven miles east of Lebanon. Linda rarely went to Reading and had no interest in news from that area. But as she flipped through the paper, a large photo on the cover of the Lifestyle section caught her attention. It showed a woman surrounded by Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, all of them standing on their hind legs and clamoring for her attention.

The Cavaliers were among 337 purebred dogs and other animals who had been rescued from a puppy mill—a shoddily run commercial kennel forty miles away. Some of the dogs were being housed at the Animal Rescue League of Berks County shelter, south of Reading. The breeder had pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and agreed to give up his dogs. In a matter of days, once the legal hurdles were cleared, the dogs would be available for adoption.

Linda thought quickly. Her job as development director at the local YMCA didn’t pay a fortune; she was always trying to figure out how to pay the bills. Getting a dog would be another expense. But she wanted to make her kids happy. A puppy mill rescue might just be the way to go. She couldn’t afford a purebred dog any other way.

This
Reading Eagle
photo of shelter employee Pam Bair surrounded by Cavalier King Charles Spaniels caught Linda Jackson’s eye. (
Susan Angstadt/Reading Eagle
)

She jotted down the number for the shelter and dialed it as soon as she got to work. The woman who answered confirmed that the dogs would be available in a matter of days for a small fee. She directed Linda to the shelter’s website, where she could download an adoption application form. Linda should submit the form and keep calling back to see when the dogs were available, the woman told her.

Linda filled out the application, sent it in, and was notified a couple of days later that she qualified to take one of the dogs home. The shelter had one Havanese, two English Bulldogs, and nine Cavaliers from the puppy mill. If she got in line soon enough, she could choose one of the Cavaliers. For several days she phoned the shelter every morning to see if Adoption Day had arrived. Not yet, she was told. Try again tomorrow.

On Thursday, June 29, she phoned again, expecting to hear the usual “Sorry, keep calling.” To her surprise, the woman told her that the dogs were ready to go. “First come, first served,” the woman said, “so get here as quickly as you can.”

Linda glanced at her watch. Fund-raising season was in full swing at the YMCA; this was hardly a convenient time to disappear on personal business. But the chance to adopt a Cavalier took precedence. She ducked out of the office, backed her sedan out of the parking lot, and threaded her way east through town and out onto Highway 422.

The shelter was only forty miles away, but the highway was narrow, just two lanes, and traffic was stop-and-go the entire way. Two-story brick houses lined the road. Along certain stretches, turn-of-the-century row houses sat only a few feet from the pavement, so close you could practically reach out and shake hands with people relaxing on the front porch. The drive would take an hour or more.

When she reached the town of Sinking Springs, ten miles out, Linda called the shelter to make certain some Cavaliers were left. The voice on the other end sounded apologetic
.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman told her, “we just adopted out the last one.”

There has to be a mistake, Linda thought. She hadn’t driven all this way for nothing. She stepped on the accelerator. She had to see for herself that all the Cavaliers were gone. If they were, she’d think about getting another breed of dog. Any dog; by now it didn’t matter what kind. She was on a mission that day to bring home a pet.

As she got closer to the shelter, she asked herself again if she really wanted to bring home a new pet.
Dogs were work. You had to walk them. You had to board them when you went away. “The kids want a dog, sure, but I’ll be the one who winds up taking care of it,” she thought. “There’s no getting around that.”

It was noon when she turned off the bypass, followed a curving road for a few hundred yards, and drove up the driveway to the Animal Rescue League facility. She parked her car and entered the main door. She’d never been inside an animal shelter before, and the pungent aroma of the place—a combination of disinfectant and smelly dogs—filled her with second thoughts. Linda was buoyed by the sight of a shelter tech holding a red and white Cavalier. “Is that one of the dogs you’re adopting out today?” she asked.

The woman nodded.

The receptionist had been mistaken after all! The Cavalier looked healthy for a puppy mill survivor, and she was beautiful—just like the dogs Linda had seen in the Reading paper.

Immediately, though, another tech who overheard the exchange called out that that dog had been spoken for. But they did have one left.

Pam Bair had left to run some errands, so Linda missed the chance to talk with the staffer who knew these dogs best. The tech came around from behind the counter and invited Linda outside, where the last remaining dog was waiting in a fenced-in, graveled run. Linda knelt down and peered through the chain-link fence. Looking back at her was a black and white lump with coffee brown eyes. She wasn’t anything like the striking animal Linda thought she would find. Her coat might have been pretty once—her back and sides jet black, her chest and front legs the color of snow—but her hair had been clipped short and was bone dry. One of her eyes bulged out slightly and looked cloudy, as if she had cataracts. And her nipples were so distended they nearly touched the ground. Linda had never seen anything like them.

The shelter tech opened the door, reached in, picked up the dog, and set her down in the aisle next to Linda. “Ugh,” Linda groaned to herself, “this dog stinks.” She smelled like a combination of fear, confusion, and despair.

Wilma, as the staff called her, was believed to be 6 years old. Part of the puppy mill’s breeding stock, she’d had one litter of puppies after another, and an absence of veterinary care had caught up with her. She had a recurring skin infection. Her ears were clogged with mucus. She suffered from dry eye and needed eyedrops every day. The cloudiness in her right eye had permanently damaged her eyesight. And her teeth were so rotten that the shelter’s veterinarian had pulled most of them. She had only five teeth left.

Those were the problems the shelter had been able to diagnose. The Cavalier could always develop more. “Be aware you may have to spend thousands of dollars on this dog,” the shelter tech warned.

Linda said nothing. She had just gotten rid of one problem dog. Now she was contemplating another dog who sounded like a medical train wreck. One more thing to complicate her life.

The Cavalier turned slowly and approached Linda. Fleetingly, the white tip of her black tail swung to one side and then the other. “At least she’s friendly,” thought Linda. “She’s not cowering.” She petted the little dog gingerly. In a gentle voice, the tech reached out to caress the Cavalier, too. “That a girl.” A moment passed and Linda, hesitating, picked up the dog and sat her on her lap. Almost by instinct, the dog leaned against her. Linda was struck by the endearing way her feathery ears framed her face.

Linda thought about her promise to the kids. She had assured them that if and when the rescued Cavaliers were available, she would get in line to adopt one. Now, here she was, cradling the last dog left. How could she think of leaving the shelter without her?

She looked down at the dog. The Cavalier’s cloudy brown eyes gazed back. Something about her petite little face was pathetic but also endearing. Linda couldn’t resist it.

“You know what?” she heard herself say. “I’ll take her.”

The tech nodded, pleased. “You hear that, Wilma?” she said. “You’ve just found a new home.” She lifted Dog 132 out of Linda’s arms and clutched her to her chest.

Linda had already completed the paperwork. She’d stated in writing that she owned her home, that the dog would live inside, and that she agreed to have her spayed. She listed the name of her veterinarian and a reference. The information filed that day noted the vaccinations Wilma had been given, but left some questions unanswered.

Housetrained? Unknown.

Good with children? Unknown.

Good with other animals? Unknown.

This was no time for second-guessing. Linda excused herself, walked to her car, and retrieved the small plastic cat crate she had brought from home. The shelter tech carried the Cavalier to the lobby to wait for her return. As soon as Linda stepped back inside, the employee handed her Dog 132. She watched as Linda first tried to coax the dog into the crate and, when that didn’t work, gently push her inside. The latch on the crate was broken, but the little dog made no attempt to step back out. She’d spent most of her life in confinement. She knew the drill. She crouched for several seconds and then laid down obediently and stared out.