by Kim Kavin
In this sense, it’s fair to say that nonprofit rescue groups today are sometimes operating similarly to the way many commercial breeders were operating in the 1980s, shipping dogs by hook or by crook to get an increasing number of deals done. There are well-organized rescue agencies, for sure, with serious protocols even more stringent than government regulations require, but generally speaking, the market for homeless dogs has grown faster than the infrastructure to move them into the homes of adopters. Campaigns like the ones that urge dog lovers to “Adopt, Don’t Shop” are shifting huge numbers of buyers away from pet stores and breeders, and pushing them toward shelters that, for generations, have operated more as animal control pounds than as adoption centers. The increasing popularity of rescue is shifting buyers toward new nonprofit groups that are mom-and-pop in nature and often working without a net. Volunteers like Cotopolis love the fact that so many dogs are being saved—animals who otherwise would be killed—but she also sees the growing pains of the process up close. When people like her choose to work with responsible fellow rescuers, the decision is often the only thing that helps the better rescue agencies grow and thrive. As with purebreds, so much of what happens to the dogs often boils down to a single person’s character and decency.
Most of the dogs Cotopolis transfers have foster homes or permanent homes waiting at the end of the line, as opposed to dogs who are sometimes moved from shelter to shelter to buy them extra time in the system before they’re killed. Cotopolis’s dogs have health certificates from veterinarians, and some of them are already spayed or neutered. She moves about a hundred dogs a year, and after she transfers them to other volunteer drivers, they end up in places like New York, New Hampshire, and Canada. It’s up to the coordinators to ensure that everything is in order before the dogs get into the vehicle-to-vehicle labyrinth, and Cotopolis looks for coordinators who approach the work the same way staff members did at the shelter where she once volunteered.
Generally speaking, she thinks the current, mostly self-regulated nonprofit rescue networks have about a seventy-thirty percentage split, with more than half the volunteers following sound protocols to ensure the dogs’ health and safety, and to disclose the dogs’ true nature and condition to adopters.
“One coordinator I drive for, she’s a schoolteacher, and another one is an attorney,” she says. “These are people volunteering. They have full-time jobs. The one I drive primarily for, she’s hard-core. If the shelters don’t have their act together, she’ll turn the dogs away until they get it right.”
Put another way, Cotopolis is talking about a private volunteer ensuring that a taxpayer-funded shelter is doing its job. Again, it’s about a single individual setting standards—and it’s hard not to see a similarity with, say, somebody like the large-scale distributor Andrew Hunte telling government-regulated breeders to treat the pooches better before he’ll be willing to move them into the marketplace.
Most of the dogs Cotopolis transports sleep the entire way. They’re not bouncing off their crate walls with stress, and they’re not whining or barking with dismay. Mostly, she says, they seem relieved.
“They are universally accepting and friendly,” she says. “Sometimes they’re a little shy, but none of that spinning that you see in the mill dogs. They’re very even-tempered. I’m shocked at the even temperament of these dogs.”
Her favorite drive so far was on a bitterly cold January day when she found herself cruising into the snow-covered state of Ohio with a carload of Treeing Walker Coonhounds, Bluetick Coonhounds, Australian Shepherds, and Beagles who had been pulled out of shelters in balmy Alabama and Tennessee. She and her fellow volunteers followed the usual safety protocols, taking the dogs out of their crates on leashes so they could go potty in the grass, and the dogs did something unusual: they became eerily still. At first, she thought something might be wrong, but then they “stuck their noses in the snow and blew it up, and then four or five of them started playing and rolling in the snow. They’d never seen it before. There was this moment where they stopped being this fearful creature in the cage, and it becomes this confident, I’m a dog.”
It’s the kind of moment that keeps people like Cotopolis going, doing more and more transports when she’s not running her current project, SpayNeuterOhio.
“It was just beautiful to watch,” she recalls, seeing the dogs realize there was no longer anything to fear. “We were all crying.”
Dr. Scott Marshall wasn’t the first to notice the trend. His predecessor in the job of Rhode Island state veterinarian coined the term Underhound Railroad in the mid-2000s after noticing an increasing number of everyday people transporting homeless dogs from the worst Southern US shelters up into New England for adoption. “He noticed it was happening,” Marshall recalls, “but he didn’t have a grasp of the magnitude.”
Toward the end of 2011, the influx of small-scale rescuers moving dogs into Rhode Island could no longer be ignored because officials like Marshall were seeing the result of what people like Cotopolis would call the thirty percent of rescuers cutting corners, or simply not knowing any better, as they tried to save as many dogs as possible. Cases of canine parvovirus in Rhode Island started to increase beyond anything Marshall or his predecessor had ever seen. Parvo is highly contagious, swiftly debilitating, and expensive to treat, creating vomiting and diarrhea that almost always require veterinary hospitalization and intravenous fluids. It’s also tough to kill the germs that linger wherever a puppy with parvo has been, which is how a single case can spread like a wildfire after a drought. If a single infected puppy is placed inside a car with a dozen healthy puppies and then driven eight or twelve hours in the close quarters, not only can all of those dogs be exposed, but so can the next batch of a dozen dogs who travel in the same car, and the next batch after that. Parvo has an incubation period, on average, of four to five days, which means the healthy puppies may look just fine when they arrive at the end of the line and get handed over to families. They can be put into homes where they play with other dogs, including more puppies who may not be fully vaccinated, with nobody even realizing that they carry the virus for the better part of a week.
At the end of 2011, Marshall says, parvo cases in Rhode Island shot to unprecedented levels. Calls flooded into his office from veterinarians. “We went from two or three cases a year to two or three cases a week,” he says, “and every time we traced it, it was a rescue group.”
That’s why New England states including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have begun to pass emergency orders and regulations trying to standardize the way small-scale rescues operate. The effort is especially prevalent in the region because it’s where so many of the rescued dogs end up right now in the United States—making New England the canary in the coal mine of the broader transport phenomenon. State animal health officials started to demand things like quarantine periods for every dog entering a given state, to ensure the pups coming in were disease-free, and nowadays are even working to institute regulations for temperament testing in Massachusetts, after officials there started receiving an increasing number of reports about newly adopted dogs who bit their owners after being advertised as friendly, without any type of behavior checks and balances in place.
In October 2013, New England lawmakers again went on high alert after a nine-week-old puppy from Georgia was transported to a rescue group in New York before being adopted by a family in Vermont, where the seemingly happy, healthy pooch quickly fell ill and died. The puppy had bitten her new owner the day before, so the law required a rabies test—which, to everyone’s surprise, came back positive. The rescue group said it had mistakenly provided paperwork stating the puppy had been vaccinated, when in fact no rabies shot had been given. Vermont officials said it was the first case of rabies in a domestic dog since 1994, and as a result, at least fifteen people had to undergo precautionary rabies shots.
Despite such incidents—and in an ironic twist nearly on the level of a Shakespeare
an tragedy—a fair number of rescue advocates have reacted to every proposed New England rule in almost exactly the same way southwest Missouri’s puppy farmers reacted to Proposition B. They’re drawing hard lines and screaming that regulators are unfairly trying to put them out of business.
“It’s as if they’re saying purebred dogs carry less disease than mixed-breed. It’s ridiculous. It’s discriminatory,” one rescue advocate told the Warwick Beacon in Rhode Island. “The barbarians are at the gate,” one blogger writing under the byline Jim Crow Dogs warned of Rhode Island’s efforts to oversee small-scale rescuers in 2012. That author might as well have been State Representative Bill Reiboldt of Missouri talking about HSUS.
And the tougher Rhode Island threatened to get, the more rescue groups from Providence to Newport began urging their supporters to call the state government and complain, so they could continue business as usual and save as many dogs as possible. The situation for people like Marshall in New England became stunningly similar to the one faced by officials trying to oversee breeders in the Midwest. He had to figure out a way to enact enforceable regulations without driving even more people dealing in dogs to take their operations wholly underground.
The noise surrounding small-scale rescuers, like the melee involving so-called puppy mills, is now becoming so cacophonous in some parts of America that the federal government is starting to take notice. In September 2013, the USDA closed what had become known as the “Internet loophole” in the federal Animal Welfare Act, which regulated breeders but not pet stores. Large-scale breeders had started selling pups over the Internet and arguing that they, like pet stores, were retail operations and thus should not have to endure federal inspections as breeders. Nothing had actually changed at the kennels; the only thing that was new was a website with a “click to buy” button. The 2013 rule put a stop to that end-around, at least on paper, to ensure that commercial breeders requiring inspections remained on the federal list.
As of this writing, the USDA hasn’t yet instituted any rules that treat small-scale rescue groups the same way as breeders engaged in interstate commerce, but Marshall expects that to change because, generally speaking, the financial transaction now taking place between rescue groups and dog adopters is the same as what happens between breeders and dog buyers. A person goes online and agrees to buy a dog, and the dog is transported after money is exchanged.
“I think rescues, in their mind, they said it wasn’t a sale,” Marshall explains. “It was an adoption fee. Well, you can call it what you want, but you’re not going to get that dog unless you pay a fee, so the USDA is starting to see it as a transaction.”
For dog lovers who simply want to buy a pup from a responsible source, the distinctions among breeders and rescuers are becoming fuzzier as rescue groups gain a bigger and bigger piece of the industry pie. Laws are being passed in more and more US cities banning pet stores from selling purebreds, under the theory that those dogs start out in puppy mills, while allowing pet stores to sell dogs marketed by adoption groups, which, in some cases, may be operating with less regulatory oversight than the breeders.
“What’s happening is a paradigm shift. People still want puppies. The brick-and-mortar pet store, at least in New England, is being replaced with the virtual pet store, which is Petfinder.com,” Marshall says. “Rescues have created an us-versus-them mentality. They say, ‘Get the dogs from us, not the pet stores, because they work with puppy mills.’ I think those lines are very blurred, and now with the Internet, the middlemen are being eliminated. Dog breeders are going to end up selling to the rescues because it’s more profitable for them both, and people are going to be getting their puppy mill puppies from the rescues.”
That concept may sound totally down the rabbit hole, twisted up like some kind of Alice in Wonderland nightmare, but Marshall has the right idea—just the wrong verb tense. The scenario of rescuers buying from large-scale puppy farms is not coming in the future. It’s happening now.
Remember the rescuers at the dog auction in Missouri paying to buy the dogs out of the system, with cuts of the money going to the dog auctioneer and the dog farmer alike? Those dogs are being transported from America’s puppy mill capital for sale to eager families not far from Marshall’s office in New England. They are marketed as having been rescued, in cash transactions called adoptions instead of sales. Dog lovers from Manhattan to Maine can’t get enough of them.
If all shelters were actually shelters—places of refuge that helped and healed dogs, and found them new homes—there would be no need for nonprofit rescue groups. Put another way, some of the people taking tax dollars as salary and saying they’re handling the problem are far too often choosing to solve it in slaughterhouse style. Many shelters are great, but in more than a few, the statistics can be truly shocking. In some taxpayer-funded facilities across America, the kill rates are as high as 95 percent unless the nonprofit rescue groups step in, with even friendly, healthy puppies killed, legally, inside of seventy-two hours in some states. The leading cause of death for healthy dogs in the United States is not car accidents or dogfighting, but instead shelter killing, a fact that, if it were about disease, would be treated as an epidemic.
The growing movement against shelter killing in America is being led by Nathan Winograd, a Stanford Law School graduate and former deputy district attorney who now levels prosecutorial cases against shelters and animal welfare groups alike if they fail to put dogs’ lives first. He spent the early 2000s working as executive director of an SPCA in upstate New York, where he reduced killing by 75 percent, and disease and kennel deaths by more than 90 percent, and where he took the shelter’s budget from a $124,000 annual deficit to a $23,000 surplus. In 2004, he founded the No Kill Advocacy Center, which gives shelters and nonprofit rescue groups the resources and education they need to follow the same plan he used, involving everything from spay/neuter initiatives to new ways of working with nonprofit groups and lawmakers. As of this writing, more than five hundred communities across America have achieved no-kill status, which means they’re saving at least 90 percent of the dogs and, in some cases, up to 99 percent. No-kill does not mean never kill, but it does mean caring for and rehoming every dog who is truly savable, except for those with incurable disease or viciousness—what most dog lovers believe the definition of a shelter should be.
“Killing in the face of alternatives of which you are not aware, but should be, is unforgivable,” Winograd wrote in the 2007 book Redemption (also the name of his 2014 documentary film). “It would be like a doctor who refuses to keep pace with the changing field of medicine, treating pneumonia with leeches instead of rest, antibiotics and fluid therapy. Killing in the face of alternatives you simply refuse to implement, or about which you remain willfully ignorant, is nothing short of obscene.”
This same attitude, more and more often, is being embraced around the globe as dog lovers demand better for pooches of all stripes. With so many small-scale rescuers showing that homes can, indeed, be found for the vast majority of dogs, people are starting to realize that, yet again, they may have been duped by those in control of the marketing message, that the notion of “too many dogs” is nothing more than an excuse for failure inside taxpayer-funded facilities. By the late 1990s in India, the cities of Delhi, Chennai, and Jaipur had adopted no-kill strategies, and the entire country was working toward the goal as of 2005. Italy banned the killing of healthy, friendly dogs in 2001. In Catalonia, whose capital city is Barcelona, dogs used to have ten days until lethal injection and few made it out alive—until the region became Spain’s first to ban killing as a method of animal control, in 2003. In Portugal, the Liga Portuguesa dos Direitos do Animal has a legal office and is trying to encourage no-kill principles. On the island of Kyushu in Japan, where the city of Kumamotu has a human population of nearly 750,000, the Kumamotu City Animal Welfare Center has been striving toward no-kill since 2001, when a new director took over. Between then and now, the killing has been reduced from
hundreds of animals a year to fewer than ten.
In Monmouth County, New Jersey, which has a coastal edge and is best-known as having been walloped by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the SPCA made the switch fifteen years ago and has since become a study in how to push the concept to new levels. MCSPCA was founded in 1945, and between then and the late 1990s, the practices were all too familiar. The current president and CEO, Jerry Rosenthal, doesn’t like to talk about the number of pups who came in and never made it out, but it was high. “They were killing a lot of dogs,” he says. “It was standard.”
During the early 1990s, MCSPCA started holding spay/neuter clinics, being proactive about keeping unwanted puppies from being born and abandoned in the first place. That inspired a change of philosophy, which was officially put into effect in 1999. Today, MCSPCA is finding homes for about three thousand animals a year, about 750 of which are dogs (the rest are primarily cats and kittens). For dogs, the facility’s save rate was 97 percent as of late 2014, with sixty-four staff members and about three hundred volunteers running the operation on an annual budget of $4.3 million, every last penny of it generated by private donations and adoption fees, which range from about $180 for most dogs to about $400 for puppies younger than six months. There’s no time limit for a dog’s stay, and the only reason a dog would be euthanized is severe illness or behavioral problems that lead to biting, even after months of trying to resolve them. “We will have the ‘tough sells’ here for a year, and we can get them out,” Rosenthal says. “It’s a great thing we do, but it costs money, about six dollars a day for each dog.”