Rescue Road

by Peter Zheutlin

  When he’s on the road, Greg is effectively working a twenty-four-hour day for six straight days. Even when he’s catching a few hours’ sleep in the trailer with the dogs, he’s on duty. That’s a 144-hour workweek, and he makes the trip every other week. When he’s home, he works an average of sixty to eighty hours a week. All told, that’s more than four hundred hours a month. When you do the math, he’s making less—significantly less—than minimum wage, even when he has a full load.

  “I could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald’s,” he acknowledges. If he didn’t love the work, if he weren’t on a mission, it would make absolutely no sense—no financial sense anyway. “My salary is whatever is left over after expenses,” Greg tells me. “In the first three months of 2014, because of repairs and light loads, I didn’t make a dollar. But the restaurant business taught me to live with the ups and downs.”

  One of those downs came a few years ago, when his previous tractor, purchased new for $67,000, turned out to be a lemon and brought him to the edge of bankruptcy. One day, as Adella was heading to the grocery store, Greg gave her the bad news he’d been concealing for too long. The checking account was empty and all three credit cards were maxed out. They were dead broke. Adella was so stunned, she had to hold on to the kitchen counter for support. Then, Kathy Wetmore, the founder of Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue, stepped in, paid $7,000 from her own pocket for that clutch repair he charged in Mississippi to keep Greg on the road, and Greg and Adella recovered.

  Greg may not care about money for himself, but to keep the truck rolling and to keep saving dogs, he has to think about the bottom line because he doesn’t have deep pockets to finance the operation himself. Though Rescue Road Trips is a limited liability corporation, not a charity, he gratefully accepts donations. I have seen a few adopters hand him a gratuity, but he doesn’t do any active fund-raising.

  One of the reasons the Mondays he starts a trip are so stressful is that the size of the load is still in flux and will remain in flux until the last dog boards later in the week. The stakes are high. Will he have enough dogs on board to cover costs? If there’s a late cancellation, he refunds his fee, which strikes me as overly generous since he can’t always fill a slot at the last minute. On some trips, the cancellation rate can be 10 percent, which can mean losing more than $1,000 in business if he’s unable to fill those vacancies. “It’s just the way I was brought up,” Greg says. “If I don’t do the job, I don’t want the money.”

  He also has future costs to think about. Though he’s only had the current trailer for two years—in addition to the $20,000 he paid for it, the trailer needed about $7,000 in retrofits to make it usable for transporting dogs—it’s near the end of its useful life. It’s a former race-car trailer, not one made for repeated longhaul trucking. Greg wants to replace it with something called a “Kentucky double-drop” trailer. A used Kentucky double runs around $18,000, but by the time it’s retrofitted for transporting dogs, the cost could easily double. Greg’s unofficial, pro bono engineer-in-chief is John Bradley of Connecticut. John’s wife, Sue, is a regular volunteer at Greg’s Rocky Hill, Connecticut, drop-off point. It was John who helped Greg find the tractor in Vermont, and it’s John who advises Greg on how to squeeze more miles from the current trailer until he can afford another.

  When Greg claims not to give a whit about money, he means what he says and says what he means. In fact, that’s true about Greg in general. Ask him a question and you’ll get a thoughtful, direct answer. With Greg, the bullshit quotient is exactly zero.

  • • •

  By late afternoon we’re making our way past miles and miles of cornfields on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The land is flat and the billboards are filled with ominous, religious messages. “If You Died Today, Where Would You Spend Eternity?” and “Hell Is Real” are two that catch my eye.

  We’ve only been on the road two hours and Greg is already missing Adella “like crazy,” and second-guessing his interactions with Connor during the week he was home. “I wasn’t patient enough with him,” he says to me. “I didn’t spend enough time with him. I have to do better with him.”

  He’s also a little miffed at Keri Toth, for whom he’s transported dogs for years from Louisiana. He adores Keri, but she works so hard and cares so much, she’s often scrambling at the last minute to figure out how many dogs she’ll be sending up and that wreaks havoc on Greg’s ability to manage the reservations.

  But he’s over some of the anxiety that often causes him to throw up before he leaves. “It’s the stress of everything. I hate leaving my family. I worry: Will Tommy show up? Will the trailer be okay? Are the reservations in order? It’s not one thing; it’s everything. It’s a good week when I don’t throw up.” Greg will remain tense to a greater or lesser degree, however, until Friday night, when he arrives in Allentown. Getting the dogs safely to their new homes weighs just as heavily on him as his love for his family.

  “By Friday nights, the dogs and I have become a unit, a pack,” he tells me. “We’re safely out of the South, and if something happens to me or the trailer, we’re close enough, so they’ll still get to their forever homes one way or another. I know they’re all going to make it and I can exhale.”

  • • •

  Soon, Riverfront Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Reds, comes into view on the left. Tommy is still behind the wheel, and the ride is punctuated by phone calls in and out. As we roll across the Kentucky line at six thirty in the evening, Greg calls Adella using his hands-free headset and asks her to pass along some pick-up information to an adopter. There are calls about cancellations, new reservations, and pleas to make room for just one more dog. When you run on the thin margins Greg does, every reservation and cancellation matters, so you take the calls.

  As I listen and observe all this, one thing becomes clear: the rig isn’t just a way to transport dogs; every other week, it becomes Greg’s office, his home, and his mission. When there are dogs in the trailer, the truck is attended by Greg or Tommy every minute; to ensure the dogs are always supervised and safe, they won’t even go into a truck stop restroom at the same time.

  In between phone calls, Greg gives me a little tutorial on the details of dog transport. Every dog needs a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) health certificate signed by a licensed veterinarian. Greg, too, has to have a USDA license to transport animals and a U.S. Department of Transportation interstate commerce license. Though the USDA permits dogs as young as eight weeks to be transported if accompanied by the mother, Greg has stricter rules: dogs must be twelve weeks old and have three rounds of shots for parvovirus (a highly contagious canine virus) and distemper (also a virus). They must be heartworm negative (though the tests aren’t always 100 percent accurate), negative for bordetella (kennel cough), and have a negative fecal exam.

  He also talks, as he often does, about the people in canine rescue whose faces you never see and whose names you’ll never know. His sister, Cathy, for example, the founder of Labs4rescue, the organization that united us with Albie, saves countless dogs she never sees or touches. With her husband, Harvey, they spend countless hours reviewing adoption applications, organizing field volunteers who pull dogs from shelters for adoption through Labs4rescue, organizing home visits, and navigating the bureaucracies in the various states where they are placing dogs.

  “We are all cogs in a wheel in rescue,” Greg explains. “Everyone has a role to play.” Though he’s had his share of publicity lately because he’s the lucky guy who gets to play Santa on Gotcha Day, he’s aware he’s just one small part in a much larger movement and is quick to give credit to others. “You can’t be in this for praise or glory. I’m in it because I want to see the dogs and pat their heads. Cathy and Harvey don’t get to do that, but their jobs are so important. The shelter manager who gives a dog just a few more days, hoping someone will adopt him, is important. The veterinarians and vet techs who provide free care are important. My mother-in-law who cleans the trailer, she�
�s important. John Bradley, who does the engineering, he’s important. The angels that show up in Birmingham, Allentown, and Rocky Hill, they’re all important. No one’s job is any more important than anyone else’s. It takes a hundred people playing their roles to save a dog. The adopter is the last link in the chain. That’s why I thank each adopter for saving a life.”

  The especially hard work, though, is done by the people who pull dogs from high-kill shelters, patrol rural Dumpsters and city streets where dogs are often abandoned or where they congregate looking for scraps, or intervene when there’s hoarding or a dog-fighting situation and find sixty or seventy dogs living in terrible conditions in a squalid home. When Greg first got into canine rescue transport, he was sometimes picking dogs up directly at city and county shelters. Now, because he’s transporting so many dogs, there are central pickup points: in Alexandria, for example, a Pizza Hut parking lot next to veterinary clinic that cares for many of the dogs going on Greg’s transport is the pick-up point. In Lafayette, it’s the shelter operated by Lafayette Animal Aid, a humane organization. In Hammond, Louisiana, it’s another veterinary clinic.7

  As he describes some of the horrors he’s seen, I pay close attention. I’m trying to prepare myself for the weeks ahead, when I’m going to spend time with the people doing the really heart-wrenching work, often deciding which dogs to save and which will be left behind.

  “At some shelters,” he tells me, “county prisoners do the labor and use high-power hoses to clean the cages.” Many have large drains, Greg explains. “Sometimes, I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, they’ll wash puppies right down the drain. I’ve seen some facilities where they’ll back a truck up to a sealed-in space where they have the dogs and run the exhaust until they’re all asphyxiated.

  “I saw hope in the eyes of the older dogs who were about to die,” Greg says. “The puppies are less expressive. Sometimes they throw dogs into the gas chambers on top of the dead ones, and still they look at you with hope.8 I don’t know if they know it’s a gas chamber, but even when the door closes, they’re still looking at you with hope. And I’ve even seen dogs piled into a drum and burned with diesel fuel in Georgia and then they just stir it a bit with a pole.

  “There are puppies being killed by the thousands,” he adds. “Some people look at them and see a disease-carrying animal to be gotten rid of. Black dogs have it the worst, because they’re less popular.” For reasons that are unclear, black dogs are the hardest to place in adoptive homes, yet they are just as sweet and loving as any others. It’s a bias without justification, but a harsh reality nonetheless.

  Greg is still haunted by the faces of some of the dogs he saw going to their deaths years ago.

  “I still see the little Chihuahua who was looking up at me from behind the bars,” he says. “The dogs know something awful is going to happen, and they’re howling and barking and crying, and this little dog looked up silently at me, right at my eyes. I told him ‘I can’t help you,’ and I think he knew I was his last hope. He just laid his head on the ground. He understood me. I will never in my life forget that Chihuahua.”

  At that moment, Greg faced a dilemma all rescuers who pull dogs from shelters face: deciding who will live and who will die. It’s an excruciating experience but a reality in the grim math of rescue. The number of dogs is simply overwhelming, and you can’t take them all, even though you want to. I think of the sign we passed a few miles back: “Hell Is Real.” Now I believe it.

  Greg doesn’t pick up directly at shelters now. He’s become more organized and more efficient, as has the entire rescue movement. In the old days, Greg was “scooping up dogs” everywhere and saw more of the shelter world; now, by the time the dogs are picked up, they’ve been moved to safety by dedicated people doing really hard work. Still, my sense is that these horrific images of the past are a big part of what binds him to his mission.

  “My goal,” he says, “is simply to get dogs north [to their adoptive homes] as soon as possible.”

  • • •

  Why so many southern dogs? There are several reasons. First and foremost—especially in the rural South but to some degree in more urban areas too—there is no strong culture of spaying and neutering dogs. Some people avoid it because they feel it deprives dogs, especially males, of one of life’s pleasures. But this means a large number of their dogs’ offspring may be destined for lives of deprivation. They may be left to fend for themselves, die by a road, or end up in a shelter to be euthanized because the owners don’t have the resources or any interest in taking care of them. That’s a high price to pay for a dog’s sexual pleasure. Many dogs, even those with owners, also live outside, where they can wander and mate freely, creating more offspring that people don’t want.

  Another reason for the high number of shelter dogs from the South is that in many parts of the South, dogs aren’t seen as companion animals, as they mostly are in the North, but rather as livestock or property. If they are supposed to fulfill a function—as a hunting dog, for example, or a guard dog—but prove ill-suited for the task, they are simply abandoned or worse. And there’s a lot of backyard breeding, people hoping to make a few dollars peddling puppies. If they can’t sell the puppies, they abandon them. It’s a deeply rooted and complex cultural and social problem we will explore further.

  To be sure, there are lost, abandoned, and abused dogs that need homes in every state, but the problem is far more acute in southern states. There’s no influx of dogs from Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, to Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana, and no transports such as Greg’s filled with dogs heading south from the North. The reason is simple. The oversupply is in the South and the demand is up north. Transporting rescue dogs to the South would be like delivering coal to Newcastle.

  • • •

  As we roll along, it’s hard for me to imagine the monotony of driving the same 4,200-mile route every other week. How many times has Greg noted the sign that says “Louisville 100 miles” and passed the next two hours waiting for Louisville to come into view only to count down the 175 miles from Louisville to Nashville? How many times has he pulled into the same Flying J truck stop, had a cup of coffee from the same place, and passed the same hillsides and cornfields?

  The land gets hillier in Kentucky, and for a while we drive in silence, the radio tuned to a country music station. For some reason I’d forgotten in the months since I first rode with Greg from Allentown to Putnam, to write the Parade piece, how rough the ride is in the cab of a big rig. Driving five hundred miles in a truck like this is far more tiring and punishing than five hundred miles in a car. Even for a passenger, the relentless jostling is exhausting, like being in a plane in continuous turbulence. It’s why my notes look like they were written by an especially jittery five-year-old.

  The traffic has been light all afternoon and early evening, and the weather clear, so we’re making good time. Greg announces we’ll make it past Bowling Green and push on past Nashville. Better to stop on the farside of it, so we don’t have to deal with rush hour traffic going into the city in the morning. It’s 7:00 p.m. when we eat the first of Adella’s sandwiches.

  • • •

  Greg’s in the mood to vent a little about the pressures he’s under, especially now that word has been spreading about him and his organization. People have started to see him as some sort of savior for every lost canine soul on the planet.

  “I get calls all the time like, ‘I’ve got a dog and I have to give him away and no one will take him and you’re his last hope. If you don’t take him, I’ll have to bring him to the shelter,’” Greg says. “People try to guilt me into taking their dogs all the time. People email me pictures to try and get me to take their dogs. I can’t take all these dogs! I wish I could, but I don’t have the right place to put them all.”

  He’s inundated with requests, and his natural instinct is to want to help everyone. He feels beleaguered, but only a man frustrated that he can’t respond favorably t
o every request would feel that way. If he didn’t care, the requests rolling in would keep on rolling, right off his back.

  • • •

  By 8:00 p.m. we’re on the ring road around Louisville and merge onto Interstate 65 South, headed for Nashville. Half an hour later, Greg calls Connor. Before he left, Greg hid some whoopie pies in a drawer for Connor’s dessert. Now he tells him to go look in the drawer to discover the treat. It’s just a small way of staying connected when he can’t be home.

  We’re traveling along a stretch of highway dubbed the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and pass signs directing people to the distilleries of some of the most famous names in whiskey: Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark among them. Dusk has settled over the increasingly hilly terrain as we pass the exits for Fort Knox and Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in Hodgenville.

  As nightfall nears, Tommy pulls the truck over and switches places with Greg. Tommy’s driven us 310 miles; Greg will take us past Nashville.

  • • •

  As we approach the western half of the state, the clock drops back one hour. We’re now in the central time zone. Greg drives us about 150 miles until we stop for the night at an enormous truck stop in Fairview, Tennessee. We’ve come 457 miles from Zanesville. There appear to be more than a hundred tractor-trailers parked in rows in the expansive parking lot, their engines idling. Parking is on a first-come, first-served basis, but there’s no fee to spend the night; truck stops make money selling fuel, food, and truck repair services.

  Within five minutes of slipping the rig into its parking space, Greg is in his bunk in the trailer, fast asleep. Tommy is in the bunk in the cab, and I am spreading out my sleeping bag on the unforgiving floor between the two rows of empty kennels. Except for the sound of the air conditioner, it’s eerily quiet. Without windows, it’s like being in a submarine, seemingly cut off from the outside world. The generators send gentle vibrations through the trailer as I lie awake thinking about the dogs that will soon be joining us.