For example, the Alexandria shelter, where Albie spent several months and where Keri pulls many dogs, serves Rapides and Grant Parishes, which have a combined population of 155,000 people. In 2013, it took in 3,499 dogs, of which 87 percent (3,041) were euthanized, according to official data provided by the city.
By comparison, the state of New Jersey has a population of nearly nine million people, fifty-eight times that of Rapides and Grant Parishes. Yet, according to the New Jersey Department of Health, its twenty-one county shelters impounded a total 33,538 dogs in 2013, just ten times the number impounded in Alexandria, of which only 13 percent, 4,509, were put down. One reason for this disparity is that with such a large population, there are many more potential adopters in highly populated states such as New Jersey and far fewer dogs impounded relative to the size of the population.
And it’s not just Louisiana. Maddie’s Fund, a California-based family foundation devoted to the well-being of companion animals, has assembled dog impoundment and euthanasia data from various states and counties around the country. In Mobile County, Alabama, in 2012, for example, nearly nine thousand dogs were taken into shelters with approximately four thousand euthanized (44 percent), almost as many as were euthanized in the entire state of New Jersey in 2013. Yet, Mobile County has a population of roughly four hundred thousand people, less than 5 percent of the population of New Jersey. In Monroe County, Tennessee, population forty-five thousand, nearly three thousand dogs were taken in at the shelter in 2012, one for every fifteen people, and roughly one thousand were euthanized. Again, a single county with a population one–two hundredth the size of New Jersey’s took in about one-tenth the number of dogs and euthanized almost a quarter the number. This would be like New Jersey shelters taking in six hundred thousand dogs and euthanizing two hundred thousand of them.
Even more shocking perhaps is the estimated number of stray dogs living on the streets of Houston, one of the nation’s largest cities. The city and rescue groups agree it’s about 1.2 million. No northern city has a canine overpopulation problem anywhere near that scale. The entire city of New York (with a human population of eight million) took in just over fifteen thousand dogs in 2012. Detroit has been estimated to have a stray dog population of fifty thousand, though a 2014 study put the number as low as three thousand.
There are other nonsouthern states where the problem is serious, though still not as serious by the numbers as in the South. For example, in 2012, in four northern California counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, and Santa Clara) with a combined population of 5.3 million people, a little more than half the population of New Jersey, the shelters took in about forty thousand dogs and euthanized about 25 percent. A little over sixty thousand dogs were taken into Maricopa, Arizona, shelters in 2012 and about one-third were euthanized. The county includes the Phoenix metropolitan area and has a population around four million, one of the most populous counties in the United States.
Yes, there are dogs in need of homes everywhere, and the overpopulation problem isn’t confined to the South, but the problem is especially critical there.
• • •
“There’s a lack of value placed on pets here,” Dr. Haas tells me during a conversation at her clinic during which she chooses her words carefully. “I don’t want to say ignorance, but there’s a lack of knowledge about responsible pet ownership. It has changed since I came to this area to practice in 1988. Back then you could go to the shelter and get a dog for five dollars and a cat for three with no background check and no requirement that the animal be spayed or neutered. As the area has grown and people have come from other parts of the country, values have started to shift. But for a lot of people, if they have a sick animal, they’d just as soon spend fifteen cents on a bullet than take it to the vet. The animal is an object that’s disposable.
“These attitudes get passed down generation to generation, and isn’t just animals,” adds Dr. Haas. “I have clients who stopped coming here because of Mr. Robin.” Mr. Robin, the vet tech, is African American. “They don’t even want him to touch their animals. If you can’t respect people who are different from you, you won’t respect animals. It’s very hard to change a culture, even a culture of pet ownership. I have a client who has no qualms about buying a female dog to breed it with his male so he can get one male puppy to keep. He kills the other pups and sells the mother. As the male puppy ages, he’ll do the same thing again. This is the mentality of many people here.”
Keri and Dr. Haas agree the only thing that can change the culture is education. Dr. Haas sees that as part of her mission: to educate clients one at a time about responsible pet ownership.
“If I don’t teach them, how can I expect them to be responsible pet owners?” she asks. “It’s a one-person-at-a-time effort. I see people coming in with their pets who used to come in with their parents as children, and now they are teaching their own children how to be responsible. It takes time, generations, to change deep-seated attitudes.”
For Keri’s part, she wants to find the time to develop a program she calls C.A.R.E. (Caring for Animals Responsibly through Education), modeled on the drug education program D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). She envisions partnering with local sheriffs’ departments, which have animal control jurisdiction, to bring programs into the schools to teach children about responsible pet ownership.19
“We have to change the culture,” she says. “Animals have feelings, just as we do. We need to teach children that they feel hurt, pain, hunger, and love; they are not just a piece of property.”
She envisions a program where the kids “graduate” and earn a certificate, something to instill pride and life lessons they may forget in their adolescent years but to which they will return as adults. “You can’t just crucify; you have edify,” she says. “And when you do, those people will become your best allies.
“Right now we’re just so focused on getting as many dogs out, we haven’t been able to focus on the education part,” adds Keri. Hopefully, that will change once she has finalized the merger with Sara Kelly’s CenLa Alliance for Animals. Until then, she and everyone else involved in rescue in Louisiana is on a hamster wheel trying to save as many dogs as they can.
• • •
Later in the day, Keri, Greta, and I set out again for rural Grant Parish. Only twenty thousand people live here and household trash disposal is rudimentary. At dozens of locations around the parish, sometimes down remote dirt roads, sometimes by the side of main roads, there are clusters of small Dumpsters where residents throw their trash. Nothing is sorted: newspapers, plastics, household chemicals, paints, garbage, and organic material—it’s all disposed of together. Stray dogs and cats often scavenge at these sites; too often puppies and kittens, dead or alive, are thrown into them too. We’re going to see if there are any animals in need of rescue.
As we drive, I ask Keri about her faith. I’m curious to know if her rescue work is faith driven in any way. Though her father was a Southern Baptist preacher, Keri considers herself a nondenominational person of faith.
“Rescue work is degrading work in a way,” she says, referring to spending long hours in poop-smeared clothes and walking through redolent dumpsites in search of dogs and cats. “But in Genesis it says we were put here to take care of the animals. Why did God create Adam? To take care of the animals. This is part of my calling.”
As we step out of the car at the first of four Dumpster sites we’re going to check for strays, the stench of fish rotting in the hot Louisiana sun is thick. Keri already has her hands full with all the dogs at Diana’s, but in her heart, there’s always room for more. She knows strays forage at these sites, and she can’t bear the thought of ignoring them. At every site, there are dead fish dumped on the ground, some still intact, some nearly rotted away. Keri surmises local fishermen leave them for the dogs and cats they know scavenge the areas.
As Keri wanders into the brush, meowing and clicking her tongue, hoping to lur
e shy animals out from the underbrush, Greta and I peer into each Dumpster to see if there are any dogs or cats inside. We find nothing and begin to wander into some of the nearby brush ourselves when I ask a question I immediately regret.
“Are there snakes?”
“Oh, for sure,” answers Greta. “Keep an eye out. There are rattlesnakes, copperheads, and coral snakes.”
Coral snakes? I remember reading they are one of the most venomous snakes found in North America. Now, instead of scanning the brush forty yards away for stray dogs, I’m scanning the grass four feet in front my shoes for snakes.
Finding nothing at the first site—no dogs, no cats, no snakes—we move on. At the second, there are signs of dogs living nearby. Someone has placed a small dog bed in the underbrush and a bowl filled with water. The sun-bleached spine of a long-dead unidentified animal, about two feet long, sits nearby.
Though Keri says they almost always find dogs and cats during their Dumpster dives, today we strike out. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. Truth be told, I found myself peering into about two-dozen Dumpsters with trepidation, half hoping we might be able to rescue a distressed dog, half hoping we’d find nothing because I wasn’t sure I could bear the sight.
• • •
After our Dumpster foray, we head for the Grant Parish dog pound in Colfax. Strays picked up by one of the two parish animal control officers are brought here. The facility—if one can call it that—isn’t even a shelter: it’s two small open-air pens with concrete floors enclosed by chain-link fencing. The only protection from the weather is a couple of portable kennels and an igloo-shaped play structure. The floor of the pen on the left has recently been hosed down, but the one on the right is filthy. There are about two-dozen dogs in all, with males and females, puppies and older dogs mixed together, including five black Lab puppies about ten weeks old. As I gaze around the dismal area, it’s clear to me infection control here would be impossible, and puppies tend to carry infectious diseases, such as parvovirus and distemper. Parvovirus, or parvo for short, is an infectious disease spread through direct or indirect contact with feces. It’s common in puppies, especially those living in close, dirty conditions like this. Distemper is a highly contagious viral airborne disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract, respiratory tract, brain, and spinal cord. Both are easily preventable with vaccines but can be deadly if contracted and left untreated.20 Ideally you’d segregate the puppies and vaccinate them. But there’s no medical treatment here, unless Keri and Greta do it themselves. And unspayed females and unneutered males aren’t segregated either. This is about as rudimentary as shelters get.
Keri and Greta tell me the left pen is vastly improved from their last visit; then there were puppies with parvo (the signs are obvious, including bloody diarrhea and vomiting) mixed with healthy dogs and filth everywhere. That the floor has at least been washed with a high-pressure hose is a small victory.
Keri has phoned ahead, and one of the two Grant Parish animal control officers, Bert, meets us there and I learn the facility is monitored by the officers but not staffed. Bert seems friendly and well-meaning, and Keri and Greta have been working to encourage modest improvements in how the dogs are cared for. The problem is Bert is manifestly overweight and the other officer is disabled. So neither is really up to the physical work required to keep pens clean and manage the dogs.
As we chat, Keri’s sixth sense tells her something is amiss in the one small portable kennel in the filthy pen, and she walks along the fence to get a better view. Upon discovering there’s a dead dog inside, she tells Bert, who takes a look and promises to take care of it.
My sense is she’s not at all surprised about the dead dog. Keri has seen enough animal suffering and death to sometimes be matter-of-fact about it, as she is now, though she is often on the verge of tears when she sees an animal in distress. Thankfully, I can’t see inside the kennel from where I’m standing and I choose not to look. I’m still taken aback by the filth and primitiveness of the whole facility. It seems as though we’ve stumbled into a poverty-stricken Third World village.
Another of the dogs appears to have motor oil on its back. “The redneck way of treating mange,” says Keri.
In the left pen, Greta spots a dog she is sure is a sister to one of her fosters, Handley, a beagle mix. The age, coloring, gait, and overall appearance are nearly identical and Handley was also a stray found in this area.
Any dog not claimed by its owner here will be sent to the Alexandria shelter to be put down, so Keri and Greta take as many dogs that appear adoptable as they can from the Colfax pound. They tell Bert they’ll be back the next day to get the dog that appears to be Handley’s sister (which Greta will foster) and one other; if Keri weren’t leaving on vacation, there are half a dozen she’d pull; take to Dr. Haas’s clinic to be dewormed, vaccinated, and started on heartworm preventive; and take home until she could find foster homes. She also tells Bert she’ll be bringing enough vaccines to begin treating all the dogs. Since none have health records, it’s impossible to know if any have ever been inoculated against the common canine viruses and rabies.
As we drive away Keri and Greta also make a plan to return with a large, flat shovel to clear the filth from the right pen, so they can hose it down and disinfect it as best they can. They also noted one of the females, a basset hound–rat terrier mix, was very pregnant, so they will buy some cedar chips at a pet supply so the mama at least has a soft place to deliver her pups. It’s not as if they don’t have a million other things to do, but this is how they roll: to see a problem involving desperate dogs is to do something about it. It’s as if they are compelled to act by some invisible force. They get nothing in return but the satisfaction of relieving a tiny piece of suffering in a large ocean of it. I’ve never seen two more selfless people at work.
• • •
On the drive back toward Pineville, Keri announces she’s resolved the quandary about the fifteen dogs returning in the morning from SpayNation. It’s not a perfect solution but it’ll work for the time being. She’s found a new foster for two, she and Greta will each take one and two will be boarded at Dr. Haas’s clinic. The other nine will go back to Diana’s, but Keri and Greta will spend a few hours cleaning up the pens first. When Keri gets back from vacation, they have a more ambitious plan for Diana’s: they are going to relocate the pens to a spot on the property with better drainage and have concrete floors poured (donated hopefully) because they can be cleaned and disinfected; the wooden pallets currently being used cannot.
“We can break the kennels down in three or four hours,” Greta tells me. “We know how to do it.” The word tireless comes to mind. I’m simply in awe of the way Keri and Greta constantly seem to take on more and more, and I’m humbled too. It’s far more than I’d ever be able to do, even though I’ve now seen firsthand the suffering of so many dogs here. I know they get exhausted and that the work can be so sad and depressing it takes a huge emotional toll too, but their reservoir of energy and resilience seems infinite. I can only marvel at it.
When you do the work Keri and Greta do, nothing surprises you anymore. The next day, they learn from Bert that, during the night, three puppies, presumably alive, were tossed over the fence at the Colfax pound into one of the pens. When Bert arrived for the morning check, all were dead. And a few days later, all of the black Lab puppies we’d seen there were also dead, victims of parvo. Such is the plight of countless dogs in Louisiana.
• • •
While I was back in Alexandria, Keri arranged for me to spend a day with Sara Kelly, with whom she is joining forces. She thought it would give me a broader view of the rescue work being done in central Louisiana. Historically, Sara’s organization, the CenLa Alliance for Animals (CAFA), wasn’t a rescue organization. Though it does limited rescue work now, the focus is on improving animal welfare through education, public awareness, and spay and neuter programs. Keri’s Humane Society of Central Louisiana is a re
scue organization pure and simple. The merged organizations will do both, giving Keri a platform for the education programs she knows are the only way rescue will cease to be an endless cycle that fails to address the underlying problem, and expanding CAFA’s mission to formally include rescue.
Because she’s constantly moving dogs around, and has two young daughters, Sydney, age four, and Campbell, age six, it almost goes without saying that Sara drives a large SUV with kennels in the back. Our first stop is going to be a suburban home near Alexandria, where Sara has someone fostering two heeler mix puppies that need vaccinations she will administer.
Sara, trim, fit, and in her early forties, was raised near Dallas, graduated from the University of Texas, and received her medical training in Iowa. Her specialty is emergency medicine. Her husband, Dan Oas, an orthopedic trauma surgeon, hails from Minnesota. In addition to serving as CAFA’s president and being a mom, she owns an urgent care center where she works, manages investment properties in Hawaii, and is developing a line of pet toys. She’s driven, organized, and determined, all useful traits when you multitask the way she does. She describes herself as a type A personality.
I tell Sara I was startled by a statistic on the CAFA website: one unspayed female dog and one unneutered male and their unspayed and unneutered offspring can produce sixty-seven thousand puppies in six years.
She explains how they’re trying to stop the rapidly spreading problem of overbreeding and overpopulation. “We partner with local vets to provide financial assistance to low income families so they can spay and neuter their pets and have them vaccinated,” Sara says. “This helps reduce euthanasia rates and the spread of preventable disease.”
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