Though CAFA, which Sara revitalized over the past couple of years, didn’t have rescue as part of its mission, in early 2013, she started pulling dogs and cats from the Alexandria shelter, the shelter where Albie spent four months. She sought Keri’s help placing the animals in forever homes. In her first year, CAFA facilitated six hundred rescues, mostly transfers to other rescue organizations doing direct adoptions, but some direct adoptions also, which Keri managed. For example, in 2014, CAFA started sending dogs to the Empty Shelter Project, a no-kill facility in Virginia that adopts them out. Sara and others meet staff from the project in Atlanta, where the dogs are transferred to vehicles that will take them to Virginia. One of the huge benefits for CAFA is that the Empty Shelter Project accepts healthy, unvaccinated dogs and unaltered dogs, bearing the costs of vaccinations and spaying and neutering.
“Keri and I hope the merger of our organizations will allow us to have a greater impact,” Sara tells me. “We have tremendous need here. We could fill Greg’s truck every trip if we had the resources to get the work done.”
• • •
When we arrive where the two female heeler mix puppies are, no one is home and Sara’s unable to get the keyless entry system to work. But we see the puppies in the yard through the fence. As puppies are wont to do, as soon as they see us, they can’t run fast enough to get to where we are standing. With the confident hand of an experienced physician, Sara reaches over and grabs the first puppy by the scruff of the neck with one hand. With the other, she reaches into a small bag with the vaccines, pops the tip of a syringe off with her teeth, and in a matter of seconds, the first puppy has received his third set of vaccines. She repeats the process with the second puppy. Now that they’ve had their third set of vaccines, the puppies can go on Greg’s transport as soon as adopting families, or a foster, can be found.
We’re back in the car within minutes, heading to a local veterinary clinic where two puppies Sara pulled from the Alexandria shelter are being treated for parvo. As we drive, Sara’s cell phone rings constantly: calls from her urgent care center, calls about dogs, calls about picking up the kids from school later in the day. Like Keri and Greta, Sara is a woman of action, and I’m beginning to get the sense that this is the way life in rescue is for everyone: long hours, endless demands, and equally endless energy.
“I don’t have time to do everything I do, but I do it anyway,” she says.
Sara’s love of animals began as a child, when she learned to ride horses, a skill she honed in competitions growing up.
“I started rescuing barn cats where I kept my horse as a kid,” she tells me. “And I’ve always had an affinity for the sick and the injured, which is why I became a doctor.” During her residency in Tulsa, she spent her off hours volunteering for a feral cat spay and neuter program that would trap, neuter, and release or adopt stray cats in the area.
Even with the merger of Sara’s organization and Keri’s, the challenges will remain the same. Neither organization has much in the way of financial nor human resources—Sara, Keri, and Greta will be the nucleus—and finding local foster homes will continue to be a chronic problem.
“We have some people who will take entire litters until they are old enough to travel,” Sara explains, “but typically people are only willing to take one or two at a time and will foster only once or twice.”
As we pull up to the veterinary clinic, Sara tells me about Tupak, a pit bull she rescued who is now being fostered by one of the vet techs here. “He was stabbed in the eye,” she tells me, “and we had to remove it. He was abandoned and alone. But he’s as sweet as they come, and now he’s a registered therapy dog.”
You hear countless stories like this when you spend time with rescue people; it’s remarkable how many dogs have suffered so much at the hands of humans but still are ready to love and trust us.
Inside the clinic we first visit Jake, an eight-week-old black Lab mix who has signs of parvo. Sara explains they don’t test for parvo; it’s so common in the area, they simply treat on the assumption the dog has the disease if it displays any symptoms at all, such as loose stools. Jake has another problem causing him to limp, an abscess on one of his rear legs. As Sara lifts him up, blood and pus ooze from his hindquarters.
The second puppy, which has no name, is a ten-week-old Lab mix, the only survivor from a litter of eight pulled from the Alexandria shelter. The others had parvo, and possibly distemper, and died from dehydration caused by diarrhea. Sara is fostering the mother at home and using an IV to keep the puppy hydrated. For so many of these poor pups, the road to a forever home is a very long one, if they are even lucky enough to survive.
• • •
Our next stop is the Alexandria shelter, a place I’ve wondered about ever since we adopted Albie. Albie lived here for several months before coming to us and was fortunate to have made it out alive. The euthanasia rate here is close to 90 percent. Sara is a regular visitor here and the shelter director, Henry Wimbley, allows her to vaccinate dogs she has identified as ones she wants to pull and adopt out. Now she’s arranged to let me walk through the shelter with her and to see where Albie was before he was saved.
There’s nothing foreboding about the facility, a one-story, mostly brick structure in a light industrial area, with a small lobby and a receptionist’s window. After a perfunctory greeting, Mr. Wimbley allows us to walk around freely, though he makes sure Sara doesn’t take me to see the crematorium. I presume the thinking is, “out of sight, out of mind.”
Every shelter has one thing in common: barking dogs. The stress of working under such conditions must be enormous. As we walk by the pens—cages really—most dogs, desperate for contact with anyone, leap at the bars or push their noses as far forward as they can, each seemingly competing for attention. Place your hand or finger nearby, and they are desperate for a human touch. Some will lie quietly, as if they’ve been through this a million times, and have surrendered all hope, which is equally devastating to see.
A public animal shelter is an inherently dispiriting place. The presence of a staff member or passerby is virtually the only stimulation the dogs get unless there are volunteers to walk them occasionally; their kennels or cages are bare concrete or wire mesh fenced enclosures. Almost uniformly among the shelters I visited, there are few toys, nothing to chew on, and nothing to do. For some, the tedium gets to be too much and they pace or run around in circles, as caged animals often do at zoos.
At Alexandria, some kennels are outdoors, under a roof but open on the sides. Others are inside. As we walk through, Sara checks on dogs she has identified for rescue by CAFA, reading the notations on the cards that are posted on each kennel, checking for dates of last vaccines. In some cases, she opens the door and administers a vaccine. She also looks at the cards of dogs she may want to pull to see when they were brought in, any remarks written by shelter staff, and any notations related to the dogs’ statuses. Sometimes dogs have been seized following complaints and are awaiting a court ruling on whether they can be returned to the owner. In others, the dog has been identified as a biter.
To my untrained eye, the shelter appears relatively clean, but as I learn from Sara, clean and sanitary are not the same thing.
“This shelter is a hot zone for parvo and distemper,” she tells me. “If you know a dog is sick, it should be isolated, and puppies should always be separated from the rest of the shelter population. If a puppy has disease symptoms, it shouldn’t share a kennel with any other puppy for three months. Workers should be decontaminated as they move from one section of the shelter to another because some are airborne diseases easily carried on workers’ boots, for example. Parvo can live in walls and hosing them down may make the place look cleaner but it’s not preventing the spread of disease. Viral particles are widely shared throughout the shelter. Everything here is intermingled.”
• • •
In 2005, Keri Toth was part of a team with the Protective Animal Welfare Society, the predecesso
r organization of Sara’s CAFA, that investigated euthanasia practices at the Alexandria shelter. Until recently, county prisoners, known as “trustees,” provided manual labor at the shelter, as they do at many shelters in Louisiana, and Keri recorded conversations with trustees who had worked there. According to Keri, they described the dogs being euthanized as held around the neck with a catchpole while the heart stick, a lethal intracardial injection, was administered. Some of those interviewed described scenes in which animals were put in the incinerator alive following failed heart stick administration and crying dogs and cats being drowned in buckets.
Opinions differ, even among those engaged in rescue work in and around Alexandria, about the way the shelter is run, whether enough is being done to lower the euthanasia rate (through a more robust adoption program, for example) and the level of cooperation between rescue organizations and shelter staff. Some think the shelter is doing the best it can under the circumstances in a region with a severe cat and dog overpopulation problem; others think the level of cooperation is grudging and might be nonexistent but for their constant pressure.
The relationship between the shelter and the rescue organizations, at least Keri’s and Sara’s, seems to be marked by some wariness on both sides. The shelter sees the rescue groups as meddling critics and the rescues see the shelter as resistant to change. Yet there is a level of mutual cooperation necessary if rescue groups are going to save as many dogs as they can and if the shelter is going to be seen by the public as something other than a mere slaughterhouse.
“The philosophy of the shelter, and this is true throughout most of the state, is animal control by any means necessary,” Sara tells me. “Mr. Wimbley and I have reached an uneasy truce. He tries to help me and I try not to make his life difficult. The better our relationship is, the better it is for the shelter, for the dogs, and for CAFA. He can help us with our mission, and we can help keep the shelter kill rate down and help improve conditions for the animals there.”
Sara realizes being a physician in a small community where she knows the movers and shakers gives her some leverage in effecting change and she uses it. “He knows I can make a fuss, so he has an interest in keeping me happy,” she says.
“When I started pulling puppies and kittens from the shelter in 2013, almost all the puppies and kittens were euthanized immediately even though they are the most adoptable,” Sara tells me. “The view was that puppies and kittens carry disease and the shelter was not equipped to take care of them. Now, Mr. Wimbley allows me to vaccinate some dogs at the shelter and they vaccinate some themselves. If an animal isn’t immediately euthanized, it should be vaccinated and dewormed. Here they wait to see if an animal survives the early days; then they might invest in vaccinations and other medications. Sometimes dogs are at the shelter three to ten days and then they decide it might be worth the investment, but by then the dogs have been exposed and it’s too late. Parvo and distemper are rampant. We’re always playing catch up on vaccines with the dogs.”
Sara believes the euthanasia rate of nearly 90 percent is higher than it could be if infection control were better. Some otherwise healthy animals that would be candidates for adoption are becoming ill at the shelter and fall into the category of sick animals that need to be euthanized.
Dwelling on shelter euthanasia statistics, while important, misses a larger point, however. While most would agree the lower the rate the better, whether the euthanasia rate is 50 or 70 or 90 percent, the point is that in Louisiana alone, an estimated ninety thousand dogs and cats are put down each year and many are perfectly healthy, adoptable animals. The euthanasia rate gives you a sense of the scale of the overpopulation problem.
• • •
As Sara and I walked through the shelter I couldn’t stop thinking about Albie, and it was painful to picture him—our sweet, loving, and trusting Albie, who enjoys nothing more than to lope through the woods—sitting there day after day behind bars on a concrete floor, alone most of the time.
That he survived for four months seemed a miracle when I considered the odds. The receptionist looked up his file for me and I learned that a sheriff’s deputy picked him up on February 16, 2012, a year when nine out of every ten dogs at the shelter were euthanized, most within days or weeks of their arrival. It was a woman named Krista Lombardo, a Connecticut native who had relocated to Alexandria, who went to the shelter and saved Albie, and it was Krista who had made the short video that caused us to fall in love with him.
Krista, a Syracuse University graduate, first came to Alexandria to take a job as a television reporter, married, had children, and stayed. She considers herself a freelance rescuer and she regularly collaborates with Keri to get her dogs adopted, but she also sees herself as a volunteer at the shelter. She identified Albie as a dog she wanted to rescue—he was sweet tempered and “just wanted to be with you”—and pulled him shortly thereafter. Sometimes, in rescue lingo “pulled” literally means taken from the shelter to a foster home or another place where the dog will be safe from euthanasia. In Albie’s case, it meant Krista came to the shelter and placed a “hold” on him. For two weeks, he was still eligible for local adoption. He wasn’t adopted, so Krista began the process of adopting him herself with the intention of getting him into the Labs4rescue program. The adoption was formalized on March 26, 2012. Krista, who enjoys a good working relationship with shelter director Wimbley, persuaded him to allow Albie to remain at the shelter while she and Keri sought an adopter. Depending on space availability, Krista has been allowed to keep dogs there for up to a year.
Part of her agreement with Henry Wimbley was that she would buy Albie’s food and take care of his medical needs. Two to three times a week, she came and took him for walks.
When I met with Krista in Dr. Haas’s office, I asked her how she came up with the name Albie. It was, she told me, the name of one of the sons on the television program The Real Housewives of New Jersey. My wife, Judy, and I both grew up in New Jersey so it seemed fitting somehow.
• • •
“The shelter needs a rescue connection to look good,” Sara says as we continue our tour. “As a shelter director, you want someone who does rescue work you can control and you can take credit for saving dogs. Mr. Wimbley and I use each other to mutual advantage,” she says. “He gives me a lot of leeway and I try and be as respectful as I can be. As a physician, I’m used to being in control, so it’s hard to let other people run the show, especially when you know there are things they could be doing to improve infection control.” As with Krista, Henry Wimbley will hold dogs for Sara as long as he has the space, and she keeps the dogs moving to fosters or forever families.
One of the biggest challenges Sara and Keri face is that more than 80 percent of adult dogs (two years and up) at the Alexandria shelter are heartworm positive. Heartworm is not directly passed from dog to dog, as are parvo and distemper; it’s transmitted when a mosquito bites an infected dog and then bites another dog. Heartworm is treatable, but the treatment can be difficult for the dog. The disease can also be fatal.
“We treat those we pull from the shelter,” Sara says, “but we avoid testing them in the shelter because once they test positive, they’re euthanized because people generally won’t adopt heartworm positive dogs. It costs us an average of two hundred dollars a dog to treat heartworm, and post treatment the dogs need to reduce activity and be kept calm for a long period. We then retest to be as sure as we can be that there’s no active disease, and then the dog is ready for adoption.
“The problems here with respect to our dog and cat population are educational and financial,” Sara continues. “When we moved here I was shocked at the high price of veterinary care. It was higher than where we were living in Tampa. There were no low cost spay and neuter clinics. And the average annual family income in this area is about $29,000. A lot of people are living on some sort of public assistance.” It’s no wonder taking care of animals isn’t a high priority.
• • �
��
After we leave the shelter, we make a mad dash to the school where Sara’s daughters, Campbell and Sydney, are waiting to be picked up. They’re very personable and talkative. They refer to me as “Mr. Peter.”
The four of us drive to a private dog shelter called Boudreaux’s Animal Rescue Krewe (BARK), also located in Alexandria.21 Owned by the Long family, BARK is a private, nonprofit organization devoted to saving dogs from neglect and/or abuse and maintaining shelter for them until a loving home is found. BARK is a no-kill facility. Dogs here are generally adopted out in Canada and there’s a large trailer used for transport parked outside.
Again, as we enter the kennel areas, the barking nearly drowns out our conversation. Though the dogs here are safe from euthanasia, and there are more obvious efforts at infection control, such as bleach baths for dipping shoes before moving from one section to another, there’s only so much you can do to make a concrete kennel a place where you’d be happy to see a dog spend months or years. Some of the dogs here are aggressive pit bulls and cannot be adopted out; they will remain here indefinitely. One of the pit bulls, an absolutely sweet seven-year-old named Pearl, has scars where her muzzle was wired shut.
There are trade-offs to be made everywhere in rescue. Sara admires what the Longs are doing, but points out that when you are 100 percent committed to no-kill and you can’t move the dogs along to homes, perhaps because the dog is aggressive, that’s space that isn’t available to another dog sitting in a high-kill shelter that might be highly adoptable.
• • •
“So,” I ask Sara toward the end of a long day, “why animals?” There are many people, including children, in need right here in central Louisiana. Why devote all this time and effort to saving animals? It’s the same question I put to Greg when I visited him in Zanesville.
“As a physician I deal with people all the time,” she answers. “But these animals are a population of unconditionally loving creatures. When I see an animal abused, it’s like child abuse or elder abuse. Animals are innocent and have no control over what happens to them. You can personally impact many lives in the ER, but there’s a lot of satisfaction in helping helpless creatures.
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