“When I die, I want to know I did something to change this little world,” she adds. “When you connect a family and a dog and you hear from them afterward, there’s a feeling of great satisfaction.”
• • •
Natchitoches, in west-central Louisiana, is the oldest city in the state. Its small downtown on the banks of the Cane River, home to several historic plantations, is beautiful and charming.
I made the one-hour drive north from Alexandria to Natchitoches to meet a young man named Clarence Nash, who goes by CJ. When we met, CJ, then eighteen, had just started his freshman year at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
Four months earlier, CJ’s dog, a silver Lab mix named Mia, had given birth to ten puppies near his family’s trailer home fifteen miles outside of town. Five of them were the S puppies—Sally, Sylvia, Sully, Seth, and Salyna—we took on board Greg’s truck in Alexandria a few weeks before, most bound for the Rhode Island adoption event. I made the connection to CJ through Rae McManus of Colfax, who saw a picture of me with one of the puppies, Salyna, on Greg’s Rescue Road Trips Facebook page and got in touch with me.
For years Rae has been active in several rescue and animal welfare organizations—she’s the vice president of the Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates and founder of the Heart of Louisiana Humane Society—and she messaged me to tell me she had had a hand in saving Mia’s litter. I was curious to learn more, and she offered to put me in touch with CJ, a friend of her daughter’s since grade school.
I doubted CJ would be willing to talk to me—a stranger and writer from up north—because he had little to gain from doing so. But I was wrong, and he so impressed me during our phone conversation, I was determined to meet him.
CJ is articulate and charming, and looks scholarly in his large eyeglasses. The trailer home where he grew up is one of three on the property where numerous relatives live. A few junked cars sit in the expansive yard where the puppies were born; CJ’s father, Clarence Sr., works as a short-haul trucker. His mother, Joanna, is a supervisor for the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services. He has two younger brothers, Devon, fifteen, and eight-year-old Bryant.
Mia’s recent litter was her second in the last two years; the first comprised three puppies, one of which, Sasha, the Nash’s kept. Like Salyna, she is yellowish white with a blue tongue. Mia and Sasha are what is known in the South as a “yard dogs.”
“Where we live, this is how dogs live,” says CJ. “People aren’t interested in having house dogs. You don’t worry about shedding and pooping. We love our dogs, but we don’t see them living with us in the house. They’re not part of the family the way your dogs are. The dogs take care of themselves. You’ll do much more to care for a dog.”
I ask him why they haven’t spayed Mia since they obviously didn’t want more puppies.
“To come up with $150 to spay Mia is a bit of trouble,” says CJ. “We live on a check-to-check basis. And it’s hard to get to the vet because my parents both work, I don’t drive, and the vet’s office is closed after work hours. But based on this experience with Mia and the puppies, I know we should spay her.
“I’ve had Mia since she was just three weeks old,” he continues. “I talk to her like I talk to my brothers. It’s personal, and she’ll look back and listen as I talk; she reacts. She seems human to me in that way. But most people here don’t spend time like that with their dogs. They’re just animals. Mia is free and she enjoys it, always running and playing. But it would be less worry if she were spayed.
“Some people around here keep all the puppies their dogs have and feed them what little they can until the puppies just run off,” he adds. “Some try to breed them, but mostly they just leave the dogs to fend for themselves. Some are hauled off to the shelter or are just ditched in the woods or left by the side of the road. You can’t treat another living being that way.”
Though CJ spends a lot of time with the dogs, they aren’t well socialized. Mia wouldn’t let me approach her, and when I reached out to pet Sasha, with CJ and Bryant both holding her, she snarled.
After Mia’s second litter was born in early March 2012, CJ’s father told him to get rid of them by taking them to the local pound.
“I knew there was a better, more humane way than taking them to the shelter where they’d be killed immediately,” he says. “I knew Ms. McManus could help or would know someone who could help, like Ms. Keri Toth.” CJ emailed Rae and asked for help.
Rae drove out to the Nashes shortly thereafter and noticed the puppies were mostly Lab. Over the years Keri, through Labs4rescue, has helped Rae place Labs she’s rescued and they collaborate frequently. She called Keri, who provided vaccines and medication to deworm the puppies and Rae vaccinated and dewormed them at the Nashes herself.
“My dad wanted to know who was paying for all this,” CJ says. “When he found out it was all paid for by Ms. Toth, he said to me, ‘You really know how to deal with this don’t you?’” The son had proved himself to his father. “I told my dad, I’ll take care of it and you relax.”
When the pups were about six weeks old, Rae brought three to Keri for fostering at Dr. Haas’s clinic; the others remained at the Nashes until they were about nine weeks, when they joined their siblings in Alexandria—a friend of the Nashes also adopted one. Three weeks later, all had been spayed and neutered. Keri’s daughter, Chelsea, adopted one and Seth had an adopter waiting for him in Massachusetts. We took five aboard Greg’s truck in Alexandria on that rainy Wednesday morning. The other three joined Keri and Greta in the van for the drive to Rhode Island for the adoption event that Sunday. There was no doubt the puppies would be snatched up quickly, especially Salyna, the beautiful yellow one. And she was.
17.It should be noted Keri doesn’t just rescue dogs; she also rescues many cats, which are all adopted out locally, after being spayed or neutered. But her work with Greg is for the dogs.
18.According to the Humane Society of the United States more than ninety thousand dogs and cats are euthanized annually in Louisiana, a number that doesn’t include uncounted animals killed or neglected to death by their owners, or those who die before ever reaching a shelter.
19.Some in rescue believe that the term “animal control” is itself a problem in shaping the mission and attitudes of those in charge of shelters. The public shelters I visited in Louisiana are referred to as “animal control” facilities and many bear names that identify them that way, such as the City of Alexandria Animal Control and Lafayette Parish Animal Control. The linguistic emphasis is on control, not care. They are not called animal “welfare” or animal “protection” facilities, for example. No one is suggesting that simply changing the name would result in major changes, but that the word control reflects a mission and mindset that doesn’t necessarily have animal welfare at its core.
20.Parvovirus and distemper cannot infect humans.
21.A krewe typically refers to an organization that puts on a parade or ball during Carnival season; it’s a term commonly associated with Mardi Gras in New Orleans. But it’s also used loosely to mean team or group. Boudreaux was a boxer the Longs, who started the shelter, rescued years ago.
5
LONE STAR STATE OF MIND
NOW THAT WE’VE SEEN THE WORLD KERI and Sara operate in, and how many of their dogs get from the streets and shelters to Greg’s truck, let’s rewind and rejoin Greg during my trip with him several weeks earlier. At 10:30 a.m., three and half hours after we started boarding dogs in Alexandria, we pull out for Baytown, Texas, 225 miles away. Getting all of Keri’s dogs on board and their paperwork sorted out has taken longer than expected. Greg tries hard to keep to his schedule because he always has people waiting on him up and down the line, and delays, especially avoidable ones, drive him up the wall.
Baytown is where Greg picks up dogs from Kathy Wetmore’s Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue, and occasionally some dogs from Nutmeg Rescue, run by Tom English, a math professor at a community college in Texas C
ity, about forty miles southeast of Houston. Sometimes there are dogs from other area rescues too. After the pickups in Baytown, we’ll drive two hundred miles back east to Lafayette, where we’ll spend the night, just ninety miles south of where the day began in Alexandria.
Greg makes this 425-mile drive to Baytown and back to Louisiana whether it’s to pick up one dog or twenty. It’s on his schedule and he’s committed to it, even if it costs a couple hundred dollars in diesel and the entire day to get there and back. He has to be in Lafayette by Wednesday night because Thursdays begin bright and early with pickups at Lafayette Animal Aid, a rescue organization located in Carencro, in Lafayette Parish, just north of the city of Lafayette.
As we hop on the interstate, Greg takes a phone call from Deb Cook Keavy, a Labs4rescue adoption coordinator who lives in Connecticut but arranges adoptions from south-central Louisiana. When he hangs up, Greg tells me we’ll be picking up Sadie, a four-year-old female yellow Lab, tomorrow in Hammond, Louisiana, about an hour east of Baton Rouge. Sadie is a special case. She has epilepsy. Anxiety can trigger her seizures and transport can be stressful since it’s a new and foreign environment where the only people around the dogs are strangers. Since we have an extra body (mine), Greg has assured Deb that Sadie will ride in the cab next to me on Tommy’s mattress to ensure she has quiet and human companionship along the way. Plus, we can keep an eye on her in case she has a seizure. Greg informs me I’ll also be responsible for administering her epilepsy medication twice a day.
Sadie’s story is different from most but sad nonetheless. She had a family in Louisiana who raised her from puppyhood and loved her. But the three-year-old son developed severe dog allergies, and they couldn’t keep her. At the thought of Sadie being abruptly separated from the only family she’s known, my compassion leaps for this dog I haven’t even met yet. What, I wonder, goes through a dog’s mind at times like this? Her new forever family, Brenda Byers-Britney and daughter, Elizabeth, of Middle Haddam, Connecticut, will be waiting for her at Rocky Hill.
• • •
While on the road, Greg regularly checks on the dogs. When we stop shortly after noon a few miles east of the Texas line, it’s hot and humid, but the trailer is cool thanks to the four generator-powered air-conditioning units. In the trailer, I take Salyna out of her kennel. She appeared frightened when we boarded her a few hours ago and still seems on edge and unhappy. Sensing my concern, Greg suggests I have her ride with me in the cab. Greg can be hard to read sometimes, and at first I think he might be joking at what he sees as my undue concern. After all, he’s seen tens of thousands of dogs on transport and not all of them are going to be happy campers all the time. Aware that perhaps he’s just indulging me and trying to make me comfortable (never mind the dog), I take Salyna with me. Tommy takes over the driving, Greg is sitting on the mattress behind me and to my left, and I am in the passenger seat with Salyna on my lap.
Greg can occasionally show flashes of irritation, especially when he senses naïveté about dogs. Salyna trembled as I climbed up into the cab and tried to get her settled in my arms.
“She’s so scared,” I say.
“She’s not scared,” Greg snaps, “and I take offense, I really do, that you think one of my dogs is scared!”
It’s true. What do I know? At this point in my life, I’d seen all of forty dogs loaded onto transport. Greg, meanwhile, has transported more than thirty thousand dogs over ten years and he doesn’t confuse a dog’s mild trepidation with fear.
Scared or not, Salyna had been upgraded to first class, riding in my lap, while the other Alexandria dogs ride in kennels in the trailer. The contact calms her and she sits quietly in my arms for the next couple of hours as we pass the massive oil refineries along Interstate 10 near Lake Charles, Louisiana, heading for Baytown. With each passing mile, I find myself growing more and more attached to Salyna and she seems to be enjoying the company too.
At 1:30 p.m., we cross into Texas and stop for fuel. It’s been more than a thousand miles since our last fill up in Ohio and that means another receipt for over five hundred dollars. We check the dogs again, making sure each has water before driving the last half hour to the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel, the pickup point for all the Texas dogs that will be joining us. It’s three o’clock.
• • •
Rescue involves a lot of physical work, especially hauling dogs here and there virtually all day, every day. So it’s amazing that a widow in her early sixties, like Kathy Wetmore of Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue, does all the work herself. A native of the British Isle of Wight and a self-described “control freak,” she is hands-on in every aspect of her rescue work: she walks through the shelters looking for dogs to rescue; manages the adoption process and the website, for which she does all the photography; shepherds her dogs to their veterinary appointments; and personally brings the dogs heading north to meet Greg every other Wednesday.
“I can’t afford a screwup when I’m shipping dogs,” she says.
She’s a tall, broad-shouldered woman, and doesn’t move easily. Her gait is slightly labored, and the heat and humidity in Houston much of the year make the physical part of her job all the harder. But that doesn’t stop her. In 2013, she adopted out about 210 dogs to various parts of the United States; all those bound for the Northeast traveled with Greg.
Kathy has fewer dogs than usual traveling with Greg this week: about a half-dozen including shy Carina, a griffon/sheepdog mix; Maggie May, a poodle mix; and Willis, a shaggy, white bichon mix with cataracts, a dog Kathy described to me on the phone a couple of weeks earlier as “the happiest little guy.”
Willis wasn’t one of Houston’s staggering 1.2 million strays. His owner surrendered him to the large shelter known as BARC (Bureau of Animal Regulation and Control) where strays picked up by the city’s animal control officers are also brought. Kathy visits BARC regularly and pulls most of the dogs she rescues from there.
“I was walking through the holding kennels,” she told me on the phone, “and I saw this happy dog. His skin was terrible and he was missing fur on the back. But he was just as happy as could be. The shelter adoption coordinator told me, ‘His time is up today,’ and I took him.”
That Willis’s time was up was no surprise to Kathy. He was about eight, and older dogs, or “senior dogs” as they are called, are harder to place because their life expectancy is relatively short. But there are adopters who are keen to give them a chance to enjoy their last few years. And that’s exactly who Kathy was hoping to find for Willis.
But first she had to clean him up. Willis was in bad shape. As soon as she pulled Willis from BARC, he began treatment for a bad case of flea dermatitis, and Kathy brought him to a veterinary ophthalmologist to see if his cataracts could be treated as well. Surgery was ruled out; Willis’s eyes didn’t drain well enough, but medications have helped. His vision is passable, but he’s nearly blind in one eye.
Kathy makes investments like this all the time to get her dogs ready for adoption. She’s a successful real estate agent, once the top-grossing broker in the state. In an average year, she spends $200,000 from her own pocket on veterinary care. She’s spent as much as $4,000 on a single dog’s dental work. She has about a half-dozen veterinarians in the city she uses, including specialists, and all discount their services. Kathy is yet another example of the many selfless people who work in the rescue world.
• • •
Before joining Greg on the road, I also spoke to both Willis’s adopting family, Mary Ellen and Phil Gambutti, of Easton, Pennsylvania, and the young woman, Tilani Pomirko, who had been fostering Willis for almost a year while Kathy was attending to his medical needs and reviewing applications from potential adopters who had seen Willis’s profile on her website.
Tilani is a vet tech for one of the veterinarians Kathy uses, and she fosters special-needs dogs for Kathy, those with behavioral issues who need more socialization before being adopted, amputees, and, in Willis’s case, some who need
ongoing medical treatment.
“I hadn’t met Willis when I agreed to foster him,” Tilani told me. “But Kathy said he was the happiest dog she’d ever met. And he is the happiest little dog. When he first came to the clinic, he played with Nugget, a cat we had there. We always want to see how a dog does with cats before adopting them out, and he prefers cats to dogs.”
Tilani had no other pets during the year she fostered Willis and she was dreading saying good-bye to him. Her voice quavered and she sobbed gently through much of our conversation.
“The paperwork said ‘owner surrender due to behavioral issues,’ but I never observed any problems,” Tilani told me. It’s not uncommon for owners, perhaps embarrassed by their decision to surrender a dog they don’t want, perhaps for financial reasons, perhaps for no reason other than their own convenience, to fib to shelter personnel.
“When Willis is gone, my apartment will be empty,” she said. “I wanted to adopt him, but I work twelve hours a day and Willis spends those hours with a dog buddy in a kennel and in the yard. Then I come home tired. It’s not fair to him. He needs someone who will love him unconditionally, which I do, but also someone who can dote on him, which I can’t.” Tilani’s selflessness is deeply touching; she so clearly adores Willis but is honest enough with herself to know he could have a better life elsewhere.
“I’ve been thinking about what the transition will be like for Willis,” she added. “But he’s very adaptable to change and to new people. I’m so excited for him going on this journey. He always goes with the flow. It’ll be harder on me than on him. But I want to tell him it will be okay.” Tilani was struggling through her tears at this point. “I want to tell him, ‘It will be a long trip, but you’ll be in a good home.’ You wish you could make them understand: ‘It’ll be a long and scary trip, but you’re going to have the best life.’”
Rescue Road Page 11