“It’s not about thinking outside the box,” Michelle tells me. “There is no box. There’s no limit to what you can do.”
Turning the euthanasia rate around is harder in a small parish such as Saint Martin, she says: the budget is smaller (her department and the parish public health department share a budget of just over $100,000 annually); the shelter is small, so animals can’t be held long; and there’s a smaller population from which to find adopters.
Michelle started working at the Saint Martin shelter as a part-time employee cleaning kennels. Her background was in big-box retail with Walmart and Sears, but following a battle with cancer, she was looking for something else. She thinks it’s been an advantage she didn’t come up through the system as a professional animal control officer. When she was offered the directorship, she had to learn the job on her own: she understood management but, other than her own pets, had no training in animal care. She sought advice from veterinarians and rescue groups. Importantly, she wasn’t an apprentice to her predecessor, so no one was there to tell her what couldn’t be done.
For example, for 2015 the parish has budgeted $5,000 for animal euthanasia and zero for transport or outreach to rescue groups. Since no one has told her she can’t reallocate funds as she sees fit, some of the money will be put toward life-saving efforts rather than euthanasia. Other shelter directors she’s spoken with say they can’t reallocate funds. And since no one has told her she can’t fundraise for the shelter, she holds fundraising events and solicits support from individuals and local businesses to supplement her budget.
“I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission,” Michelle tells me, an attitude that has opened up a world of possibilities beyond business as usual.
“I know a handful of animal control directors who really want to do what’s in the best interests of the animals,” Michelle tells me. “But more don’t want to buck the system. They want to do their job and leave. But it’s not just a job. You have to see it as more. There are lives at stake. These animals depend on you. You have to change the way you look at it. If you see it as just a job, you should get another job. It’s appalling to me when I talk to other directors and I hear, ‘I don’t have the time,’ or ‘I can’t do it that way.’ Make the time. It can be done. These are just excuses. I do what I do because the animals can’t do it for themselves. I want to be a facilitator for a better life for them, not the grim reaper.”
When Michelle took over as director, no rescue groups were pulling from the shelter. Michelle has forged good relationships with many rescues. “I work with rescues to save more lives,” she tells me. “I’m honored to work with rescue groups. We help each other.”
Still, Jamie Clark worries that at some point Michelle will suffer “compassion fatigue,” as so many other shelter directors do. Over the years, the job grinds them down and becomes a routine, and because people working in shelters see so many damaged dogs, it can become overwhelming if you can’t compartmentalize.
But for now, Michelle remains undaunted.
“We had a Chihuahua, Penny, come in here recently that would have been euthanized almost immediately at any other shelter,” Jamie tells me. “Someone had put a safety pin through her eye and eyelid and some kind of chemical in the other. She was the most flea-infested dog I’ve ever seen. Her nails were so long and her muscles so atrophied, we were sure she’d been kept in a small cage a long time. She was just a mess. Yet despite the terrible abuse she’d suffered, when we approached her, she just started wagging her tail. She should have been biting us, but she just wanted to love us. Michelle just couldn’t put her down. Now she’s at Lafayette Animal Aid getting ready for adoption.”
Jamie has been offered more than one job as a shelter director, but she knows she could never do the part of the job the sheer number of dogs flooding the state’s shelters requires: euthanizing an animal.
“Michelle has a very high compassion level,” explains Jamie, “but she’s able to do the most difficult part of the job. We can’t save them all yet. But every animal has a good chance of leaving Saint Martin Parish shelter; at most others, they don’t. I cry when I leave here. Working with Michelle has been such a blessing.”
Jamie bemoans the treatment of dogs in her native Louisiana and offers an example.
“There are these hunting camps near Sabine where hunters come and their dogs wander around and reproduce,” she tells me. “Hunting dogs are very disposable here. A lot of hunters believe for the dogs to hunt well, you have to starve them, make sure they’re hungry. At the end of hunting season, the shelters see a noticeable increase in the number of Labs and other hunting dogs. One guy came to the shelter to dump his dog and was furious because he’d paid $1,200 for the dog and it had missed a duck. Another guy brought in a dog that had been riding in his pickup truck, fell out, and was badly hurt. His upper leg bone protruding from his shoulder.”
Governor Jindal had vetoed the bill that would have required dogs riding in the back of pickup trucks to be properly secured a few weeks before Jamie and I spoke. Louisiana’s animal cruelty statutes were enough, he said. But it was a common complaint among people doing rescue work in Louisiana that enforcement of animal cruelty laws is a low priority.
“In Vermillion Parish, there was a case of a breeder with three hundred dogs, and video evidence of dogs there with broken bones, dogs dying from exposure to the elements, and neither the sheriff nor the DA would take action,” Jamie tells me. “And the shelter there won’t work with rescue groups and doesn’t do adoptions.”
“Dogs here are property,” April Reeves adds. “Even some of my own family members are appalled at what I do. Why would you do that for a dog?”
• • •
The following day, Melinda arranged for us to have lunch with Virginia Lee, supervisor of the Lafayette Animal Control shelter—where about half of all of LAA’s rescue dogs come from—and tour the shelter. A former police officer in the city of Lafayette, Virginia is secretary of the Louisiana Animal Control Association, a professional association of the state’s shelter directors.
Over hamburgers and fries at a local eatery, Virginia seems forthright about the problems afflicting the state’s companion animals and shelters.
“I don’t see things changing in my lifetime,” Virginia tells me, referring to state’s overpopulation problem. “I have seen some changes, but we need drastic changes.
“Getting dogs out of the shelter is our biggest challenge,” she continues. Virginia herself adopted a schnauzer that came into the shelter. “We have way too many animals. Cats don’t move; we’ll always have a high euthanasia rate for cats. When it comes to direct adoptions of dogs, each dog we adopt out is micro-chipped, spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and dewormed. Our contract requires new owners take the dog to the veterinarian within a week. But I can’t vet adopters as thoroughly as a rescue group can.”
“We get between two and three thousand dogs in per year,” says Virginia. “Ten years ago, it was more like five thousand, and the euthanasia rate was 90 percent. SpayNation [the Lafayette-based group that picked up a group of Keri’s dogs in Alexandria] has helped lower the rate.”
Virginia puts the canine euthanasia rate today at 55 percent. Of the dogs leaving the shelter alive, about a third are direct adoption, a third are returns to owner, and a third go to rescue groups, such as LAA.
“We have to put some dogs down because of overcrowding,” adds Virginia. “Dogs are generally held for five days, though aggressive dogs go sooner. We make choices. We try to save good, adoptable dogs. If a rescue such as LAA identifies a dog they want, we’ll hold it as long as we can and as long as we have space, typically a couple of weeks if they can’t take the dog right away. We have room for about a hundred dogs and we’re always at capacity. We euthanize every day to keep the flow going. It’s awful doing the euthanasia. It’s my least favorite part of my job.”
Virginia contends her staff loves animals, which makes euthanizing them pai
nstaking. Animals are sedated intravenously then killed using a heart stick.
“Making the choices and carrying it out wrenches your heart, and I won’t lie to you, sometimes I miss,” she says, referring to directing the heart stick precisely. “I don’t think anyone really knows how many cats and dogs are euthanized in the state every year. There are so many small shelters, shelters without computers, and no statewide collection of the information that does exist.” She thinks the Humane Society of the United States’ estimate of ninety thousand dogs and cats euthanized in Louisiana annually is probably low.
Virginia says transports bringing dogs north, such as Rescue Road Trips, are the best option for lowering the euthanasia rate. Stricter spay and neuter laws, and stricter laws governing treatment of animals are unlikely, she says, “because of the mentality here.” And it takes resources and political will to enforce animal welfare laws and there’s little public clamor for it. “Good laws do work if you have the people to enforce them,” she says. “If we had a strong spay/neuter law and enforced it, things would change fast.”
Like nearly everyone else I spoke to in Louisiana, Virginia thinks only education will provide a long-term answer.
“Ignorance is the problem here,” Virginia continues. “There’s no value in the ownership of an animal. Our rescue groups are doing a lot of education and in some portion of the population, that attitude has changed.
“Some animal control supervisors in the state don’t see rescue organizations as allies,” Virginia adds as she finishes her hamburger. “Some think rescues are filled with crazy people who love animals too much. Some think the rescues are just out to make money.26 We certify [the] rescues we allow to pull from our shelter to be sure they are there for the right reasons. If they meet the criteria, everyone should feel good about that.
“There are also some in animal control for whom euthanizing all the animals is the easy way out,” she continues, suggesting some would rather put animals down than build and manage an adoption program and establish relationships with sometimes-critical rescue organizations who may want to see changes in shelter operations. This seemed surprisingly candid for one of the officers of the state’s association of animal control officers. “A lot of what we do at the Louisiana Animal Control Officers Association is basic education because so many of our members have no basic education in shelter management, infection control, and animal abuse investigation.”
After lunch, Virginia walks us through the shelter. The Lafayette shelter, by contrast with Saint Martin’s, is well staffed, and its budget is just under two million dollars a year. There are fifteen employees, including four animal control officers on patrol and a patrol supervisor. Five days a week, five trustees from the parish jail also work at the shelter. Lafayette Parish has about 250,000 residents, Saint Martin just 53,000.
The shelter is well lit and appears clean, but having been in perhaps a dozen shelters by now, there’s just something deeply sad about seeing dogs confined, no matter how clean and well lit the facility may be. Uniformly, the enclosures in the public shelters I saw were Spartan concrete or chain-mesh enclosures, more often than not without so much as a toy to play with or a soft place to lie down. Some, such as the Pineville shelter just outside of Alexandria, were dark and dungeonlike. Every time I walked the corridors of a shelter, the thought that always came to mind was, These dogs don’t belong here.
As we walk by the kennels holding dogs up for direct public adoption, Virginia explains that once a dog is on “adoption row,” it can stay there forever. These are the dogs Virginia thinks will be the easiest to place. Rescues, such as LAA, can have the pick of the rest, though dogs found to be aggressive will not be released, and some dogs, simply because they are breeds deemed aggressive, such as pit bulls, won’t be released. There has been much debate about whether pit bulls and other so-called “bully breeds” have been unfairly stereotyped and maligned, but some communities, concerned about potential liability, simply won’t take the risk of releasing some types of dogs. Sadly, one of the first dogs I see is a very sweet female pit bull whose nails are way too long, is heartworm positive, and has been overbred. She was abandoned by the side of the road when she was no longer useful for breeding.
“Every now and then, we get a special animal in,” Virginia says, not referring to any specific dog. “What we do here hurts so much sometimes that if one of my employees wants to do something special for an animal, it’s a way for me to help them get through the day.”
With the exception of the relationship between LAA and Michelle Brignac, director of Saint Martin Parish Animal Control, and Kathy Wetmore and BARC in Houston, every shelter-rescue relationship I observed seemed marked by some degree of mutual suspicion. But shelter directors need rescues unless they are utterly indifferent to the animals in their custody, and without some degree of cooperation from the directors or staff, rescues are thwarted in their mission and lives are lost. If you’re in rescue, the shelters can never be run well enough; if you’re a shelter director, the rescues can be unreasonable, demanding, and mettlesome. It’s a broad generalization, but it seems to capture the nature of the tension.
When Melinda and I return from lunch and our visit to Lafayette Animal Control, we encounter Carley Faughn, LAA’s executive director, in the reception area. It’s clear the relationship with Virginia is not without its tensions.
Neither Melinda nor Carley accepts the canine euthanasia number of 55 percent, though Melinda thinks it’s a number Virginia believes to be true. Accurate statistics, as noted, can be hard to come by. And though they tell me Virginia and her staff are always cordial, there’s an employee who works for Virginia and who they believe makes arbitrary decisions about which dogs will live and which will die. Yet they work to maintain a good working relationship in the interest of the dogs.
But we have little time to dissect the complicated shelter-rescue relationship. For Carley and the LAA staff, today is a busy day. Early tomorrow morning, as he does every other Thursday, Greg will turn up LAA’s long, dirt driveway. The staff, many in tears, will say good-bye to dogs they have loved and cared for and nursed back to good health. It’s bittersweet, of course. All that effort, all that love and compassion has prepared each one for a new life where they will be valued, cherished, and adored. And each one bound for a new life up north makes room for another to take his or her first steps on the same journey.
25.PetSmart is a national pet supply retailer.
26.From everything I saw and learned in my southern travels, this was one of the greatest misconceptions I heard about rescue organizations. Those I saw in operation are often investing far more in most dogs than they will ever see returned in an adoption fee.
9
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
WHEN WE LAST LEFT GREG AND TOMMY (and me) in a tractor-trailer with more than fifty dogs at the end of Chapter 5, we were in a water-logged parking lot east of Lafayette on I-10 on a Wednesday night. Earlier that morning we’d boarded Keri’s dogs in Alexandria, then driven to Baytown and back into Louisiana. Most were settled in for a short night’s sleep before we were to start boarding more dogs at Lafayette Animal Aid early the next morning. The stop at LAA will mark the beginning of the longest part of Greg’s journey, a drive that begins in Lafayette early on Thursday morning and ends early Friday evening in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
• • •
Thanks to Willis and T-Bone, whose barking has kept me up most of the night, I’ve managed to get nary an hour of sound sleep before six thirty, when Greg and Tommy are up and ready for the short drive to LAA. But I can’t feel that bad for myself. Other than sleep, Greg doesn’t get so much as five minutes off when he’s on the road. Even when Tommy’s driving, he’s taking calls, keeping an eye on the road (he and Tommy serve as one another’s second set of eyes while driving), and noodling over work-related problems, such as the need for a new trailer and how to arrange the dogs since we have a heavy load already and more to boar
d.
Fifteen dogs are scheduled to join us at LAA. For the past few years Greg has transported between two hundred and three hundred dogs a year from LAA, all adopted out through Labs4rescue and Mutts4rescue.
Just as it did when we loaded our first dogs in Alexandria yesterday morning, it’s pouring as the dogs are brought to the truck. There’s Hammish, a four-year old Border collie with a leaky heart valve and advanced, inoperable heartworm disease. Though he’ll likely live only another year, a Connecticut family has agreed to provide a home for whatever days he has remaining. He’s a handsome dog, sweet and happy. A few of the LAA staff wipe away tears that have mingled with the raindrops on their faces as Greg picks up Hammish and lifts him into the trailer.
Following Hammish is Happy, an eight-month-old Australian shepherd mix found tied to the fence at LAA with his two brothers. Happy has really hit the lottery; he’s found a forever home on Martha’s Vineyard. Then Gladys and Abby, both young Lab mixes, a golden retriever named Lolly, a terrier-schnauzer mix named Maple, and last but not least, Bijou, the stray pulled from the Saint Martin Parish Animal Services shelter and bound for the Mooney family in South Walpole, Massachusetts.27
• • •
Now it’s time for the big thirty-six-hour push from Lafayette to Allentown. When we finish loading the dogs at LAA in the pouring rain, most of the dogs traveling with us this week are on board. We’ll pick up a few more in Hammond, Louisiana—including Sadie, the Lab with epilepsy—and Slidell, Louisiana, and, near midnight, two more in tiny Rising Fawn, Georgia, in the northwest corner of the state.
Thanks to people such as Keri Toth, Greta Jones, and Sara Kelly in Alexandria; Kathy Wetmore in Houston; Melinda Falgout, Carley Faughn, April Reeves and the staff of LAA; and dozens of fosters, veterinarians, volunteers, shelter directors, and shelter staff, nearly eighty hard-luck dogs—dogs abandoned, abused, neglected, unwanted, or just lost—are about to begin the final leg of their long and often torturous journeys to their forever homes.
Rescue Road Page 17