Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

by Rosenfelt, David

  I had some concerns. For example, most adoptions are done on weekends, which happens to be exactly when football is on television. And this wasn’t some down-the-road problem; Labor Day was approaching.

  As is the case close to 100 percent of the time, Debbie’s enthusiasm ran roughshod over my hesitancy and procrastination. We started with the name, which was the easy part. By decree we announced that we were now running the Tara Foundation, dedicated to the rescue of abandoned and homeless dogs, primarily golden retrievers.

  There are no licenses necessary to establish a foundation like this; all it takes is the willingness to do the work and care for the dogs. We started with a couple of advantages. Rather than go through the long process of securing a nonprofit tax status, we became a subsidiary of Perfect Pet Rescue, thanks to the amazing Nancy Sarnoff. Also, having volunteered in the shelter system, we knew our way around it and had made some important contacts.

  The only real disadvantage was that it was just Debbie and me, and she had a full-time job. Most rescue organizations have a large group of volunteers to draw on, but we did not. We probably should have gone out of our way to recruit, but we never did, and we wound up with only four part-time volunteers the entire time we operated. They were a huge help, especially a woman who was with us almost the entire time, Cathy Pearl.

  But Debbie and I wound up doing almost all the rescuing and the walking and the advertising and the screening of potential adopters on the phone, and everything else. It was physically and emotionally draining.

  The one thing that was absolutely no problem was finding the dogs to rescue. The shelter system was overflowing with them, all types and all sizes; we just needed to figure out where to put them once we got them out of the shelters.

  Sort of by definition, someone who would dump their dog in a bad shelter probably hadn’t taken very good care of it anyway. So the dogs we would be saving might well have health issues that would need to be addressed. They’d also need a bath and shots, and a safe place to stay while we were finding them a home.

  A vet’s office would provide all of the above, and we soon discovered that they were eager to have us. All of those things cost money, and even though they offered us a generous discount, it was still very much in their interest to serve as our base of operations.

  So in no time at all we had what we physically needed to get going.

  Except for the dogs.

  We started making the rounds of shelters, primarily looking for golden retrievers. Amazingly, they’re not in short supply; we got eight of them immediately. But we soon realized that we could not and should not rescue only goldens; there were too many terrific, deserving dogs, both mixes and pedigrees, for us to limit ourselves.

  We had the physical space at the vet’s office to house twenty-five dogs at a time, and there was no reason to ever be below that number. We would take in all the golden retrievers that needed us and use the remaining space for other deserving dogs.

  We’d do our shelter runs once or twice a week, depending on how adoptions were going. We had to go through the same process as anyone else, adopting each dog individually. Once we did that, we loaded up our cars with as many dogs as we had room for. We usually placed about twelve a week in homes, so that’s how many new ones we were able to take.

  Almost all of our adopters learned about us through ads in the Los Angeles Times. This was before the proliferation of the Internet, which today makes things much easier. Potential adopters can now go online and see and read about available dogs. They can also fill out pre-applications. I wish we’d had those things available to us back then.

  It was a simultaneously exhilarating and horrible experience. On the one hand, it was the purest form of rescue. We were taking dogs that had no chance, and once we had them it was an ironclad guarantee that they would wind up in a good home.

  But we were picking them from thousands of equally worthy animals, and we knew that only a small percentage of those we left behind would make it out. The animals we were looking at were the starfish, and like the man on the beach, we could make a difference to only a very, very small percentage.

  That meant we were literally making life-or-death decisions, not something I would recommend to others. We’d walk by the dog runs in the shelters, and the dogs we’d pick out would live, and the ones we’d walk by would most likely die. And there was nothing we could do about it.

  Ultimately, about 60 percent of the dogs we rescued were goldens, and the rest were mostly mixes. One thing that they had in common was their size; because smaller ones had a better chance of being adopted out of the shelter, we focused on large ones. It was rare that we took a dog under sixty pounds.

  Things immediately went well, at least in terms of finding homes for the dogs. People are much more willing to deal with rescue groups than shelters, at least in Southern California. Just the idea of walking into a shelter is daunting for animal lovers. They fear that what they will see will break their hearts, and very often it will.

  Dealing with a rescue group like ours removes that danger, and also provides security. Adopters had to sign a contract that obligated them to return the dog to us if the adoption didn’t work out well, for whatever reason. That removed the chance of their having to take the dog back to a shelter, where returned dogs generally did not fare well. By bringing the dog back to us, they would know that it would be well taken care of, so the potential guilt factor was removed.

  I should say that the guilt factor was removed from the adopter, but not from us. We chose dogs who appealed to us, and who seemed most in need. Very often, that need would make them less likely to be wanted by others.

  So what happened was that we would rescue a dog and either know going in, or subsequently find out, that it possessed a quality that would make it virtually unadoptable to anyone else. Perhaps the dog was old or had epilepsy or bad hips or whatever. The majority of people, even well-intentioned ones, did not want to deal with issues like this.

  A perfect example of this was Nugget, a ten-year-old golden that was dumped in the South LA animal shelter. Nugget had a seizure while in the shelter, which would almost assure his not getting adopted, especially with his advanced age.

  But Nugget was also blind, which made it 100 percent certain that he was going to be euthanized. No one would deal with the expense and difficulty of taking Nugget into their home, not when there were healthy young dogs in the same shelter, even in the same run.

  But there were few things more painful than seeing how scared Nugget was in that cage, not being able to see his surroundings and being picked on by the other dogs. There was simply no way we could leave him there, though we knew it would be fruitless to even put him up for rescue. So Nugget came home with us, and he lived two happy and safe years.

  That happened frequently, and was the reason our home gang kept expanding. Our guilt instantly kicked in; once we rescued a dog, how could we just leave it in a cage at our vet, constantly being rejected by potential adopters? What kind of life was that? The dog would have been better off facing its fate in the shelters.

  There was also a more practical consideration. If a particular dog occupied one of our cages for a lengthy period of time, then it cut down on the amount of new dogs we could bring in.

  All of this left us with two options. We could either keep the dog in a cage while we failed to find him a good home or bring him to ours. We kept choosing the latter, and it surprisingly became easier, rather than harder, as the number in our house increased.

  When you have two dogs, getting a third is a big decision. For instance, the vet costs increase by 50 percent. But when you have twenty-one, one more doesn’t seem much of an additional hardship. And if you have twenty-eight, and a shelter calls and says that a twelve-year-old golden will be put down that afternoon if you don’t come and get it, then you go and get it, and you raise your number to twenty-nine.

  So dogs kept coming home with us, one after another after another. We had cr
ossed over into full-blown dog lunacy and burned the bridge behind us.

  Princess

  Debbie and I were at a shelter in Downey, California, called SEACCA. It was an overcrowded, awful place, which is why we got many of our dogs from there. We wanted to get them from the shelters where they would have the least chance of otherwise being adopted.

  It seems counterintuitive, but very often the worst shelters are run by the most caring people, and SEACCA was a perfect example of this. The shelter supervisor was Ron Edwards, who later became head of the Irvine shelter and provided our dogs sanctuary in the fires. At SEACCA, Ron did everything he could to protect the animals in his care. The fact that it was so often a losing effort did not change that simple fact.

  One day Debbie and I were walking through SEACCA when we saw a kennel worker leading a dog, not with a leash, but at the end of a long pole. That pole, plus the room toward which they were heading, made it clear to us that this dog was about to be euthanized.

  Intellectually, there was nothing shocking about it. We knew that euthanasia was very common there; a high percentage of the “inmates” never came out. For example, the public shelters in California reported euthanizing 391,000 dogs in 2007, and most observers believe that shelters tend to underreport. The scene that was playing out in front of us no doubt happened many, many times each day.

  This particular dog was adorable, a terrier mix of some sort, no more than thirty pounds. She was getting up in age, and from a distance I would have guessed that she was maybe seven years old. Her fur was matted and dirty, but she had a smile on her face, and not a clue where she was going.

  Except she wasn’t going there for long.

  They were maybe thirty feet from the euthanasia room when Debbie screamed, “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING WITH MY DOG?”

  The man turned, as did probably everybody within a mile of where we were standing. What he saw was Debbie running down the hall toward him. She grabbed for the pole, and he was smart enough to let her have it. He looked so scared I thought he was going to give her his wallet.

  Once she got the pole from him, she dropped it to the ground, ran over to the dog, and disconnected it from her collar. Then she picked her up, and she didn’t put her down until we were in the car.

  We took the dog, who Debbie named Princess, to the vet’s office where we kept our rescue dogs. She was in good shape physically, so she soon became a candidate for adoption. And once she was cleaned and groomed, she was even more adorable.

  A couple in their mid-sixties showed up one day, along with their son, Richard. He was in his thirties and clearly had mental challenges. He spoke haltingly, without much affect; in the old, politically incorrect days we would have said he was “slow.”

  I had talked to the couple at length over the phone, so I knew that the man was a college professor at Cal State Fullerton, and that his wife did not work. She would be home most of the day with the dog that they’d adopt, and the dog would live and sleep in the house, an absolute requirement for us. But they hadn’t mentioned their son.

  They were interested in a golden retriever, but Richard had other ideas. He brightened when he saw Princess, and within three minutes he was sitting with her on his lap. He was smiling and petting her, and she was loving it. A bond had clearly been forged, and his parents made the adoption of Princess official. Life had turned around quite nicely for her.

  It was about three weeks later when the husband called, with his wife on the extension. He asked that I have Debbie join the call as well, which she did.

  From that point on, the wife did all the talking. She told us that Richard had been in an accident when he was six months old, and it had left him brain damaged. His behavior had been erratic ever since, to the extent that it became impossible for Richard to stay in their home full-time … he needed care at a special facility. For more than thirty years they had been able to take Richard only on weekends.

  She went on to tell us that the transformation in Richard since they’d adopted Princess had been startling. She had a calming, pleasing effect on him. He doted on her, and since he was willing to be the doter, Princess was certainly of a mind to be the dotee. They were inseparable.

  She told us that as a result, they had consulted with Richard’s doctors, and all agreed that he could move out of the facility and in with them full-time. And he had done so that morning.

  So they had called to say, “Thank you for giving us our son back.”

  I rarely tell this story at speaking engagements, because the memory of it chokes me up. The love of a dog had radically changed the lives of these three people for the better; it had brought a family together.

  Princess had come in and done what medical science could not.

  And one month earlier she had been on the end of a pole.

  Duchess

  I was doing a signing at Book Carnival near our home in Orange County, and near the end a woman came up to me to talk about a terrible situation she was facing. She said that her husband had cancer, and they couldn’t have a dog around because of the possibility of infection. She said that they’d have to give up their ten-year-old black Lab, Duchess, and asked if I would take her.

  The story she told didn’t ring completely true for me, especially when I told her that I would take the dog, but that I would see myself as more of a caretaker for her. If the woman’s situation changed, and it became OK for the husband to be in the house with Duchess, then she could take her back. She seemed uninterested in this possibility, which surprised me, because usually owners who are forced to give up their dogs for similar reasons grab on to the possibility of someday getting them back.

  I really had no interest in dwelling on whether her story was accurate, because if she wanted or needed to give up this incredibly sweet dog, for whatever reason, then Duchess would probably be better off with us. But my suspicions increased in the two weeks after Duchess entered our home. I e-mailed the woman updates about her progress and how she was adapting that were very positive, yet she didn’t respond.

  The bottom line is that Duchess has now been with us for about four years, and she has never, not once, caused the slightest problem. She doesn’t bark, she never gets angry, and when you walk by her, she rolls onto her back to get her stomach scratched. She’s somewhat incontinent, but it’s handled by medication. There could not be a nicer dog, and she’s been a fantastic addition to our family.

  Saint Cyndi

  Four months before our trip was to begin, we still had no idea how we were going to do it. Travolta and Oprah had continued to selfishly withhold their planes, though I was staying by the phone just in case.

  Debbie had the idea that maybe one of the cable networks would want to film the trip as a reality show, and they might therefore finance it and provide appropriate vehicles. I called a friend of mine who is a producer and active in that world to gauge the possibilities.

  He said that the idea had potential, and that the trip might well be of interest, but there would be a few conditions that we would have to agree to. First of all, just a four- or five-day trip by itself wouldn’t give a network nearly what it would need to fill a season, to say nothing of multiple seasons. They would have to set up shop in our house after we arrived, to document our day-to-day existence with the dogs.

  That was bad enough; the chaos of a camera crew in our house with all the dogs was too horrible to even contemplate. To make matters worse, my friend said, the network would insist on “human conflict.” Of course, if we were to do it, I’d be able to give them more than just conflict. I’d provide an on-camera suicide.

  So we ditched the reality show idea.

  No matter what method of transportation we ultimately chose, we had another problem that seemed insurmountable. We were going to need people to help us; there was no way around that. Debbie and I simply could not do it on our own.

  I am not really the type to ask for a favor, and certainly not one of this magnitude. That’s not to say I’m
not a taker; I take with both hands. But I am not often an asker. And being a taker without being an asker is not an easy thing to pull off.

  Enter Cyndi Flores.

  I had communicated occasionally in the past with Cyndi, who had been living in North Carolina. She had e-mailed me, introducing herself and asking for my help with an auction her dog rescue group was having, so I donated a signed book and a character name. What that means is that the winning bidder could have his or her name used in a future book as a character. If they chose to, they could use their dog’s name instead. I do that frequently with rescue groups around the country, and they often make pretty good money in the process.

  The auction went well, and after that Cyndi and I communicated intermittently. I’m a hermit in real life but Mr. Sociable when it comes to e-mails. I had been impressed by Cyndi’s dedication to the rescue group, and her obvious ability to make things happen.

  So, since I had asked almost everybody else in America if they had ideas on how to move the dogs, I asked her. The next day she e-mailed me back, and her message included the following:

  Potential Challenges Moving Dogs Cross-Country

  1. Vehicles for 20+ dogs and humans to drive them.

  2. Poop and exercise breaks (getting them out of vehicles, leashed, walked, etc.).

  3. Feeding breaks and having to carry enough food or buy in transit.

  4. Places to sleep dogs and humans comfortably.

  5. Risk Management Plan—what to do if there are car problems, sick dogs, or other travel issues (traffic, accident, etc.).

  6. Need to research state laws in the travel path to make sure there aren’t any silly laws like you can’t have 10 dogs in a Winnebago.

  7. And I’m sure things I haven’t even thought of yet.