Saved

by Karin Winegar

  Later that day, we drive to Bill and Susan’s home in a quiet, elegantly landscaped gated community in the Biltmore Hotel area. The sunny townhouse has rich coral and cinnabar walls, black granite kitchen countertops, and Lalique nudes. While we wait for Bill to come home from his drive-time financial show on a local AM station, Susan pours white wine into etched goblets (“some of Grandma’s crystal from the Confederate War,” she says, and we don’t doubt it). And we gratefully settle ourselves onto the couch to be licked by three poodles, Scratch, Sniff, and Sedona. They are, of course, rescues. Scratch and Sniff were littermates that Susan scooped up at the opening of a new shelter run by the Arizona Animal Care and Control. Sedona was a little red runt, the unsold last of ten puppies that was about to be given to the pound.

  “Mr. Sniff, we didn’t think he’d make it,” says Susan. “He had mange and kennel cough, and he had been abused and would shrink from your hand. He’d given up and wanted to die. Now we call him Bubba the Love Sponge or Scratchmo, because he is Sammy Davis Jr. reincarnated. It’s ‘let me show you what I can do.’”

  “I was always dragging home cats, which Mother would give away because I am so allergic to cats,” says Susan. “My first dog was a Boston bulldog that Mom named Sinner Girl (Mom was a flapper, what can I tell ya?). Sinner Girl died in my junior year in high school. Later that spring, Mother took me to Oklahoma City, and we got my first poodle, named, of course, Madame Suzette. It’s been a long love affair since then, and I’ve never been without a poodle.”

  Just beyond the patio, Ernie and Bertha, a South African gray goose and a white snow goose, totter out of the pond and shriek like rusty gates, accompanied by a bevy of mallard ducks Susan and Bill have named Ethel, Fred, and Chester. Susan designed Scratch & Sniff to focus on cats and dogs, but that doesn’t stop her from rescuing other creatures.

  “One day Ernie was eating out of my hand, and he just fell down,” Susan recalls. “When I picked him up, I found he weighed about an ounce, so I took him to the vet. Well, he had a fungus in his bill, and he was starving. I felt so bad that I hadn’t seen it before. It took six months of vet care and injections in the breast, but he got better.”

  Bill arrives home, handsome in a silvering, middle-aged, on-camera guy way, with a soft, round Kansas voice and easy cordiality. Like Susan, his life has been built around people and good causes, and his public has reciprocated: not long ago, he was voted All-Time Favorite Arizona Radio Personality.

  But there is someone missing: Susan opens a velvet-covered album containing photos of their beloved bichon frise, Delilah. The queen of the Heywood household, the imp who belly flopped in the fountain at the Arizona Biltmore, Delilah ruled the roost from the leopard-print chair in the entry. She also liked to play ball, but only with blue balls, and when she ran, she dragged little Sedona along, clinging to her hind leg or her tail. “Delilah was the most human and cat-like of any animal I’ve ever known or had an opportunity to love; she was so sensitive to voices and feelings,” says Susan. Then she and Bill go pale beneath their tans. Delilah died of autoimmune hemolytic anemia, a swift and inexorable disease, just two months ago.

  Delilah came into their lives when a previous poodle, Mr. Laguna, passed away, leaving Bill and Susan dogless. “Couples our age go through the emotional trauma of losing a pet, and often they say, ‘Never again,’ so I wrote myself a contract that within a month after losing my dog, I would go out and look for a puppy, because I don’t want to live my life with that vacant part of my heart,” says Susan. “We don’t have a big home, and without the patter of dog paws it would feel like a mausoleum.”

  For Susan, dogs have been a continuous chain of love from puppyhood to their old age or death, but for Bill, raised on a farm in Kansas, animals just meant searing, repeated loss. Bill’s stepfather worked in construction as a bridge builder, and the family lived in a mobile home, traveling the little towns of Kansas from Zimmerdale to Poplin to Woodbine.

  “He’d bring home a puppy, and three months later we’d have to move to the next town, and he’d tell me, ‘We can’t take Snickers; we will give him to the boss,’” says Bill. “I was not able to get attached to a dog, or a place we lived, or anybody at school, so I steeled myself, put a shield between me and anything that mattered,” Bill says. “I learned to be very cold, and not to care about dogs, people, or teachers. I was kind of a bad boy.”

  Around seventh grade, when Bill moved to his grandparents’ farm, the loss continued. “I’d be given a horse, and then I’d wake up one morning and ask what happened to Ginger. My granddad or stepdad would say, ‘We sold her last night to somebody.’ The same with dogs, chickens—everything was disposable.”

  “I had a beautiful collie, and my stepdad caught her in the chicken house eating eggs, so he took her behind the barn, and I went with him, and he shot her between the eyes—boom! And there was a series of events like that up through when I was seventeen or eighteen years old.”

  Because he was not allowed to rely on people or animals as a child, Bill found stability in basketball. “Sports taught me not to be a selfish schmuck, to learn to care about and play with a team,” he says. “I was one of the first sophomores to make the starting five on the high-school team, but I had a habit of quitting on the play. One day the coach, a John Wooten type, told me, ‘I will put you so low on the totem pole for that that they will have to pipe light down to you.’ So I had to play my way back up through the ranks. I became All-American at junior college, but the lesson was don’t quit, don’t be a brat, and do get attached, because if you don’t, nothing means anything.”

  So Bill is puzzled by the widespread lack of attachment to dogs and cats. “Once a week, the newspaper publishes a graph from the Humane Society on their animal intakes,” he says. “People come and go in Phoenix, this is a very transient area, and for every three who arrive, two leave, and the dog is the first disposable thing. They leave it behind like a BIC lighter.”

  Bill and Susan have been married twenty-eight years, through many dogs, and they plan to keep it that way forever. “Will Rogers said if there are no dogs in heaven, I don’t want to go to that heaven, or something like that,” says Susan. “That’s how we feel.”

  Chutzpah, caring, and marketing savvy plus Bill’s media stardom have helped the couple muster some real muscle toward animal rescue. They recently flexed that muscle when a local wild-animal park was threatened.

  “The native tribe owned the land it was on and gave the people thirty days to get out, because the tribe wanted to build an RV park there,” says Bill. “There were 365 exotic animals, everything from giraffes to lions and tigers. So I got the owner on the air. We put the word out everywhere: if you’ve got a truck, saw, hammer, or can volunteer some time, come help them move. And we had people with semitrucks cut holes in the tops of them for the giraffes. Some professional animal movers from the Carolinas drove here to help.”

  As a result of the publicity, someone donated land in Camp Verde, Arizona, for the menagerie. “It’s a much better place, cooler than Phoenix,” Bill says. “And there was nothing there to house the animals, so people donated electrical work and plumbing work and built facilities. It was a massive exercise.”

  Their ability to make those links is one of their strengths. “For us to move the animals along, we have to depend on other humans; animals cannot do it for themselves,” Susan says. “I am very conservative in style. To throw blood on people wearing fur coats is not part of my philosophy.”

  In order to bring their work home in a visceral way to potential contributors, Susan occasionally takes them to visit some of the groups supported by Scratch & Sniff. She recently shepherded ten friends to a shelter for pure-bred dogs. They were so moved that they all got on the phones, called friends, and placed half a dozen dogs before the day was out.

  She persuaded another group to visit a service that offers pet therapy for blind and sight-impaired children. “Desiree is five years old; she cannot walk, cannot speak
, and they are teaching her to crawl,” she recalls. “The only thing that will motivate her to crawl is Lizzie, a collie. So they place Desiree at the end of a padded area, and she moves toward the dog. Lizzie herself was trying to crawl to reach Desiree. When they reached each other, Lizzie fell on her face, licked her face, her thick glasses, and for the entire time we were there, Desiree was just wallowing in Lizzie. It helped me and potential funders understand what the dollars are doing, because sometimes we are removed from fieldwork.”

  And it’s the humane fieldworkers whom she admires most, she says. “I spend a couple of Saturdays helping the Petmobile with adoptions, but it’s very hard to leave the animals behind, not knowing if they are going to be adopted or euthanized. How do you sleep?”

  “I can’t imagine life without a dog, without that love as a part of my heart,” Susan says. “Everybody says that, but it’s their total acceptance. A dog is always glad to see me no matter how I look or what mood I’m in. I reach over at night and touch that fur and have them snuggle up. Without dogs, I think life would be so lonely.”

  Scratch & Sniff has a T-shirt with the slogan: “We Are Responsible for What We Have Tamed.”

  “I love that; isn’t that good?” says Susan. “If I had a creed, I’d like for people to understand and adopt; that’s it. We have domesticated all these dogs and cats, and they are our responsibility now. Some of the people in pet organizations have seen the underbelly of humanity and have given up on people. But if we have any hope to help animals, it’s with humans.”

  25

  ALWAYS BRINGING IT HOME

  RON DANTA AND DANNY ROBERTSHAW AND THEIR DOGS AND CATS

  THIS IS THE Deep South, the lowland around Camden, South Carolina, weighted by a wet heat so oppressive in summer that farm work begins in early morning and leaves off by noon or two o’clock. Down here even modest homes have a man-made bass pond; grits and green-tomato pickle are on restaurant menus; and gas stations feature a selection of china figurines including the Ten Commandments and black praying hands, as well as bumper stickers that declare: “Possum, the Other White Meat.”

  Tall pines shoot up from the red sand; mourning doves call amid sizzling choirs of cicadas; alligators sail silently across lakes; and white cattle egrets convene in the trees. And on the flat, rich land where cotton still blossoms just outside the town, at least one family has held on to their plantation for more than two centuries.

  Horse trainers Ron Danta and Danny Robertshaw thrive here at their Beaver River Farm, down a lane of young live oaks hung with strands of Spanish moss leading to a low white farmhouse. In the field along the driveway, women in leather chaps and helmets trot and canter horses to the faint songs of mockingbirds and the bantam rooster in the farm’s chicken coop. The stable doors are tall and open to the breeze, and each horse is dressed in a plaid fly sheet, its halter buffered in sheepskin.

  Ron appears quietly, a blue-eyed, silver blonde, six foot eight inches tall and wearing jeans and a polo shirt. When I step out of the car and stand next to him, the word Viking comes to mind. “Would you like to see the Kitty Hilton?” says Ron—so much for the Viking image, I think—and we follow him over the grass to the side of the stable.

  Horses are their business, but rescuing dogs and cats is their calling: on the outer wall of the stable is a spacious cage with carpeted ramps, climbing logs, and napping ledges. A chicken-wire-covered catwalk runs from the large pen up the wall of the stable into the barn itself and spans the stable aisle to the hayloft. Some two dozen cats—orange tabbies, calicoes, and grays—snooze in the grass or on ledges; others hide in the hay.

  “Hi, Mama Kitty,” Ron says, squatting to stroke a cream calico through the wire. “She is the oldest one, and she has eye herpes that need medication twice a day. We’ve had her nine years.”

  “Here’s Stachio,” he says, pointing out an orange tabby with an orange mustache. “We found him with his dead littermate on the road near Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. He had mange and ringworm and was so little he had to be bottle-fed . . . Snow Kitty was up in a tree—we went and got a ladder.”

  Wherever they go, Ron and Danny keep Havahart traps in their trucks and horse trailers along with Danny’s homemade liver snacks, a handy stash for luring frightened dogs off freeway medians, lost cats from restaurant parking lots, and injured and starved animals in trailer parks or the woods.

  “We can’t pass a scraggly dog on the road,” says Ron. “Our hearts just pound, and we drive to the next exit and come back. And at restaurants, if we see them out back by the trash cans, we catch them. We tackle them if we have to.”

  A slick black dog, possibly with Doberman ancestors, waggles his rump with joy while greeting us and rolls over on his back. “That’s Wino,” says Ron. “He was found with a bullet through his heart and lungs, left in a Camden dump in all the beer and wine bottles. We thought he was dead. He is the sweetest dog!”

  We are joined by a gold, dingo-looking creature named CJ (“the man used to beat her. She’s still scared of men in baseball caps”) and Ebenezer, a miniature wirehaired dachshund (“rescued from a Kentucky puppy mill”), who seizes a saliva-soaked, green tennis ball and drops it at my feet. Ebenezer and I play fetch until the ball is so saturated with his drool that it gives off a fine mist when it bounces on the grass.

  Ron and Danny spend December through April in Palm Beach, Florida, with their clients at the big horse shows, staying in their second home on Lake Wellington with six of their dogs (“the neediest ones,” they say). On the horse-show grounds, the two blonde, tan men—a sort of Siegfried & Roy of the horse world—are a common sight, breezing along in a three-seat golf cart packed with dogs.

  They are gods in the equestrian competition circuit. In 1989, Danny won the hunter-over-fences championship at not one but all of the most prestigious horse shows in North America: Devon, the Pennsylvania National, the Washington International, at Madison Square Garden, and the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. It had not been done before or has not been repeated since. He was the leading hunter rider of the year. And now, despite having lost five discs in his spine to the rigors of his sport, he trains horses daily.

  Their clients are women and girls from all over the country. Some arrive via the family jet and drive to the farm, where a crack crew of stablehands make sure their horse is buffed, saddled, and ready. They take a lesson—trotting and cantering in circles and over the barrels, rocks, timbers, and poles in the jump field—with Ron or Danny gently encouraging and correcting. Then they dismount, hand the horse back to the grooms, and are home in time for dinner. Often, the students go home with a dog or cat as well. Over the years, Danny and Ron have matched more than two hundred rescued animals with their clients, family, and friends.

  “It’s my belief that every animal, like every person, has its own personality, and we are matchmakers,” says Danny. “Just like with our horses: we want the temperament to suit the customer or friend. We want them to go somewhere they are loved. We don’t push; we just make the animal available, and if the match transpires, you can tell. The friend meets the animal and just has to have the dog or cat. With horses, we just hope it stays sound—our name and reputation as trainers are on the line. Either way, nobody wants it to work more than we do.”

  “Sometimes we offer the animal because there’s a sadness in someone’s situation and what we have can fix it,” says Ron. “Or there’s a void in their lives the animal can help fill.”

  And to those who adopt the dogs, they often give short pieces called “Rainbow Bridge” and “A Dog Sits Waiting.” Ron hands me a copy of the latter.

  A dog sits waiting in the cold autumn sun, too faithful to leave, too frightened to run.

  He’s been here for days now with nothing to do but sit by the road, waiting for you.

  He can’t understand why you left him that day. He thought you were stopping to play.

  He’s sure you’ll come back and that’s why he stays.

  How
long will he suffer? How many more days?

  His legs have grown weak; his throat’s parched and dry.

  He’s sick now from hunger and falls with a sigh.

  He lays down his head and closes his eyes.

  I wish you could see how a waiting dog dies.

  (Kathy Flood, “A Dog Sits Waiting”)

  Danny and Ron have rescued many waiting dogs. Under the shady cedars and sweet gums near their house, the dogs yet to be adopted and the dogs they are keeping for themselves live in grassy pens with igloo-shaped dog shelters and wooden sheds.

  Blue, a foxhound, dances happily around his pen, his bark a loud, wheezy whisper. “He weighed twenty-seven pounds and was so full of ticks that he was very anemic,” Ron explains. “He took us four days to catch. And when we got him home, he barked twenty-four hours a day. I mean nonstop! I don’t know when he slept.”

  Blue’s kennel mate, Bagel the beagle, scrambles up from a cool trench he has dug under the roots of a tree. Bagel had been hit by a car on the interstate and was lying on the shoulder of the road. “I was driving past and thought he was dead, but he moved his head just a bit,” says Ron. “Both his hind legs and hips were broken. And people were just driving by.”

  Addie is stout and cheery with wide-set brown eyes and short golden hair, and she is still nimble at fifteen. “She was living at Seabrook Island, South Carolina, and she’d walk the seventeen miles from the Texaco station to beg for food at the gate of the island development,” says Ron. “The guards at Seabrook had been trying to catch her for years. They finally got her, but when we asked if we could have her, they said no. So we had a couple of women friends distract them, and we sneaked in back of the guard office and took her. She was six weeks at the vet with heartworm; she was in terrible condition. The next year she upgraded her life to our air-conditioned condo at the beach.”