by Kim Kavin
Now that Blue has grown a bit older and more comfortable in his own home, he understands that my walking up the driveway to get the mail does not constitute his abandonment. He also has made his peace with my taking out the garbage and doing the laundry (though he remains wary of the vacuum and continues his multifaceted campaign to bark it into submission). And even though I know that the day with the window grille was just a puppy reacting to his new mom doing something he hadn’t expected, the thought of how he tried so desperately to stay by my side left me wondering how he must have felt at the moment another human being plopped him into a cage at the North Carolina shelter. The metal door closed in upon him, and then the person walked away with his back as well as his heart turned on Blue—forever.
Though I’d never stepped foot in a place like that, or inside any animal shelter, for that matter, my everyday encounters with Blue had already left me plagued by the same sense of moral imperative that Armstrong talked about at breakfast. I’ve never been the kind of person who quits after starting a race. When my sister talked me into attempting a triathlon, the organizers literally had to follow me in a pickup truck, removing orange cones from the street as I unceremoniously became the very last competitor to bicycle past them—but I eventually made it, red-faced and gasping, all the way to the finish line. When it came to learning more and more about Blue, I figured that if I already, albeit inadvertently, had become a person who played even a minor role in this national grassroots effort to save dogs like him, then I’d better make every possible attempt to fully understand the problem. The underlying questions about this world that Blue so deeply embodied were nagging at me, plain and simple. They were rattling around in my brain like the chains of a restless ghost.
According to my map, Person County, North Carolina, is exactly 482 miles from my house in New Jersey. This, to most people, may seem like a ridiculous distance to travel in search of answers about a new puppy. To my husband and me, though, this was who I am and what I do. Most of my work as a journalist takes me thousands of miles around the world an average of once a month. I earn a living writing primarily about boats and travel, so it’s not unusual for a magazine editor to call and say, “Grab your notebook and camera. We need you to fly to Thailand for a few days.” I’m in the wrong time zone just as often as regular people are in the right lane on the highway. I get sent to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean the way other business travelers book flights to Indiana or Michigan. In the context of my life, eight hours of driving, a few dollars’ worth of turnpike tolls, and less than two tanks of gas seemed like a small price to pay for finding some more answers about our new puppy. Blue was now a member of our family. I wanted to know who he really was. I was his mother, after all. Something had made him sick and afraid.
My letter to Person County Manager Heidi York and Animal Control Director Ron Shaw landed on their desks in midsummer 2011. I wanted a sit-down conversation and a tour of the building where Blue was once facing a death sentence.
After exchanging a few e-mails with the Person County attorney, I found myself driving up to the facility on Chub Lake Road in Roxboro. The city is a financial flip side of the part of New Jersey where I live, with Census data alone implying a picture of contrast so stark that it would have to be painted solely in black and white. In my community, the median household income is about $98,000 and only 2 percent of people live below the poverty line. In Roxboro, the median household income is $31,500 and nearly 17 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. I marveled at the differences between where Blue had come from and where he had ended up. Not only were these communities separated by hundreds of miles and several state lines, they were also separated by deep socioeconomic differences.
Shaw had told me, via e-mail, that his shelter was small and working with limited funds because of the recession, so I had tried to mentally prepare for a scene that would be tough on my soul. But as I drove closer, it was hard to think about anything other than the fact that, once I stepped inside the building, I would be meeting the man who had once been mere hours away from killing Blue.
My first order of business, actually, would be to introduce myself, reach out, and politely shake his hand.
1 I highly recommend The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, as well as Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. They changed the way I buy, cook, and eat meat every day. If you’d rather watch than read, then you can check out their appearances in the excellent documentary film Food, Inc.
The Reality of a Childhood Dream
It was hard for me to imagine tobacco fields as far as the eye can see as I drove southbound along Route 49 toward Roxboro. Back in the first half of the 1900s, tobacco is what kept the economy in Person County afloat. Big-type headlines in the newspaper couldn’t always fit the word “tobacco,” so editors used the shorter word “leaf.” Everybody knew what it meant, even if the elders couldn’t read, especially when the news was “School Opening Postponed due to Late Leaf Crop.”
There’s still some tobacco growing today in the fields among Person County’s four hundred or so square miles, but as Americans become more health conscious, soybeans are supplanting The Leaf as a more economically viable choice. The county does have two industrial parks, but the nearest center of big business is at least an hour beyond in the Raleigh-Durham region, where Research Triangle is home to a number of high-tech companies and university research facilities. I felt like I was a planet away from anything resembling a corporate skyscraper as I drove around the boundaries of Roxboro proper. Between the “Welcome to Person County” sign and the edge of the city, I passed a great deal of open land and some modest homes with trucks in the driveway that were no doubt used for father-son fishing trips on the weekends. Two signs caught my eye along the side of this main highway, one with a real-estate advertisement for a 106-acre parcel and another handwritten by somebody selling a dozen eggs for a dollar. After I got to Roxboro’s three-block-long main street, I saw telltale signs of life as it is today in Person County. “For rent” posters hung in more than a half-dozen empty storefronts.
In the span of a single day, I had driven into a part of America that seemed truly foreign to me. Where I live on the edge of commuting distance into New York City, we have cornfields, for sure, and a fair number of farm stands, but we also have a lot of gorgeous stables used by Olympic-level riders. The “for sale” signs usually refer to homes on parcels that have been subdivided down to less than an acre, any extra cars in the driveways are usually fuel-efficient foreign models, and people selling eggs at $4 a dozen always include the word “organic” on their handmade signs. My town, too, has been hit hard by the recession, but we have new businesses where the old ones used to be, as opposed to rows of vacancies.
As a travel writer, I’m used to seeing a lot of unique communities. I’ve spent time everywhere from ancient Greek harbors where donkeys are still the primary mode of transportation to Jamaican coffee farms where women live in half-built cinderblock homes to Fijian islands where thatched huts are still the primary form of shelter. Driving into Person County made me feel like I was going not only into yet another new place, but also into a contrasting culture.
I couldn’t help but wonder if that culture had anything to do with the fact that so many dogs like Blue seemed to be in trouble here, and whether the way of life where I live had anything to do with the fact that so many of them were finding homes there.
The current animal shelter, as best as anybody can remember in Person County, was originally built sometime during the 1950s. It’s a couple of miles outside of town, down a gravel driveway that it shares with the Public Works Maintenance Building. The shelter is prominently advertised along the road by a white sign with bright blue letters and an image of the county seal that has faded from more than a few too many days beneath North Carolina’s 100-degree summer sun. But the building itself where dogs like Blue are kept is back behind the maintenance office, and behind the Dumpster, surrounded by a cha
in-link fence topped with angled barbed wire to keep people out after hours.
According to The Times-Courier, the problem with dogs as recently as the 1960s was strays running wild. The edition printed on Monday, February 15, 1960, carries a front-page story stating that the county dog warden picked up 86 stray dogs the previous month and found new homes for all but 7 dogs. The edition printed on Thursday, March 3, 1960, states that in February of that year, 117 stray dogs were picked up in the county. About half of them found new homes. Sixty-one were “disposed of” and another 16 were shot.
I had looked, while driving into town, for dogs running loose or in packs along the side of the road. I’d paid especially close attention to garbage cans behind the local eateries. When people talk about a rural community and an overcrowded animal shelter, the common assumption is that the problem is strays. But I hadn’t seen a single one, and apparently, it wasn’t for lack of looking. One of the first things that Animal Control Director Ron Shaw told me is that the county no longer has a feral dog problem. There are still strays, yes, but the far bigger problem is people who fail to spay and neuter their dogs. Those people bring box after box of puppies to the shelter, either unaware or unconcerned that the dogs have little chance of making it out of the building alive.
We began our talk in Shaw’s office, which is just a few steps from the shelter’s main entrance. The shelter’s front door boasts a weather-worn Petfinder.com bumper sticker whose top right corner is bent inward in dog-ear style. Inside the shelter’s entryway is the dispatcher’s desk, where calls are received about vicious animals, strays, or other problems. Behind the dispatcher’s desk is an office for the town’s three animal-control officers who respond to those calls. That office connects to the smaller office where Shaw works. Most of these spaces are institutional looking with few windows, limited natural light, and neutral yellowish paint. Everything was as clean as a grandmother’s favorite serving dish on the day that I visited, but the vibe was a far cry from warm or soothing. I had the same sense that I get when I walk into the police department in my own hometown, minus the bulletproof partition at the reception desk. This place, it seemed to me, was designed to create an aura of authority.
Next to Shaw’s office is by far the largest one, used by the facility’s kennel attendant/adoption agent. That room has a more welcoming feel, with dog toys and supplies that people can purchase, a vending machine filled with cold sodas, a fish tank, a long table with chairs for groups that visit, and a fuzzy orange orangutan hanging above a desk to lighten the mood. On the day that I stood at this room’s entrance, a Golden Retriever mix named Buddy was lounging comfortably on the blue sofa. He might as well have been in my own den at home, he looked so content.
Across the hallway from these offices are a couple of smaller, almost closet-size rooms, including the ones used for grooming and killing by lethal injection. Those two rooms are remarkably close to each other, actually. No dogs were in either of them on the morning that I visited. I actually couldn’t even hear a single dog barking as I walked from there into Shaw’s office.
Shaw is not a particularly large or imposing man, though he projected an air of serious command and control as he offered me a chair and sat down behind his desk. He wore his official uniform as a county animal-control officer, with solid colors of tan and brown—shades that could have been pulled right out of an Operation Desert Storm camouflage jacket. The official seal of the Person County Animal Control department was embroidered onto his shirt like a soldier’s name or the American flag might be. The backdrop behind his desk was a wall filled with official-looking certificates from various training courses. They filled my line of vision like a subliminal show of clout whenever I looked him directly in the eye.
His face is round and kind, though topped by a buzz cut that no doubt served him well during his time as a detention sergeant with the county’s human prisoners back in the early 1990s. Given his resumé and the salt-and-pepper flecks in his mustache, I’d guess that Shaw is in his mid-fifties. He has been Animal Control director for the county since 1997, and he is proud to say that he was the first person ever to hold that professional title instead of being called, simply, dogcatcher. Shaw is an ex-military man, and I got the feeling from him that the title distinction was important. The title defines the job. It defines the person’s place in the pecking order of the system. It also defines how the person is expected to carry himself. His tone when explaining his title reminded me of people in war zones who are hired as independent contractors to assist troops in combat, and who get offended if anyone dares to call them a mercenary for hire.
One of the first things Shaw did after we sat down across from one another was attempt to size me up. He wanted to know whether I really was the unlikely person I had claimed to be—a journalist from New Jersey who had somehow ended up adopting a dog who was once on death row in this building, and then drove hundreds of miles because I wanted to have a conversation. My entire existence seemed far-fetched to him, like a cover story begging to be blown apart. And I couldn’t blame him, seeing as how some rescue advocates try to infiltrate shelters and catch the bosses saying something that will ultimately get them fired. I also didn’t mind him poking at me a bit with a few questions, since he was just as respectful as I planned to be with him when I started asking questions of my own.
“I’d like to know, before we get started, what your view is of no-kill shelters,” Shaw said. “Everybody who comes in here to talk to me, I always want to know the answer to that question.”
I took a moment to think before I spoke, assuming that others with zero experience had sat here plenty of times telling the fourteen-year veteran of animal control precisely how they thought he should be doing his job differently.
“I’m no expert,” I said. “I’m just an everyday dog owner. But if you mean shelters where they say ‘no-kill’ as if it’s a good thing but then keep the dogs locked in cages all their lives, well, I’d have to say I think that’s cruel to the dogs. On the other hand, if you mean ‘no-kill’ as in people working hard to save as many dogs as possible and get them good homes, then I’m for it one hundred percent.”
Shaw nodded and said, as if checking a box in his mind, “So then we’re in agreement on that.”
He kept looking directly at me, holding my gaze as if it were tangible evidence, really, as he relaxed ever so slightly in his chair. He didn’t sit back the way somebody does when he believes he’s completely safe, but his arms and fingers loosened just a few fractions of an inch, as if to say he trusted me—but just a little.
And then he started to talk about life inside this facility as he has lived it, beginning back in the days when things were much worse than they are now.
For about the first two years that he held the job, Shaw told me, he was required to kill every dog who came in unless somebody could prove the pup had been vaccinated against rabies. Plenty of raccoons, foxes, bats, and skunks in Person County are rabies carriers, and far too many dog owners fail to vaccinate their pooches against the disease. The county’s rules meant that if a family’s dog got loose, and the family could not produce a rabies vaccination certificate, the dog would die at animal control even if the parents and children came looking for him. Period.
Shaw says this was too much for him to bear, so he went to the county Board of Health and asked if he could at least seek new homes for dogs found in areas where no rabid animals had been recently found. “After some controversy,” he recalls, “they said yes. And immediately, we were allowed to work with rescue groups and do adoptions. We thought it was great. We started ‘Pet of the Week’ in the local paper.”
At that time, the building filled with offices where we were now sitting comprised the entirety of Person County Animal Control. It wasn’t just office space. It held all the cages and animals, too—and precious few people knew or cared that it existed. Shaw describes those days as almost a full decade’s worth of years before rescue groups became prominent
or vocal, and before people beyond his officers paid any attention whatsoever to what went on inside the shelter. He and his small staff were awfully isolated as he learned firsthand what it felt like to be the human being in charge of enforcing county and state rules regarding unwanted animals. He hardened himself to a job that required him to show up on time, kill healthy puppies, and then get up the next morning and do so again. He tried to do the job and follow the rules in as professional a way as he could, even though the work itself sometimes strained at the best parts of human nature.
Then, in the mid-2000s he learned that the state was going to begin inspecting county shelters and requiring training for the three legal ways to kill a dog in North Carolina: by lethal injection, by gunshot, and by gas chamber. “I didn’t have all the rescue groups on my back then,” he told me. “I came up with this brainstorm on my own, that we needed a better facility before these inspections started. I came up with a plan and went to the county. There was controversy about that, too—one county commissioner asked me, ‘Can’t you just have a roof and some cages?’—but they spent about $600,000 to build an addition and make the facility better. And all of a sudden after that, people got interested in us. They realized we existed. And we started hearing from all these rescue groups that put down our employees. Some of them wanted to help us do our jobs, but some said they didn’t have to abide by any rules and were going to do whatever they wanted. We had no idea how to work with them.”
During the past two or three years, Shaw says, a lot of his time has shifted from doing what he likes best—being out in the community helping people and animals—to defending himself and his employees against animal-welfare activists. The tone that some of the rescue groups take makes Shaw uneasy, to say the least. He felt he had done the right thing by asking the county for the building improvements, as well as for new funding to provide professional euthanasia training within the bounds of state law. He ran a clean operation. Not once, he told me, has his kennel ever been shut down because of parvo or another disease outbreak the way other shelters are because they are dirty and poorly run. He grew so concerned about what felt to him like an onslaught of negativity that he even started reading the fine print when applying for grants that might help the facility improve further.