by Kim Kavin
“I have to make sure the grants aren’t attached to a group like PETA,” he told me. “They have a history of coming in the back door and taking control. My staff works hard. The job here is hard. Most animal-control officers last two, three, maybe five years. I have a much better retention rate because we give the staff training and send them to conferences. I love animals, but my job is to manage this facility and keep the community safe. Some of these rescue groups, they see a dog on the side of the road suffering and a person on the side of the road suffering, and they ignore the person to save the dog. I put people’s safety first. That is part of our job here at animal control. I go by the rules and regulations of the county. I am paid to uphold the law.”
Shaw spent a good hour sitting and talking with me, and making sure that I understood how professional his animal-control operation was. But he knew, because of questions I’d submitted in advance, that I also wanted to talk about the gas chamber. It has fast become a lightning-rod topic for him and his fellow animal-control directors throughout the country, as rescue groups call it everything from cruel to barbaric to evil. Shaw made sure to tell me, even before I asked, that the gas chamber is a tool of animal control. It is nothing more, and nothing less. He said that it is not only one of the three legal methods of killing dogs according to the state of North Carolina, but that it is also an approved form of euthanasia by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
I nodded with understanding, and then I asked him whether he was aware that just two months earlier, in June 2011, the AVMA had issued a new proposed set of guidelines. Unlike in so many years past, the group was now specifically stating that gas chambers should not be used for routine euthanasia of dogs.
Shaw looked surprised, and then concerned.
And that’s when he offered to give me a tour and show me how it worked.
“This is where we’re getting to Blue’s story,” Shaw said as we walked out the back door of the original building and into the area that separates it from the new addition, which is the dog kennel. Local folks call this in-between space a sally port. I’ve always heard spaces like this referred to as breezeways. No matter the lingo, the construction is the same. We stood on concrete in the open air. On either side of us were floor-to-ceiling chainlink fences with large gates that connect the old building and the new kennel, and that swing open from the middle. This is where cars drive in to drop off puppies and dogs on one side, and where trucks arrive to collect them on the other side after they have been killed.
Blue most likely came in through this drop-off gate, Shaw says. If he was only four or five months old when he arrived in New Jersey, and he had already been neutered and healed from the surgery, then the odds are good that he was no more than two or three months old when he was left here. Since the shelter doesn’t name the dogs who come in, there is no way to tell exactly how Blue arrived, but Shaw’s best guess based on what he’s seen every day for nearly fifteen years in this place is that Blue was part of an unwanted litter of puppies. That means Blue would have been dropped off by a car here in the breezeway, about ten steps away from the gas chamber in plain view.
Now, I’m the first to admit that most pieces of machinery in my own basement are like alien spaceships to me. If I hadn’t seen a photograph of the gas chamber beforehand, I would have assumed it was some kind of air handler attached to the original building. It’s a large stainless-steel box, about the shape of a palette of bottled water cases being delivered to a convenience store. Its height is about four feet tall and its depth appeared to be a bit longer, making the entire chamber about the size of four bottled water cases stacked atop one another. As people drop off puppies like Blue, the chamber stands off to the right, clear as day. Many people probably don’t even notice it, the same way I don’t typically look at my own furnace all too carefully. When I asked around town later that day, every local resident I met seemed surprised to learn that they lived in a county that still used a gas chamber at all.
Shaw says that having the gas chamber here is a decision made by the county and the state—not by him. It is a legal tool that he is given in order to perform his job, just like lethal injection.
“Now, in my opinion, it’s not a cruel way to euthanize an animal,” he says. “There really is no humane way to euthanize a healthy animal. But if I thought it was cruel, it would be lying in a ditch somewhere instead of standing in this building.”
He walked over to the chamber and swung its door open so I could look inside. I saw three stalls, much like the ones that separate racehorses at the start of the Kentucky Derby. The separating walls of each stall were see-through thanks to large holes that let the gas flow between them. If Blue had been placed inside, he most likely would have pawed at the separating wall to get to the dog next door, the same way that most puppies paw from inside kennels or crates to get to dogs or people on the other side.
First, Shaw showed me how his staff uses the gas chamber to kill cats. He grabbed a cat carrier from atop a nearby stack and explained how it fits inside the gas-chamber stall.
“Is that size carrier the same as what you would use for a little puppy like Blue?” I asked.
He thought for a moment—and then his eyes grew wide with epiphany.
“If he was really that little, if he was really a puppy, then he wouldn’t have gone into this gas chamber at all,” Shaw blurted. “Any dog four months or younger is killed by lethal injection, not by the gas chamber. That’s the rule. We take ’em inside the euthanasia room. We love ’em and rub ’em for a few minutes. And then we say good-bye.”
Shaw next pointed out the carbon-monoxide detector installed just above the chamber door. We were in the open air, so it really wasn’t doing much good, but he said the law requires it so his department has it for safety.
I recalled that a carbon-monoxide detector was among the AVMA guidelines for proper gas chamber use. Those guidelines also state that all workers must understand the hazards of the chamber itself. I asked Shaw if his staff had been informed of the reports from the state departments of Health and Labor that showed chambers from the same manufacturer had leaked gas and overexposed workers to fumes in Sampson and Davidson counties.
As with my earlier question about the newly proposed AVMA guidelines, he looked surprised. “I hadn’t heard about any of that,” he said quietly before continuing our tour.
That’s when I started doing some mental math. If dogs are required to be separated inside the chamber, and there are only three stalls, and the chamber has to be loaded, filled with gas, and then unloaded to complete a single cycle, then killing dogs in a gas chamber according to the guidelines really isn’t all that much faster than killing them by lethal injection, which advocates say is far more humane.
I asked Shaw if he ever puts more than one dog into each of the three chambers, for efficiency. Rescue advocates I spoke with allege that some shelter directors do just that, including gassing litters of puppies in violation of the law. These critics said that since the shelters don’t know the actual ages of abandoned dogs anyway, they take the easier route of gassing any puppies they can versus giving them individual, lethal injections.
In fact, a shelter director in Gaston County, North Carolina, did an entire analysis to show how much more cost effective the gas chambers are compared with lethal injection. He deter- mined that killing in the chamber costs $4.66 per animal while killing with injections costs $11.21. “With the [gas chamber] flexibility of euthanizing multiple and not individual animals,” the Gaston County director told the local newspaper, “there’s certainly less time involved.”
Shaw didn’t say anything about using the gas chamber in Person County to save time or make the job easier. He once again referred to the way he works within the bounds of the law. “This is a professionally built chamber,” he told me. “Before I worked here, it used to be a wooden box that they backed a car up to. Now we have this, and before the state came and said we had to divide it, they’d pu
t five, six, seven dogs in here. But now, it’s three.
“I’m not going to say it’s only vicious dogs,” he continued. “That would not be true. If we have thirteen dogs to go down in one day, we might not have enough [lethal injection] juice to do the job, especially if they’re bigger dogs. I have never allowed an animal to be shot inside this facility, so there are times when this chamber is the only legal option.”
Our tour ended inside the recent addition, which is the dog kennel. It has two sections of cages. The one closest to the gas chamber contains fourteen cages side by side. The second section, in the far corner, contains ten cages across from one another with five on each side—five for dogs the shelter has decided are preferable for adoption, and five for dogs that rescue groups have offered to take. The dogs in these ten cages are the lucky ones. The dogs who are in the larger row of cages, Shaw told me, don’t even get a walk outside before their three legally mandated holding days are up.
“Now, anybody can come and adopt any of these dogs in any of the cages,” Shaw said. “It’s not like we’re saying the ones in these cages have no chance at all. But the dogs in the back have been temperament tested with people and with other dogs, and they’re the ones we think have the best chance.”
Rescue groups that have attained 501(c) (3) charity status are allowed to enter the kennel and choose any dogs they want to save, except for ones the shelter has deemed rabid or vicious, Shaw told me more than once. He pointed to a cage in the larger row where a dog had been tagged for rescue as an example. I looked down and saw a puppy wagging his tail and trying to jump through the cage to get to me. Next door, in a cage that had not been tagged for rescue, was a tiny little brindle just like Blue. The date on his card was just two days from now. It reminded me of the expiration dates on gallons of milk at the grocery store.
At the time when Blue was here, a volunteer named Rhonda Beach from Canine Volunteer Rescue in Person County would walk through the kennel with Annie Turner and choose the dogs to be saved. While Shaw had no idea which dog Blue might have been, Beach told me that she remembered him distinctly. I spoke to her more than a year after she tagged him for rescue at the shelter, a year when he was one of more than three hundred dogs she helped to save. She could still remember the way he had looked at her, his brown eyes wide and worried, his body cowering with fear.
Blue was in the long row of cages, she told me. He was one of the dogs the shelter did not deem preferable for adoption.
“He was a shy one,” she recalls. “He was reserved. He wasn’t a bouncy, crazy puppy. He was playful, but he had a very gentle spirit. The other dogs, they all ran up to the front of the cages when I walked near them, but Blue wasn’t up front wagging his tail. He is the kind of dog that this shelter always called unadoptable, the kind of dog they would always deny me the right to take out. But I could see it in his eyes that he was just plain scared. A lot of dogs who come out of that shelter are changed. They can smell death in there. They can hear the screams from the other dogs in the gas chamber. Blue was just so gentle and loving after all of that. I remember him like yesterday. There is no other word to describe him but scared.”
By county ordinance, Shaw told me, even the dogs in the preferable cages can only be held for fifteen days at most. He does everything he can think to do within his budget, he said, to try to get them homes during that time. His staff puts their photographs on Petfinder.com. They also run “Pet of the Week” advertisements in the twice-weekly Courier-Times. He instituted a “Strut a Mutt” program for local residents to come inside the shelter and walk the dogs, to get to know them. He created a gravel trail out behind the kennels, in a wooded, parklike setting, so potential adopters can have some alone time with their favorite pooch and hopefully fall in love.
But few people respond, he said with a sigh. “We only have about thirty thousand people in all of Roxboro,” he explained. “In the past five or six years, factories have left. Every year, my budget gets cut by 5 or 6 percent more. There are only so many things that we can do, and unlike these rescue groups from all over the country, we have to try to adopt locally. There just aren’t enough people here who want all these dogs.”
I asked him what he thought of the multistate transports like the one that brought Blue home to me, matching dogs from places like Person County with locations like mine where there are lots of potential adopters. He didn’t know the logistics of how they worked, so I explained that Blue was put into an RV here in North Carolina by the local rescue group, and that I was told to wait for his arrival in New Jersey with the Pennsylvania rescue group by my side.
Shaw thought for a moment about the lack of official oversight. It surely seemed counterintuitive to him, given the way he feels he is asked to operate every day.
“I just hope that these rescue people up North, I hope that they’re keeping an eye on these dogs to make sure they’re okay,” he said. “It sounds like an awful lot of room for error to me.”
And it is—for adopters as well as for the dogs. It is a system based entirely upon one rescue trusting the judgment of another about a dog’s temperament and where he should end up. A good number of the people involved feel so strongly about saving every dog’s life that they will give some dogs a behavioral benefit of the doubt that is unwarranted. Shaw does not have that option. He is required to err on the side of human safety. Not every dog is as sweet and loving as Blue, though just about all are advertised as such. As with any dog acquired from a shelter or anywhere else, there must always be an element of “buyer beware.”2
Even so, as Shaw talked about room for error in the rescue system, I couldn’t help but notice that we were standing about two feet from the long row of cages where my happy, sweet, and very much alive boy Blue once sat with an orderly, carefully monitored, state-approved death sentence. The rescue system that has emerged in recent years may be haphazard, but it’s the only thing that saved Blue’s life—and that continues to save the lives of a lot of great dogs just like him.
Shaw must have seen me stumbling to collect my thoughts, because that’s when he told me a story that I didn’t even ask to hear. He started by acknowledging the notebook in my hand and saying that he wished I wouldn’t put what he was about to say into this book. Then he decided to tell me the story, anyway.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I wanted to be two things. One was an animal-control officer. Growing up in Maryland, I used to deliver newspapers, and I’d find all these stray dogs and bring them home. After a while my dad would call me over and say, ‘Son, the fence is only so big. You have to take these dogs down to the pound.’ So I would call the local animal-control officer, and we’d have a good, long talk, and the next week, when I was delivering my newspapers, I’d see that dog’s picture in the paper. I figured that’s a pretty good job, being an animalcontrol officer. It means you get to find homes for stray dogs who need them.”
“The other thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a Marine,” he continued. “That’s what came first for me. I was in Beirut working at a checkpoint, and there were all these stray dogs around. We were ordered absolutely not to feed those dogs or be nice to them, but a few of us, you know, we gave them food and petted them. They were just the nicest dogs. Now, one day, a terrorist drove up to that checkpoint. Those dogs knew it was a terrorist. They started barking. They alerted all of us Marines. And all of those dogs, they died that day in the explosion, but not a single Marine did. All of the Marines lived because the dogs helped to save us.”
I looked right into Shaw’s eyes as he finished that story, and I realized why he didn’t want his fellow soldiers and current colleagues in the Animal Control Department to know it.
He was starting to cry.
2 For tips on bringing home a shelter dog, see “What You Can Do” at the end of this book.
Truth in Numbers
The microfilm machine at Person County Library was making me blind. Well, maybe not completely blind, but certainly in need of
a cold compress across my eyelids. I’d call the machine ancient, but I’ve seen ruins in Turkey that have held up better over the centuries. And my research efforts weren’t being helped by the fact that the ultra-kind, yet ultra-small, library staff had no index of articles. To find anything about the local animal shelter dating back to the first printing of the newspaper in 1881, I literally had to read years’ worth of copies, inching the ever-jamming microfilm tape forward, page by poorly scanned page.
It was like finding a gold nugget in a Rocky Mountain stream when I saw the front-page article from Wednesday, January 18, 2006. The headline read: “Larger shelter sparks hope for more animal adoptions.” It was written by an intern named Grey Pentecost who has since become a staffer. It included a photograph of construction getting under way for the kennel addition in which Ron Shaw and I had stood that same week, the one with the long row of cages where Blue had once sat.
The paragraph that caught my eye was buried on the story’s jump page, almost at the end of the article itself. It stated that thanks to the new addition, “the shelter will be able to hold fifty dogs, twelve more than before.”
That sounded awfully good to me, as I’m sure it had to every dog lover in Person County who read it and ponied up the tax dollars to pay for it.