Little Boy Blue

by Kim Kavin

  But it also sounded wrong. I flipped the pages in my notebook to the section where Shaw told me about the new kennel as we walked through it together. The new kennel has fourteen cages in one section and ten cages in the other. I later got a map of the facility from a local rescue group, and the map confirmed that I’d taken notes correctly.

  Fourteen cages plus ten cages does not equal fifty cages, as was promised to taxpayers in exchange for the money to build the new kennel. It’s instead a total of twenty-four cages, which is less than half the number of dogs Shaw implied could be held when talking to the newspaper reporter. With two dogs per cage, yes, the statement would have been accurate, but I did not see two dogs per cage during my tour. In some of the cages, I saw just one dog. In a few of the cages, I saw none.

  I next combed through the facility’s statistics for dogs, which Shaw gave me after I requested them under North Carolina’s public records laws. These are the kinds of documents that give most people a headache, filled with facts and figures so endless that even the best-intentioned public official will go out of his way not to investigate them. I laid them out on a table with a notepad and a calculator, right next to a printout of the newspaper article. I reread the headline: “Larger shelter sparks hope for more animal adoptions. ”Those last three words were important, I thought—more animal adoptions.

  But the data show that hasn’t happened, either. While the number of dogs being handled by Person County Animal Control has dropped by nearly 30 percent in recent years, and the number of cages has increased with the new kennel, the percentage of dog adoptions has not changed at all. It’s been hovering around 5 percent year after year. Without taking into account the work of rescue groups—which I’ll get to in a bit—the shelter has an unchanged kill rate of about 95 percent. In 2008, just shy of 5 percent of dogs went to new homes. In 2009, it was also about 5 percent. In 2010, there was a slight uptick to 6 percent. As of my visit in 2011, the shelter’s adoption rate was 4.8 percent. Unless a rescue group intervenes, dogs and puppies who are strays or drop-offs, like Blue, have only a one-in-twenty chance of making it out alive.

  Next, I took a look at the Animal Control Department’s budgets dating back the past five years, which Shaw also gave me under state public records law. He had told me that his department was small to begin with and was doing the best it could while enduring budget cuts of 5 percent to 6 percent each year during the recession. I expected to see an overall funding decrease of 25 or 30 percent in the past five years—but the budgets actually show a decrease of just 6 percent overall. For the year that I visited, the facility’s budget had actually been increased. The shelter today has about 94 percent of the budget that it had before the recession even began.

  Last, I worked through the Courier-Times to get copies of articles dating back to 2005 about the new kennel addition. Shaw had told me the kennel cost the county’s taxpayers about $600,000. Yet back in 2005, Shaw told the newspaper the new addition was costing taxpayers “a little over $500,000.”

  The actual figure, according to Person County’s financial records, is $562,954—in the ballpark of what Shaw told me, but an awful lot of money, I thought, to be so cavalierly discussed. Inconsistencies like the ones I was uncovering often lead rescue groups to cast an even harsher glance at operations like Person County Animal Control. They look at the high-kill rate, they scour the numbers, and they assume the shelter director is just plain lying about everything.

  I tried hard not to cast so harsh a glance, but the more I researched, the more I felt compelled to keep asking questions. For instance, I wanted to know how much money was spent on the gas chamber during the most recent year, versus the amount of money spent trying to find homes for the dogs like Blue who were on death row. My thinking was that if adopting dogs into new homes was indeed a priority, then it should have been reflected in the current budget.

  Yet again, the numbers did not match what I’d been told. While more than $7,600 was being spent on training and supplies related to the gas chamber, only $1,000 was in the budget for advertising. That thousand bucks includes money given to the local newspaper for something other than dog advertisements— someone at the shelter had kindly noted for me that the “Pet of the Week” advertisement is free. The person had handwritten that note on my budget printouts after creating a new line that did not exist in the official printout, a budget line titled “marketing for animals.” The only three items under it, added in ink from a blue pen, were the free newspaper ad, the free use of Petfinder.com, and the free use of the social networking site Facebook3. So, not only were adoptions not a financial priority, but they only became a written afterthought when a journalist like me asked to see them on paper.

  Taken together, all of this information made me a lot more inclined to listen carefully to the rescue advocates who had been crying foul from the day I first called to learn more about Blue’s background. Sometimes, I will admit, they sounded a little hysterical. On more than one occasion, the rescue advocates I interviewed from all across America ended up screaming at me through the telephone, they wanted so emphatically to make their voices heard. Even though I was listening, even though I was not arguing, a good many of them still felt the need to shout.

  Just maybe, I was starting to think, that’s because they had been so frustrated for so long by the reality that they say they encounter day to day—a reality that is far more in keeping with the numbers I’d crunched and far less rosy than the prearranged picture that had been presented during my tour.

  3 I went on Facebook to check out the Person County Animal Control page about two weeks after I visited the shelter. It had just twenty-three fans, no contact information, and not a single photograph of any dog who was currently available. It appeared that nobody had posted anything on the page, ever.

  Incoming Fire

  So far, the only human being I’d met face-to-face in Person County was Animal Control Director Ron Shaw. But I’d also gotten an earful of information about what happens to dogs like Blue in this place by way of telephone. I’d called Annie Turner several times to get more details, since she was president of a local rescue group. I’d also spent some time chatting with Rhonda Beach, the society volunteer who had first met Blue at the shelter. My plan was to meet both Turner and Beach later that week, after trying to reconcile what they’d told me with everything that I had seen for myself. Just as I’d done with the animal-control director, I wanted to try to verify that what I’d been hearing out of their mouths was actually the truth.

  Blue, I’d been told, was the last dog Turner and Beach worked together to rescue. The women had a falling out around the time that I adopted him, and Beach went on to create her own rescue organization. Blue was apparently one of several reasons for their split. They’d been at odds about the way that a rescue should be run, and when I called asking questions about Blue’s rash and background, the finger-pointing about who had done what to him became something of a last straw.

  From what they’d told me on the phone, though, they did agree that Beach is the one who first saw Blue in the long row of non-preferred cages at Person County Animal Control. The way Beach remembers it, Blue crawled to her slower than a snail bound for a pot of escargot. He didn’t once bear his teeth or do anything else to make her think that he might be aggressive, or that he might bite her out of pure fear. Instead, she recalls him putting his head way, way down so that she could pet it. After a few minutes, Beach decided that Blue was a dog who was just plain terrified. He struck her as the kind of dog who would be all right if he got into a foster home where he’d feel safe and have a chance to act like a puppy instead of a death-row prisoner.

  Beach tagged Blue as a dog to be rescued, and the shelter put a note on his cage that kept him alive for the next few days. Then Beach and Turner went to the shelter together to collect Blue along with a few other dogs. Turner offered to take Blue home as a foster dog, something she had done many, many times before. Beach had never been to Turne
r’s home, but as a fellow member of Canine Volunteer Rescue, she assumed that everything would be fine there.

  Blue, from what Turner and a friend of hers told me, continued to hang his head low at her house. It was as if he were constantly ducking in anticipation of incoming fire or shrapnel. While rescuers don’t always know the history of dogs like Blue, Turner and her friend came to believe that Blue had been abused. If anybody raised their hand above his head, even if just to pet him without warning, Blue would try to bury himself in the floor and hide.

  That characteristic alone is something that can get a dog like Blue tagged for death, both Turner and Beach told me. Beach said she has met many, many dogs like Blue inside county-run shelters, and that she has had to overcome resistance to rescuing them from Person County Animal Control specifically.

  “I would go to the shelter again and again,” she told me, “and they kept telling me that most of the dogs were unavailable. They’d tell me they had maybe two or three dogs available, that only two or three dogs in that whole building had okay behavior and attitudes. It was just insane.”

  It sounds counterintuitive, that a shelter would want to keep any rescue group out when so many dogs are being killed, but the blocking of rescue volunteers is so common that several states have actually passed laws that require animal-control directors to work with them. In California, for instance, a law had to be passed to force shelter directors to work with rescue groups that were willing and able to find homes for death-row dogs. And that California law was, at the time it passed in 1998, regarded as groundbreaking. The same type of law did not pass in Delaware until July 2010, with the signing of the Delaware Companion Animal Protection Act. It’s widely regarded as the most progressive of its kind in the country today. It legally pro- hibits shelters from killing an animal if a rescue group is willing to take him, and it requires shelters to post photos of stray dogs online so they can be recognized and claimed by their owners instead of simply being held in a cage until they’re killed at the end of the state’s mandated waiting period.

  Beach told me that when she first approached Person County Animal Control about saving dogs who were destined for its gas chamber in North Carolina, she was unceremoniously turned away, just like the advocates in California and Delaware were for so many years before her.

  “All shelters operate differently,” Beach told me, “and this is one that tried to stop me from pulling out dogs that they called unadoptable. They do not want change. I had to fight for two years to get the right to go in and save a lot of dogs who were very adoptable.”

  The effect of rescue advocates getting inside is undeniable, even by the shelter’s own statistics. In 2008, according to the documents Shaw gave me, 74 dogs were saved by rescue groups in Person County. That’s about the same number that the shelter itself adopted out. In 2009, though, the number saved by rescue groups nearly doubled while the shelter’s own number of adoptions stayed virtually static. In 2010, the rescue group number climbed to 292 (including Blue), again with the county’s own efforts showing little movement. During the first eight months of 2011, rescue groups had already saved several hundred dogs—more than in the entire previous year. The shelter itself, at that point in the year, had a record of adopting out just 38.

  So rescue groups in Person County that tapped into the crosscountry network of transports and distant adopters like me had achieved a four-fold increase in success in less than four years. And that’s on zero budget beyond donated time, money, and supplies, compared with more than a quarter-million taxpayer dollars that the shelter itself receives annually.

  Again, these kinds of statistics raised my eyebrow. I remembered that Shaw told me his job duties were clearly outlined by the county—and how he’d specifically mentioned that the state has no law requiring him to run an actual shelter. Yet when I read his job description, which was most recently updated by Person County in 2008, the first sentence beneath “essential duties and tasks” requires the animal-control director to plan and supervise the “care, feeding, medical attention, adoption, and euthanasia of animals.” It seemed to me, looking at the statistics from recent years, that the volunteer rescue groups were the ones doing most of the care, feeding, medical attention, and adoption that was supposed to be happening inside the shelter’s walls.

  And even with such recent progress and momentum, rescuers in Person County still cry out that the shelter is getting in their way as they try to save even more dogs like Blue. Beach and Turner both told me that they have tagged dogs to be saved only to learn that the staff had gone ahead and killed them, anyway.

  “I’d go to get ’em out of there, and he’d say, ‘They’re gone,’” Turner told me. She didn’t mention whether she’d been on time to get the dogs, or whether she’d asked Shaw for an ex- tension of a few days. I could imagine her swinging her head low and shaking it with disgust. “He killed them,” she said. “Just like that.”

  I’ll never know exactly what goes on during killing days at Person County Animal Control. I did not see a dog killed during my tour, and I have never seen a gas chamber in use. The precise fate that seems to have once awaited Blue will forever be a mystery to me.

  But it’s not a mystery to everybody. Plenty of rescue workers have seen the gas chambers in action at shelters nationwide— and some of those advocates were carrying video cameras.

  Behind Closed Doors

  If you type “animal shelter gas chamber” into the search engine on YouTube, you can see for yourself how they work. Supporting information from the American Humane Association documents what I saw in a gas-chamber video, lest anyone believe it was doctored to make a point. To me, it certainly sounded like the dogs were suffering as the gas overcame them. If Blue made a noise like that, I’d go running to find out what was wrong. What I heard in the video of a gas chamber being used can only be described as desperate screams.

  The video opens with a view of shelter workers wearing thick canvas gloves. They are moving dogs and puppies, one by one, into a metal box that sits on the ground. The box doesn’t look much different from the one that I saw in Person County, except that it does not contain individual stalls to separate one dog from the next. The workers filling this chamber are methodical, almost rhythmical, like convenience-store employees stocking the auto section with jugs of wiper fluid. Their faces show no expression, and they don’t utter a single word.

  The gas chamber has an open lid, high enough off the ground that dogs placed inside can’t easily get out. Some of the dogs are dropped inside willingly, as if they have just been lifted into a playpen. Their faces bear the same expression that Blue’s did on the day that I met him and plopped him into my old wine box lined with a sheet, because I didn’t have a crate for our car ride home. The look in the eyes of these dogs is quizzical, even curious. Some of them, no doubt, are simply relieved to be free from their cages.

  Others go less willingly and must be moved by a restraint pole, which captures the dog by his neck and lets the worker carry him without touching him. Perhaps these dogs are skittish by nature, perhaps they are vicious and biting, or maybe they recall the sounds of the dogs they watched being put into the box the day before. It’s impossible to say, of course, but for whatever reason, they resist.

  Once there are six or eight dogs in the box, the lid is secured. A hose is attached, and carbon-monoxide gas is turned on. The shelter worker holds the knob on the gas line open, and the dogs hear the hiss of the gas as it pushes inside. Dogs squeal and scratch at the box’s walls, their untrimmed nails no match for its metal. The screams grow louder at first, perhaps from disorientation and dizziness, perhaps from pain, or perhaps from terror at the sight of the first dogs dropping dead inside the dark chamber. Unlike with lethal injections, which are de- signed to knock a dog unconscious before his vital organs shut down, gas chambers stop a dog’s organ function before the animal loses consciousness. Frightened dogs sometimes fight with other, impaired dogs. And in some cases, chambers can
take a half hour to be fully effective. Only then do the wails end. The strongest dog’s final whimper comes last, and then, in the end, there is silence.

  The worker in the video turns off the gas, opens the lid, and begins moving the next batch of dogs and puppies into the metal box. He places them atop the limp bodies of the dogs who have just been killed, where the new arrivals struggle to find their footing until the lid is closed atop them, too.

  Once this gas-chamber session is complete, a garbage truck arrives to lift the box, just as it would any other can of refuse. The truck’s mechanical arms swing the box up past the headlights and cab, and then backward over a large holding container. The driver presses a button that tips the box sideways, and the dogs fall into the container atop the local trash. They are then taken to the dump, where they are left to rot alongside everyday household garbage.

  The lives of these puppies and dogs are treated with less meaning than a piece of kindling thrown into a fireplace. Their fur is not used to make clothing. Their rumps and ribs are not used as food. They are not being killed for a purpose of any kind, except to make room for the next batch of dogs like them. In this respect, they are of a lower value in our society than cows, deer, and squirrels. Nobody speaks a kind word. Nobody even knows their names, if ever they had names at all.

  And sometimes, nobody checks to make sure they are actually dead. In April 2005, Jeff and Susan Armsworthy of Mocksville, North Carolina, were at the local dump depositing their trash. They told reporter Mike Gunning of the Davie County Enterprise Record that they heard a squeaking noise coming from the Dumpster. At first, they thought it was a discarded toy. When the squeaking continued, they realized it was a live animal. Jeff Armsworthy said he jumped into the Dumpster and found two large, plastic bags. Both contained dead dogs, including three puppies—“but one was still wiggling. It was all matted and nasty, but it was alive.” The pups had been brought to the dump from Davie County Animal Shelter, where they had been left in the custody of taxpayer-funded animal control a week earlier. A session that morning in the shelter’s gas chamber had knocked this particular puppy unconscious, but he had awoken inside the trash bag at the dump.