Little Boy Blue

by Kim Kavin

  The Petersons quickly realized that while the idea of moving rescued dogs was good, the way it was being done was sometimes bad. They were hearing all of those stories that I’d also heard when researching how best to transport Izzy and Summer— only they were hearing terrible versions that involved people trying to move far more than a couple of dogs at a time.

  “When we first started out,” Kyle recalls, “I called the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get licensed. It took them a month to figure out how to even classify us. We realized right away that you could follow all of the rules out there, and you still would not be working in the best interest of the dogs. There was nothing that said the dogs even had to be walked or given constant access to water or be in a climate-controlled space. So we not only became the first rescue transport to get certified by the USDA, but we also became the first to impose our own rules on the rescuers who wanted the dogs moved. We tried to pioneer the industry while we were flying by the seat of our pants.”

  One of the unsettling things the Petersons noticed was that a lot of dogs were being transported straight from the shelters in the South to the foster homes or adopters like me up North, taken straight from the cages without getting the kinds of basic shots and sterilizations that Blue, Izzy, and Summer had all received. The Petersons quickly realized that was a health problem— not just with dogs like Blue suspected of having communicable rashes like ringworm, but also with everything from the parvo virus to mange. They now refuse to transport any dog who has not been out of a shelter and with a rescue for at least two weeks. They find that’s enough time for the dogs to get all their vaccines, as well as for the dogs to have settled down from the shelter experience so that they’re not stressed out when they go into the transport, which can be stressful enough to make even a healthy dog sick.

  “We also don’t transport any dog unless it’s spayed or neutered,” Kyle told me. “That’s another one of our own rules. We don’t want to be in the business of transporting the dog overpopulation problem. We want to be in the business of helping to end the dog overpopulation problem.”

  While it never occurred to me that driving Izzy and Summer across multiple state lines might put me in violation of any laws, the Petersons are now spending a fair amount of time worrying about that very issue. They are beginning to see some lawmakers creating barriers that make it harder to transport rescue dogs. Lawmakers in the North are trying to make sense of the sea change that is occurring with shelter dogs, and they have some serious concerns, including the transport of disease.

  Behind those legitimate concerns that lawmakers have, though, are substantial lobbying dollars for breeders and pet stores.

  “There are a lot of people doing it wrong,” Kyle told me. “They’ll move dogs in a van without health certificates, park in a Walmart parking lot, and just start selling dogs out of the van without any rabies shots, spay/neuter surgeries, nothing. The ones they can’t sell, they dump in the local shelters. So you’re spreading problems and disease, and the Northern states are right to try to stop that. But we also are now seeing something else in states like Connecticut, which just passed a law that was sponsored and written by a breeders’ association. They feel they are not selling as many purebred dogs because people in the North are starting to adopt more mutts. The pet stores and the breeders feel the rescue groups are eclipsing them in, well, sales. So they are taking their lobbyists and money into the government to get these laws passed that have only to do with rescues. The one that just passed in Connecticut has a pet-store exemption. It’s that blatant.”

  I looked up Connecticut House Bill 5368, and Kyle’s description was surprisingly accurate. The law clearly outlines how anyone who transports a dog into the state must register with the state Department of Agriculture, have each dog examined by a state-licensed veterinarian, and notify local zoning officials before offering the dog for sale, adoption, or transfer—unless the dog is being delivered to a pet shop to be sold.

  That seemed like a ridiculous exemption to me, plus an awful lot of requirements for somebody like me, who wanted to take two dogs named Izzy and Summer to my own home while a rescue group found them permanent adopters. It seemed incredible to me, the lengths to which special interests will go to ensure that dogs like Blue remain mired in places where they have a 5-percent chance of survival, to protect the ability to make money off the lives of other dogs and animals.

  “What is sad about laws like these is that it will do nothing more than stop some rescue groups from using proper transports,” Kyle says. “They’ll just sneak the dogs in to the families that are willing to save them. They want to save these dogs, so they load them up and drive them wherever.”

  That’s exactly what I did with Izzy and Summer. I didn’t think for a moment that I might be doing something wrong. I just thought they were really nice dogs who didn’t deserve to be asphyxiated in a gas chamber, and I wanted to help them the same way that other people had so generously helped to save Blue.

  Izzy, I learned by reading her paperwork, was about six months old. I could immediately tell that she was as playful as any puppy I’d ever known. She was listed as a flat-coated retriever mix, and she had adorably fuzzy hairs sticking up all around her face, as if she’d just rolled around on a carpet and jumped up fluttering with static cling. She looked healthy and had a super-shiny coat, and she came right to me with her tail wagging. Her foster mom in North Carolina had loved her so much that she sent a bag full of treats and toys and food, as well as a long note that instructed me to contact her if the northbound transport didn’t work out. The only reason she’d given Izzy up is that the dog needed a big fenced yard for running, and while she didn’t have one, I did. Under no circumstances did she want sweet Izzy ending up back in a shelter. She would drive the hundreds of miles herself to come and collect Izzy if necessary, she promised.

  Summer, on the other hand, arrived in my care with as little paperwork and history as Blue. She was listed for adoption as a petite black Labrador, which I suppose is rescue-speak for “cute little black dog we have no idea what else to call.” She was probably at least a year or two old and was sadly skinny, so much so that I thought she may have recently been left tied to a tree and starved. Later, I’d learn that she was more likely a stray, one who had arrived at the shelter with a litter of four puppies. They had all been adopted after suckling her weight right out of her, and she’d been left to die. Summer was confused about eating food out of a bowl at first, but she would sit beautifully on command and gulp treats from my hand like a well-practiced beggar. She mostly just wanted to sit in a way where she was constantly touching me, which seemed to make her feel safe.

  I put Izzy in the crate behind my driver’s seat and Summer in the crate behind the passenger seat. As I drove north toward Interstate 95, I had a box of dog treats up front with me. Every twenty minutes or so, I would slip one treat apiece through each of the crate bars, to make the dogs feel safer during the first part of the drive. I kept the volume on the radio low. I made a point of talking to Izzy and Summer in a calm, soothing voice.

  Izzy seemed just fine and lay down in her crate to take a nap, but I soon smelled that something was amiss in Summer’s crate. At first I thought it was nervous gas, but then the stench got so bad that I had to roll down all of the windows. I pulled off the highway at the first possible chance so that I could stop the car and see what was wrong.

  In the gas-station parking lot, I opened Summer’s crate. She had gotten so scared that she urinated and defecated everywhere. She hadn’t just soiled the towels on the bottom; the crate looked like a filthy monkey cage at the zoo. There was poop all over the crate walls, somehow on the crate ceiling, and even on Summer herself.

  It was at that moment that I realized I’d thought ahead to bring dog treats, bottled water, and a few extra clean towels, but not to bring any cleaning supplies or dog shampoo. I had thought that one of the dogs might vomit, but I hadn’t anticipated having to wipe poop off the
plastic crate’s walls or give either of the dogs a bath on the side of the road.

  Since I was alone in the gas-station parking lot with Izzy and Summer, now both out of the crates and on their leashes, I had to rely on the goodwill of a stranger to help. I explained my situation to a woman who was walking inside the station’s convenience store to buy a soda, handed her a twenty-dollar bill, and asked her to please bring back any cleaning supplies she could find. She could have easily pocketed the money and snuck out of town without me noticing, but she kindly returned with paper towels and spray cleaner—and she brought a few extra people in tow. All of the people petted Summer and Izzy while I cleaned out the cage, and two of them asked me where they could look online for adoption information about dogs like Summer and Izzy in their own areas.

  “You’re doing such a great thing,” the woman said as she handed me my change and the cashier’s receipt. “These seem like terrific dogs. I’d take one myself if I didn’t already have my own at home.”

  The crate came clean easily with the spray and paper towels, and Summer, well, she also ended up smelling lemony fresh. I had to wipe the poop off her fur with the paper towels after giving them a small squirt of the stuff, since I didn’t have dog shampoo or a bathtub in the backseat. I took both dogs for a walk on the grass next to the gas station before returning them to the crates, and I sat down for a minute to collect my thoughts before beginning the rest of the drive home.

  That’s when I realized that Summer was shaking. She was like Blue had been, submissive and terrified. She struck me as the kind of dog who, like him, would have cowered in the back of her cage at the shelter. She, too, was most likely from the long row of cages, the ones for the non-preferable dogs. She could have just as similarly ended up being transported in the back of a dark RV where nobody talked to her or took her out for a walk. She could have easily been forced to ride the whole way covered in her own filth, just as Blue had been forced to ride next to a pile of vomit.

  Instead, she was now sitting in my lap on the grass next to the rest stop, burying her eyes and nose in my armpit. I stroked her black fur and told her everything was going to be all right. I wished somebody had done the same for Blue when he’d been so afraid.

  Dogs like Summer and Blue who seem to be further traumatized by transport are the reason some rescuers now forgo longdistance ground transports altogether. Instead, they work with groups like Pilots N Paws, a charity that provides private planes for rescue dogs. This is the organization I’d first heard about at my kitchen table as a possibility for moving Blue up to New Jersey. At the time, I’d thought the woman telling me about it was insane. Now I understood exactly why such a service is invaluable.

  When I spoke with Debi Boies, who cofounded Pilots N Paws, she told me that the idea stemmed from the death of her twelve-year-old Doberman. She looked into dogs needing rescue, just as I had, and decided to adopt a Dobie from Florida into her South Carolina home. She asked everyone she knew for help driving the dog north, and a friend named Jon Wehrenberg offered to go her one better. He’s a pilot from Knoxville, Tennessee, and he said he would skip the driving altogether and pick up the dog in his plane.

  The experience left Wehrenberg wondering whether dogs needed long-range transports on a regular basis. He and Boies conceived Pilots N Paws that same day. They started small, with Wehrenberg’s sixteen-year-old son building their first website. Soon after that, USA Today took notice. Two days before Thanksgiving in 2008, the newspaper published an article about what Pilots N Paws was trying to do. And then, Boies said, every news organization in America called. The carmaker Subaru offered to become a financial sponsor. The company Petmate offered to donate supplies. Today, about 2,000 registered pilots are among the 9,500 people who regularly use the Pilots N Paws online forum to arrange transports of dogs just like Blue, Izzy, and Summer.

  “Contrary to what some people believe, these pilots are not always wealthy people,” Boies told me. “Most of our pilots are hard-working people with daily jobs that run the gamut from airport workers to heads of corporations. They own small planes, and they love to fly as a hobby. Since they do this out of their own pockets, Jon and I pursued 501(c)(3) charity status, which means they can now be eligible for some tax benefits as humanitarians. But I’ll tell you, they’d do it even without that. These pilots are so committed. We had one pilot who couldn’t fly because of weather, so he rented an RV and drove the dogs himself. We have another pilot, one single pilot who has been with us for less than a year, and he alone is already approaching his thousandth dog moved. He had ‘Pilots N Paws’ painted on the side of his plane, and a big picture of a beagle painted on its tail. I have no clue how many dogs we’ve moved overall, but I would not be surprised if it’s in the tens of thousands by now.”

  I’m sure that Summer would have preferred the two-hour flight in the back of a private plane to the eight-hour drive in the back of my car, just as Blue’s stomach would have been better off without the sixteen-and-a-half-hour drive in an RV. Heck, if Blue had been flown to New Jersey in just a few short hours instead of spending so much time in that RV, he might have avoided feeling scared in the car for all of his young life. He’d vomited a few times after first coming home, during random drives we took together, and I’d chalked the incidents up to his still-settling nerves or the fact that he didn’t yet understand what cars were. But Blue’s carsickness was becoming more commonplace the longer he was with me. He seemed to have some kind of a deeper fear. I couldn’t help but wonder if it had something to do with that long, bumpy drive in the RV.

  I thought about how much better Izzy and Summer had things as I drove them up Interstate 95, along the same route that had carried Blue. It was just the three of us. They heard my voice talking to them the whole time. If the bang of a loud truck or the hum of being inside a tunnel pierced our calm, I let them know that everything was all right.

  Indeed, I told them, everything was finally going to be all right for the rest of their lives.

  And I hoped it was true, since nobody had actually applied to adopt them yet.

  Loving, and Letting Go

  My niece Kate Deurr is one of the people who helped to convince me that I could handle the responsibility of fostering two dogs. She and my nephew live in a modest home in Wall Township, New Jersey, where, from morning till night, she looks over two energy-packed pre-teen daughters, an autistic son, and, for the past few months, two foster babies. In her spare time, which she somehow finds tucked away in the deep recesses of her ever-giving soul, Kate opens her home to dogs who are being rescued by Canines in Need of Ocean Township. It’s a group like the one that saved Blue—a team of volunteers who work with people in the South to move dogs up North and put them into foster care until permanent homes can be found.

  On the day I called her to tell her what I was preparing to do, I expected to hear kids screaming and babies crying and dogs barking in the background—the kind of mutinous cacophany that most people only need imagine once before deciding that fostering a homeless dog is simply too much of a hassle. Instead, though, we enjoyed a quiet half hour conversation. She told me the foster dogs were no problem at all. They are, to her mind, just one more blessing in her day-to-day life. Like Blue, most of them arrive from North Carolina.

  She has lost count of how many dogs she has fostered, but she thinks it’s in the neighborhood of fifty or sixty during the past five years. Most of the dogs come through her home like transient borders, just needing a warm bed for a few days or a couple of weeks, but a few have left lasting impressions on her entire family. There was Wyatt the Labradoodle, for one. “He was such a beautiful boy,” she says. “I got e-mails from as far away as Canada from people willing to drive to New Jersey to take him.” There was also Willie the Terrier. “He was a pee-er,” she told me. “He couldn’t hold it and wait to go out. I had him right around Easter, and my whole house smelled like pee.” With her encouragement, Willie was adopted by a family whose house had a doggy d
oor that he could use at any time. He not only stopped wrecking the carpets, but he also went on to become a therapy dog and remains a beloved family member today.

  Kate seemed to know her own foster dogs the way I was getting to know Izzy and Summer after spending just a few hours with them in my car—not just as numbers moving through a system, but as individuals with distinct personalities and needs. This is key to the adoption process. The better the fosters get to know the dogs, the better the rescuers can match them with homes where they are likely to fit in and remain happy forever.

  I decided to learn as much as possible about Izzy and Summer so that I could give Lulu’s Rescue some great nuggets to include in their online profiles. I figured if my niece Kate could do it with all of her other obligations, I could sure as heck do it without any kids or other responsibilities of my own besides my work. I really had no excuse except to try. I frankly felt a little guilty for never having tried before.

  My biggest worry at first was making sure that both Izzy and Summer got along with Blue. Adding two dogs to any household with another dog can be a challenge, and if Stella had still been living with me at the time, too, I don’t think I’d have even attempted it. She had a history of showing aggression toward female dogs in particular, and Izzy and Summer both likely would have ended up in a dogfight with her at one point or another.

  But Stella, my wonderful alpha menace, was no longer a part of our lives by the time I returned from North Carolina.