by Kim Kavin
“I didn’t realize how many enemies these dogs had until that bill went up in 2009,” she told me by telephone. “All of these state agencies opposed it. The Farm Bureau, the state Association of County Commissioners—they all fought against it because they don’t want control over animals taken out of their hands. At one of the hearings, I walked in and saw at least two hundred people in this small committee room, all of them wearing Farm Bureau tags. I thought I was in the wrong place. I asked one of them, ‘Why are y’all here?’ I didn’t get the relationship between the Farm Bureau and shelter dogs. At another hearing, one of the House representatives who co-sponsored the bill told me that in order to pass it, the volunteers trying to help shelter dogs would have to neutralize the entire Farm Bureau and the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, that they were the two biggest blocks. Now how the heck are we supposed to do that? These are huge, powerful groups. It’s a completely lopsided fight with these groups that have been around forever and that aren’t even thinking about the dogs.”
What people like King view as enemies of dogs like Blue are actually the well-funded, well-connected lobby for influential business interests. Well more than half of the beef, pork, and chicken consumed in America comes from factory farms controlled by fewer than a half dozen corporations. North Carolina has more factory farms than most other states—so many, actually, that in 1997, because of pollution and other concerns, a moratorium was placed on any more being built. Lobbyists for the companies that control factory farms don’t have any specific interest in the treatment of shelter dogs, since the dogs aren’t turned into hamburgers or chicken nuggets after they’re killed. However, big agribusiness does have an intense interest in any law that might affect the way animals can be legally confined and killed. The introduction of Davie’s Law, which was intended only to eliminate gas chambers like the one in the shelter where Blue was found, created shock waves of fear that lobbyists spread throughout the North Carolina farming community and well beyond. Everyday farmers even heard about Davie’s Law in states like Michigan that are hundreds of miles away. Fears were irrationally spread that all animals, not just homeless dogs, would have to be killed by lethal injection.
“In addition to the Farm Bureau, we also came up against a bunch of groups that are friendly with the American Kennel Club,” King told me, sounding downright exasperated. “It was just so shocking. All of these hunting and breeding groups, all of them have banded together to lobby against any type of animal welfare ordinance. They see it as a slippery slope, too. Hunters want to be able to breed their hunting dogs, and they don’t want to be told what to do with their animals when they’re done using them. Breeders don’t want to have to pay any kinds of fees or have any laws telling them what to do with their dogs, which they see as property instead of as living creatures. You see the names of these groups, and you think they would be on the side of the dogs, but they were not. The whole situation made my head spin.”
Davie’s Law died in committee. It was never voted upon by the full general assembly despite the fact that it had forty-five cosponsoring lawmakers, which is more than a quarter of North Carolina’s House and Senate combined.
As I heard the behind-the-scenes story about what happened in North Carolina, I realized that it sounded an awful lot like what I’d heard about in Connecticut, where the law was passed making it harder for rescue transports to enter the state—the law with a blatant exemption for pet stores. Forces seemed to be at work in back rooms, where people appeared to be cutting deals for industries that had more pull than rescue advocates. I found something similar happening in Pennsylvania, too. The state’s lawmakers also recently considered a law that would have banned gas chambers. It also ended up stalled in committee— by lobbyists for the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association. The PVMA wanted to maintain the legal ability to gas dogs who were violently out of control or difficult to inject, which, to me, seems like an awful lot of leeway for shelter directors who describe scared, submissive pups like Blue as potentially aggressive. I also couldn’t help but note that the PVMA wanted exemptions for “normal agricultural operations.” It might as well have been language right out of the playbook that outmaneuvered Davie’s Law from passing in North Carolina.
Then there is the money. Wherever lawmakers and lobbyists and activists are milling about, there is certainly going to be a trail of cash just waiting to be wallowed in and handed out and ultimately traced in the aftermath of a grand scandal. It’s the same trail almost every time. It usually ends with a big pile of tax dollars paying for things that hardworking citizens have no idea they are buying.
The issue of animal shelter gas chambers is no different. Places like the one where Blue was found are funded by taxpayer dollars. Records must be kept on how those dollars are spent. It seemed natural to me, after all I’d learned about the swirling politics, to get copies of the actual financial records from the more than forty counties where I had learned about gas chambers still being used.
I printed out my Freedom of Information Act letters from my home computer during the hours when Blue, Izzy, and Summer took their naps. I addressed all the envelopes at the same desk where I send out my annual Christmas cards. Then I carried my pile of mail in a shoe box over to the local post office. The middle-aged postman behind the counter dutifully scanned each of my letters and saw address after address of various animal shelters. After about the twenty-fifth letter, he looked up and caught my eye.
“Are you trying to find a dog?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “I’m writing a book about my dog. He came from a kill shelter with a gas chamber. These letters are for other shelters that kill dogs in gas chambers, so I can make what they’re doing public, too.”
He took a moment to make sure he’d heard me correctly, nodded as if to say my cause was admirable, and then quipped, “I wish I could give you a discount on the postage.”
It took a few months to receive all of the responses. The final answer came only after I went a few rounds with a lawyer who represented a nonprofit group that a bunch of towns created to deal with homeless dogs in Colbert County, Alabama. Even though the nonprofit was funded by taxpayer dollars, the lawyer insisted that it wasn’t legally required to give me its annual budget. I had to send yet more Freedom of Information Act requests to the individual towns that funded the organization. I’m sure the local clerks in Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia, and Sheffield really appreciated that when my certified letters landed on their desks.
What I found when I added up all of the county budgets is that Americans are spending just shy of $15 million local tax dollars each year to fund animal-control facilities with gas chambers. That’s not chump change. It’s the kind of money that can boost entire industries. It’s what New York State gave farmers after Hurricane Irene washed away crops. It’s what a transit company paid to build a thirty-four-acre train terminal in Louisville, Kentucky. And it’s money that I have to believe most taxpayers— especially the dog lovers—have no idea is being spent in such a way.
I always thought of my tax dollars going to support local shelters that keep the majority of puppies and dogs safe until homes can be found. I knew that not every dog survived, but it never occurred to me that tax dollars would go to shelters like the one where Blue was found, that have a long record of killing nineteen of every twenty dogs in their care. It is anathema to me that anyone’s hard-earned money is financing a facility whose primary contribution to dogs like Blue is killing them as quickly as possible, especially in gas chambers that can cause them pain and fear. Yes, animal-control facilities have a broader mandate that includes public safety and many other things, and I understand that sometimes, finding homes for dogs has to take a backseat to other priorities. But when a facility’s kill rate is 95 percent year after year after year, it seems to me that taxpayers have a right to ask when, if ever, the adoption of dogs into homes is being given the attention it deserves.
And while I may have b
een naïve in my thinking, I most certainly am not alone. All across America, when I asked everyday people what happens to dogs and puppies inside of their local shelters, they told me the workers try to find the dogs good homes. I’m sure that is true in some communities, but in all of the same places where waitresses and gas-station attendants told me they thought their shelter was doing the right thing, rescue advocates told a different story.
“It’s not just North Carolina,” a marketing executive named Danielle Dunfee told me while I was with her in the Bahamas for a travel-writing assignment. “I work with a Labrador rescue group in South Florida. There is an owner surrender at one of the local shelters in Miami today, and when the owner surrenders the dog, they don’t have to wait to euthanize. They can kill it that day. I have to drive over to that shelter and get that dog out. It only has a few hours left, and it sounds like a really great dog.”9
Other rescue advocates told me that they receive the same responses from the general public in places that they know to be among the worst when it comes to high-kill rates.
“We stood there at Gaston County’s shelter one day in North Carolina, and family after family was walking in with crates and crates of puppies and kittens,” Jane Zeolla of Lulu’s Rescue told me. “One man said, ‘Well, we’re moving and we can’t take them with us.’ I asked him and his wife if they understood that when dogs are surrendered by their owners, the shelter doesn’t even have to wait. They can kill them immediately. The wife was in tears. She had no idea. She thought the shelter would try to find the puppies a home.”
That’s also what a family in Jackson County, Mississippi, thought when they relinquished a six-month-old Bulldog/ Labrador mix named Chloe to the county’s animal shelter on a Monday morning. The family had wanted to raise the puppy, but Chloe was spending so much time in a crate that the mother felt guilty. “My main thinking,” the mother wrote on a Facebook page that she created for the pup, “was while she was small and cute, she would find herself a home that would love her and take great care of her.” The workers who received Chloe at the shelter remarked about how adorable she was. The mother had taken care to bathe Chloe that morning, to make her more appealing to potential adopters who could give her a better life.
The mother reconsidered that night during a tear-filled conversation with her ten-year-old daughter, and by the time the shelter opened at 10 A.M. the next morning, the mother was en route to retrieve Chloe and bring her back home. But the puppy was already dead, killed less than twenty-four hours after arriving. The Ocean Springs Gazette reported that the shelter’s holding capacity was maxed out, and that all dogs who get surrendered are “guaranteed to be euthanized within a quick period of time.” The mother was shocked and asked if she could at least retrieve Chloe’s body to give her a proper burial. She claims that the shelter workers handed it to her in a trash bag and told her to have a nice day.
I couldn’t help but wonder, as I thought more about the big picture, How on earth did we get to this point, of the lucky few like Blue and Izzy and Summer being snatched from the brink of death while the masses are killed every day? If so many people are dog lovers like me, how did the system become so warped and dysfunctional in so many places?
For the answer to that question, I’d have to look not to the people trying to create change all across America today, but instead to the people who were leading the fight back in the era of America’s Civil War.
6 Beckham’s Act in Alabama was scheduled to go into effect in January 2012. The law is named for a dog who was nearly gassed in a Cullman County shelter, and who now lives with a family in Maine.
7 The Louisiana state Legislature passed a gas chamber ban in 2010. It is scheduled to take effect in January 2013.
8 For insight into how the world of shelters intersects with the world of medical research, check out the book How Shelter Pets are Brokered for Experimentation: Understanding Pound Seizure by Allie Phillips.
9 Dunfee made it in time to save Tanner, a chocolate Labrador who arrived at her home covered in ticks and fleas, and with dried blood in his ears. “The shelter did absolutely nothing to care for this guy,” she says. “I can’t believe they couldn’t even bathe him.” Tanner got adopted less than two months later. He’s now among the fifty or so dogs she has helped to save in just four years, including a black Labrador named Shadow who was found on the streets of South Florida and now lives with his family on a motoryacht in the Bahamas.
From Humble Beginnings
On February 8, 1866, a fifty-three-year-old man named Henry Bergh walked through the storm-soaked streets of New York City. This son of a wealthy shipbuilder was headed toward Clinton Hall, which stood at the triangle of Astor Place, East Eighth Street, and Lafayette Street, in what today is known as Greenwich Village. Despite the unpleasant weather in the dead of winter, the hall was packed with people, many of them from the well-to-do social circles that Bergh frequented. It was a time when draft horses were regularly beaten in the city streets to make them pull carts at a faster pace, an era when the mere thought of a shop selling organic dog treats would have been met with an incredulous chuckle. And yet, Bergh had managed to create a groundswell of interest for the lecture he intended to give. The place was jammed with people eagerly awaiting his report on “Statistics Related to the Cruelty Practiced on Animals.”
Just two months later, Bergh was at the state capitol in Albany with a petition signed by a hundred people. That was enough, along with his “Declaration of the Rights of Animals,” to help him win a charter from the New York State Legislature to create the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. On April 19, 1866, just two months after his lecture in Manhattan, the state legislature passed a law that prevented cruelty to animals. It authorized Bergh, through the newly founded ASPCA, to enforce that law.
This was America’s first humane society, the first organization of its kind given legal authority to investigate and make arrests for crimes against animals. The ASPCA’s large-scale efforts would be followed in 1877 by the creation of the American Humane Association, in 1954 by the launch of the Humane Society of the United States, and in 1980 by the formation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Each of these organizations today has its favored target efforts, which include eradicating puppy mills, stopping medical experimentation, prosecuting dogfighting, shuttering factory farms, ending the fur trade, and engaging in legislative lobbying. Some of the nationwide groups are regularly criticized for failing to offer enough direct financial support to shelters like the one where Blue was found, as well as for giving aid to shelters that continue to kill more dogs than they save. All of these groups, however, do offer at least some kind of support to shelters or campaigns that are intended to save dogs’ lives.
These nationwide organizations, as well as most local and state SPCAs, rescue groups, and private shelters, originally arose because private citizens did not like what they saw happening to animals in their local communities. The folks at Lulu’s Rescue today aren’t all that different from who Henry Bergh was so many years ago, simply wanting to put some muscle behind the idea that animals should be treated with respect and kindness. Unlike in Bergh’s time, though, today’s activists aren’t always seeking to create an official, state-sanctioned infrastructure. They are instead working to change what they see as an existing infrastructure that has become desperately twisted from its original mandate several generations ago.
Most parts of the United States today have animal-control centers that serve several towns within a county or a single large city. The job of these centers is just what their name states— animal control. The dogcatcher, or animal-control officer, is typically hired to enforce leash and licensing laws, to prevent the spread of diseases like rabies, to protect people from vicious animals, and to eliminate stray dogs from the streets. The job description does not include easing the nerves of frightened puppies like Blue, nor does it always require seeking permanent homes for healthy dogs who ar
e perfectly adoptable. Instead, the animal-control officer is required to keep the dogs for a state-mandated holding period—usually two or three days for strays scheduled to be killed, or five days for dogs who will be sold to federally licensed brokers and used for medical experiments. In the most crowded shelters, as well as those that make no outreach or rescue efforts, these holding periods are the only safeguard a dog’s owner has if she wants to reclaim a lost pet. For dogs like Blue, the holding periods are nothing more than a final few days trapped in a cage before death.
The way that the worst animal-control centers are run is counterintuitive to the natural bond that most people instinctively feel toward dogs, and that most dogs instinctively feel toward people. For some dogs, the experience of being inside these centers also alters the natural ease that they feel toward humans in general. Newborn puppies, like most newborn animals, are not innately afraid of people. Puppies are usually absolutely content not only to go to people, but also to be touched and petted and held by them. For some dogs who spend time in the worst animal-control centers, though, it becomes far harder for them to trust. As Blue got older and overcame his initial skittishness, I noticed that his distrust of certain people never fully left him. That same bit of cautiousness I’d seen on Blue’s first day home, when he belly-crawled across my neighbor’s yard to meet her teenagers, was a seed of caution that, so firmly planted in his soul as a baby, would grow like an unwanted weed later in his life.
One of Blue’s favorite things to do is visit our local dog park. It’s a fenced-in old baseball field that’s now full of agility equipment for dogs to run around, through, and over. Dogs are allowed to romp off leash and play with one another by racing and wrestling to their hearts’ content, and there’s even a fake fire hydrant available should they feel the need to give it a spray. As with any dog park, there are always at least as many pooches as there are humans on any given day. When we visit, Blue takes a minute or two to get his bearings with all of the dogs, and then he runs around the place like it’s a Willy Wonka factory made entirely of liver and rawhide. He is immediately friendly with just about every person he meets at the dog park, men and women alike, and will wag his tail for two hours straight if I let him stay and play that long. He goes to people inside the dog park like a pinball bouncing from one person to the next, and he lets them pet him from ear to toe without so much as a curious cock of the head.