Little Boy Blue

by Kim Kavin

  No matter the reason for the tip-off, the representative said, the investigation was now stalled. When the officer had tried once again to get into Turner’s house, he’d arrived to find an entirely new situation. Turner would remain on their watch list, as well as on the radar of Person County Animal Control, in case she actually was hoarding or doing something else dangerous to dogs. But as for what I’d seen, there was really nothing else that anyone could do.

  The dogs, the representative told me, were inexplicably gone.

  Safe Haven

  Sometimes in dog rescue, well-intentioned people just get in over their heads. I’d certainly managed to do exactly that with a single phone call about some pups I thought might need help. Annie Turner may have done it after spending so many years trying to save dogs from her local gas chamber that she simply couldn’t stop taking more in. But in some cases, it doesn’t take grand ambitions to find yourself in a situation you can’t resolve. In at least one case, it took only a few cute puppies for a woman to look beyond the rescue world as I understood it—and to introduce me to what I can only describe as the promised land.

  That woman’s name is Jodi Pope. She explained to me by telephone that she once found a couple of Labrador puppies near her home in Burke County, Georgia. The pups were just four weeks old, adorable as all get out, and perfectly healthy. She figured she’d bring them home as fosters and that, like Izzy and Summer, they’d be requested by adopters inside of a week or ten days.

  “We ended up having them for six months,” she told me. “We went every weekend to adoption days, posted them on the Internet, did everything we could think of—and we could not find homes for these dogs. We even drove to the nearest city, Augusta, which is forty miles away. And do you know what we found? About twenty rescue groups showing up there every weekend, and not enough people to adopt all the dogs.”

  After half a year had passed, Pope was looking for a better solution. She spent that summer working the Web to make connections, and eventually, she found several shelters up North that were willing to work with her.

  “There were three of us who had started Old Fella Rescue here in Georgia, and we brought up eight dogs the first time, including those Lab puppies,” she recalls. “The next transport, we had thirteen dogs. Then it was twenty-one. Now, in 2010, we’re averaging thirty-five dogs a month. We’ve probably sent almost five hundred dogs up North, because we realized that the county above ours is killing about fourteen thousand dogs a year. So now I’m coordinating transports for other rescues in our area, too. We work with a lot of great shelters, especially Northeast Animal Shelter in Massachusetts, where they promote the dogs like crazy. I’ve driven there and seen people standing in line to see which dogs we’re bringing. We’ve had near fistfights by people trying to adopt our dogs, there’s such a desire for them up North, for these dogs and puppies that people in our part of Georgia leave in Dumpsters.”

  When Pope mentioned Northeast Animal Shelter to me, my ears perked up. It was as if somebody had just asked me whether I wanted to go for a walk at the p-a-r-k. I had heard again and again about this particular shelter in Massachusetts that rescuers all across the South feel is the example of the gold-standard way station for dogs like Blue who are in transit to permanent homes.

  And it came to exist, I learned in a telephone call, because a woman named Cindi Shapiro happened to read The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, March 6, 1970.

  Shapiro was just twenty-five years old, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School whose entire education had revolved around preparing her to run a health organization. But she loved animals, so her eyes gravitated naturally toward one particular front-page headline. “With Right Tactics, It’s Easy to Market A Three-Legged Cat: Little Animal Shelter Succeeds By Imitating Big Business.”

  The article, by staff reporter William Mathewson, told the story of Alexander Lewyt (pronounced LOO-it). At the time, the resident of Long Island, New York, was sixty-six years old and best known for having invented the Lewyt vacuum cleaner. It was sold door-to-door following World War II with a promise to homemakers that it would not interfere with the reception on their big-box radios or black-and-white televisions. This was a huge marketing hook in its day. Lewyt’s vacuum cleaner was no small shakes. He was featured in the 1952 book America’s Twelve Master Salesmen alongside Conrad Hilton, who founded the hotel chain that bears his name; James Farley, who is credited with turning Coca-Cola into a global brand with help from the U.S. military; and Max Hess, Jr., who would eventually sell his family’s Hess department store chain to Dillard’s, Bon-Ton, and May Department Stores (now part of Macy’s).

  The Journal article explained how Lewyt became involved with North Shore Animal League on Long Island in 1969, when his wife talked him into donating $100 after receiving a funding request. Lewyt got curious about how his money would be spent, so he paid a visit to the twenty-five-year-old shelter. It was open only two hours a day on five days of the week, had one full-time employee, and barely had enough cash flow to keep the lights on. “They were also acting as the local dogcatcher,” Lewyt told the Journal, “and they were losing money on every dog they’d catch.”

  Lewyt thought that was a pretty dumb way to run an operation, so he taught the shelter’s directors about direct-mail campaigns. Working with Publishers Clearing House, which was near his home and the shelter on Long Island, Lewyt produced a letter featuring a photograph of a puppy and a kitten. The letter asked its 28,000 recipients, “Would you give a dollar—just $1—TO SAVE THEIR LIVES?” Lewyt got a celebrity endorser to donate his signature, too. It was singer Perry Como, whose Christmas specials were as much an annual television event in the late 1960s as the all-day marathons of little Ralphie on A Christmas Story are now.

  That mailing brought in $11,000, which is the equivalent of about $67,000 today. Within the next five years, the shelter’s staff grew from one to twenty-five employees, its hours of operation increased to every day of the year, and its advertising budget alone was earmarked at $50,000 (about $125,000 in cur- rent dollars). That’s why The Wall Street Journal had taken notice. Lewyt was running the shelter as if it were a corporation—work he would continue until his death in 1988. “We have the same concept as bringing any product to the public,” Lewyt told the Journal in 1975. “We have our receivables, our inventories. And if a product doesn’t move, we have a promotion…. Most animal shelters are run by well-intentioned people who don’t know anything about fund-raising or running the place like a business. The only reason they don’t go broke is that a little old lady dies every year and leaves them something.”

  That was all that Cindi Shapiro needed to read.

  “This article was an epiphany for me,” she recalls. “It put together everything that I wanted to do with everything I’d been trained to do.”

  Shapiro found Lewyt’s number in a thick printed phone book, called him unannounced, and said she wanted to do what he was doing near Manhattan, only up in Massachusetts. He spent the next forty-five minutes berating her from his end of the phone line—the way a father might snap at a daughter who says she wants to turn down a corporate job offer and instead become a painter of abstract expressionist art. Lewyt told Shapiro that rescuing animals was a lifelong commitment, and that the work could be absolutely heartbreaking. He tried to scare off the fresh-faced college graduate by insisting there wasn’t a darn nickel of money to be made.

  “When he was done, maybe just because I was still on the line after all that, he invited me to Long Island to see what he was doing,” Shapiro told me. “I met his wife. I stayed at their home for a weekend. I visited his shelter. I tried to write down everything I saw to learn how things worked. At the end of the weekend, he told me he’d always wanted to know whether his concept could be duplicated, and that I was the first person he’d met who had a shot at succeeding. He told me, ‘I’m going to give you the ten trials of Hercules, make you do things like a financial projection and a marketing study, to see if
you can do it.’”

  She went home, took out her typewriter, and did everything he’d asked. The business logistics he demanded for the creation of a sustainable shelter were a far cry from the criteria placed on the majority of animal-control centers in the United States today, but then again, Shapiro was not the type of person to don canvas work gloves and toss a sweet puppy like Blue into a gas chamber. Her heart told her there was a better way, and her Ivy League education, along with Lewyt’s example, gave her the skills to find it.

  Not long after Shapiro completed Lewyt’s feats of mental strength, he sent her a check for $5,000. She rented the basement of a veterinarian’s office with room for just ten cages. In the early months, when she couldn’t place dogs quickly enough, she fostered them at her own home. “We’d have orphaned puppies at the dining-room table during dinner parties, dogs giving birth in the living room,” she recalls. “Bless my husband’s heart, he supported me.”

  That was in 1976, a full thirty-five years before I stepped foot into the current incarnation of Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Massachusetts. I drove along the New York-to-Boston corridor on Interstate 95 just as so many rescue groups do with dogs like Blue, only instead of puppies in my passenger seat, I had a notebook filled with questions. As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw not a single hint of the organization’s humble roots. The building wasn’t exactly a glimmering skyscraper, but it sure was a heck of a lot bigger and nicer than any other shelter I’d seen so far.

  Today, Northeast Animal Shelter is located inside an old Honda dealership that Shapiro and her sister, Executive Director Randi Cohen, raised funds to convert into a facility that can accommodate more than a hundred dogs and cats at a time. The renovations took two full years, with Cohen overseeing the project by learning everything from local zoning laws to the ins and outs of air-handling systems. In her previous careers, Cohen had been a remedial reading teacher and a travel agent. Like Shapiro, she simply did what needed to be done to make the shelter vision a reality.

  The doors opened at the new facility on May 21, 2008, with supporters cheering all the way down the red brick walkway and into the asphalt parking lot. By August 2010, Northeast Animal Shelter was celebrating its 100,000th adoption. Less than a year later, it would experience its biggest moment of success, finding permanent homes for forty-three dogs and cats in a single day. There are now fifty-three full- and part-time workers along with more than two hundred volunteers supporting the New England shelter, where some 90 percent of the dogs arrive every month from rescue groups in Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, California, Indiana, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico. The shelter’s budget—all of it privately generated through direct-mail campaigns, online donations, fund-raisers, and adoption fees of about $295 to $395 per dog—has grown from Lewyt’s original $5,000 check to some $2 million per year.

  Although Shapiro started out saving local dogs in the 1970s, she began transporting rescued dogs from across the country in 1993. She got the idea after an attorney friend called her about a shelter that the friend’s parents ran in Nebraska. They had more dogs than they knew how to handle, and puppies were going to be killed for space. This was before cellular telephones and fax machines, so Shapiro sorted things out by snail mail and landline telephone. She arranged for fifteen puppies to arrive from Nebraska by way of a commercial airline’s cargo hold, and she personally met them at the airport at nine o’clock at night, with her three children in tow. Within two days, she had found homes for every last one of the pups who had previously been slated to die.

  In that moment on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport, Shapiro became one of the first Americans to lay the groundwork for today’s nationwide rescue network. In its first five years, the effort that Shapiro dubbed Puppies Across America saved five thousand dogs. As of 2010, her shelter was saving more than four thousand dogs each year.

  It’s an effort that the local rescue community in New England now appreciates and even celebrates, but that, in its early days, was met with intense scorn.

  “We’d go to rescue seminars and have to sit alone. Nobody would talk to us,” recalls Betty Bilton, a member of Northeast Animal Shelter’s Board of Directors and a twenty-five-year veteran of the organization. “They thought there were dogs dying in the Massachusetts pounds while we were bringing in more dogs from out of state. Well, the only dogs that were dying here were vicious or so sick that they couldn’t go back into the community. We didn’t care where the dogs came from, but at first, we were the only people who thought that way.”

  Bilton, in working with Shapiro, was among the first Northern shelter workers to approach shelters in the South about creating rescue partnerships. She initially met with resistance and distrust that seemed ridiculous to her, but that she soon came to expect as standard.

  “I was in Kentucky once, and I went to a shelter where they were going to put a bunch of puppies down, and they wouldn’t give them to me,” she recalls. “They said, ‘You’re from Massachusetts? Near Boston? You’re just going to sell them to the universities there for medical experiments.’ They weren’t finding homes for them, but they wouldn’t give them to me, either. And it’s not just Kentucky. I remember a lady from West Virginia driving all the way up here with a van full of dogs that she had saved, and she sat in that van crying in our parking lot. Just absolutely weeping. She was afraid that we sounded too good to be true. She was exhausted. She had fought to rescue those dogs. She had driven all that way. For her, giving those dogs over to us required a massive leap of faith.”

  Today, the primary criticism Northeast Animal Shelter faces is that it does not accept every dog who needs a home. Shapiro says no-kill facilities that accept every dog in need would be ideal, but that her shelter—like many rescue operations nationwide— is not equipped to do so. She cannot, for instance, take a dog who has bitten a child in the face. It’s not a dog who can be adopted back into the community safely, so it is not a dog Northeast Animal Shelter will accept into its program. Other dogs who are routinely denied include pit bulls, since they are so difficult to place with families because of stereotypes about the breed.

  Being able to make that choice is a luxury that is not available to public facilities like the one where Blue, Izzy, and Summer were found. They have to make room for every dog who comes in, if not by finding adopters, then by killing the dogs already in the cages.

  Even still, Bilton says, it is just as psychologically challenging for her to choose which dogs to accept into the Northeast Animal Shelter program as it is for volunteers in Blue’s home state of North Carolina to choose which dogs to save from the gas chambers.

  “I have this dream, this horrible dream,” Bilton told me, her eyes gazing at the floor as she gently laid her hands in her lap. “I’m in the woods, and I’m standing in a river, and there’s this waterfall up ahead. A puppy is in a cardboard box, and he’s about to go over that waterfall. And I look at him, right into his eyes, and he looks at me, and he talks. That little puppy talks. He looks right at me and says, ‘But you promised.’ And then I wake up. After all these years, after all the dogs we’ve saved, I just can’t get rid of that dream.”

  The fact that a shy dog like Blue made it out of a shelter like Person County’s and all the way to a safe home with me is evidence that the longtime work of people like Shapiro, Cohen, and Bilton is beginning to make a real difference for desperate dogs across America. Northeast Animal Shelter is no longer alone in its nationwide efforts, with smaller groups like Lulu’s Rescue in Pennsylvania now rising up to help the cause. In years past, a dog like Blue wouldn’t even have had a chance. Today, the actual process of his cross-country adoption was practically routine for the people involved.

  And yet, as thankful as I am to be able to give Blue a safe and loving home, some activists are still opposed to the changing national landscape that brought him into my life. Jenny Stephens of North Penn Puppy Mill Watch in Pennsylvania, for instance, told me by telephon
e that even today, she shares a lot of the same concerns that Bilton says her team encountered in Massachusetts several decades ago. As great as I think it is that Blue was saved, and as fascinating as I find the growing movement that is saving dogs like him every day, there are some advocates and critics who say rescues should focus on their own backyards instead of following the nationwide-transport model.

  “In 2009 alone, we had more than 70,000 dogs entering the shelters in Pennsylvania,” Stephens told me, unable to hide the frustration in her voice. “Now, if we already have 70,000 homeless dogs in Pennsylvania, then why the hell are these rescue groups bringing more into the state? Not every one of these rescue groups is reputable. They’re in it to make money, and lots of money. They go down South and bring back pregnant dogs and puppies because they know most people want a puppy, and they can sell them for the highest fees. They’re leaving perfectly adoptable three- and five- and seven-year-old dogs to die in the shelters up here because they’re harder to sell. These dogs from the South have heartworm. They have medical problems that we didn’t used to see up North, but that are now spreading to the dogs up here. People think the problem is just in the South, but it’s not just there. Pennsylvania is in the North, and these overcrowded shelters are a problem here, too. We have so many puppy mills in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio whose dogs end up in these shelters. The average family that goes on a site like Petfinder is trying to do a good thing and adopt a dog, but they have no idea what’s going on behind the pictures. There are serious issues behind these pictures, issues that are convoluted by multiple states and really powerful lobbying groups and cash being paid for puppies and all kinds of money being funneled to politicians.”