Little Boy Blue

by Kim Kavin

  “Even with all that we have done and continue to do, it’s a drop in the bucket,” Shapiro says of the more than 100,000 animals Northeast Animal Shelter has saved. “It’s a Band-Aid on the real problem. Until people in these areas start to spay and neuter their dogs, it is not going to stop. It’s going to remain a tidal wave of dogs that never ends.”

  Many rescue advocates from all across America agree. As one told me: “The problem is ultimately that dogs are treated as a commodity. We’ve had puppy mill10 owners refer to them as a cash crop. If there were cows being bred and then left to wander loose on the streets of America, the problem would be solved, but because dogs can be big business, the animal rights issues get confused with the business interests, and the problem remains. Until this country adopts a mandatory spay/neuter law, we are never going to see an end to this problem. It’s like trying to move an entire beach with a colander.”

  In parts of the Northeast where the message of spaying and neutering has gotten through to the general public, the number of healthy dogs and puppies being killed in shelters has plummeted. And the success these shelters are enjoying thanks to spaying and neutering has contributed in great part to the rise of cross-country transports, too. The shelters where the problem is under control have the time and resources to help the shelters where problems remain. Since about 2007, national experts say, this type of interstate assistance has become noteworthy.

  One of the most ambitious spay/neuter programs in America is based in Asheville, North Carolina—ironically, perhaps, just four hours west of where Blue was found in Person County. It’s called the Humane Alliance, and its entire existence is devoted to offering low-cost, high-volume, high-quality sterilizations. The group does this not only in its own facility, but also by training others to use its methods all across the United States.

  The more I learned about spay/neuter as an ultimate solution to the problem, the more I realized that I needed to pay a visit there, too. I was emotionally exhausted from seeing so many dogs who I knew were going to die needlessly. I felt positively buoyed with faith after seeing Northeast Animal Shelter and realizing that in some places, people were starting to get a handle on the problem. What I initially learned about the Humane Alliance made me feel as though it, too, might be a facility filled with promise of a better future. I needed to know it was true on an almost visceral level. I’d seen so much sadness, and I needed more hope.

  I got back into my car, left the rescue organizations in my rearview mirror for the time being, and went to get the perspective of some surgeons. As I stepped inside the Humane Alliance building and looked around, I actually heard myself think, Well, Toto, we’re not in Person County anymore. This animal hospital was nicer than some doctors’ offices I’ve been inside—and it was being used in one of the most creative ways ever attempted in America, let alone ever even imagined in places like the one where Blue was found.

  10 According to the ASPCA, a puppy mill is a large-scale breeding operation where profit is placed above the well-being of dogs. Many purebred dogs from puppy mills are sold at pet stores and later found to have diseases, genetic illnesses, fearful behaviors, and a lack of socialization. Some female dogs at puppy mills are bred at every possible opportunity, never allowed to see the sun, and killed as soon as they are physically depleted.

  Turning Off the Faucet

  “That thing you just did, that thing with your shoulders? I have to tell you, we see that a lot.”

  Marianne Luft was watching me at the same time I was watching the Humane Alliance veterinarians at work. She’s the longtime assistant to the group’s director, and mine was one of countless tours she’s given during the years. We were standing in the center of six glass-walled surgical suites where dogs are spayed and neutered at a pace that tops even the diligent hands of Dr. Wendy Royce, who sterilized Blue in the POP-NC mobile clinic. In the span of about five minutes, I saw more than a half dozen dogs being prepped for surgery, another six on the operating tables, and, lying next to them, three or four dogs in each of the six suites waiting to come out of post-op anesthesia and have their breathing tubes removed.

  I had arrived at the Humane Alliance with a brain full of desperate dogs’ faces and a heart filling day by day with despair about the scope of what needed to be done. Seeing what was happening at the great shelter in Massachusetts had taught me just how distant that reality was from the one that so many dogs like Blue continue to face every day. The enormity of the task required to right this ship was subconsciously stressing me out. I hadn’t realized how tense my back had become, nor how my shoulders were now swinging from a location freakishly close to my earlobes.

  “A lot of the folks who work here have worked in shelters like the worst ones you’ve seen,” Luft told me. “They see the need for what we’re doing. We can see a palpable sense of relief in them, just like you relaxing your shoulders. Every day, they come here and they realize that there is a way—that they can actually make a huge difference.”

  The Humane Alliance was founded in 1994 inside a space just two thousand square feet in size. It was a spay/neuter clinic, nothing more or less, and the workers spent their entire first day sterilizing just five animals. “It took them something like twelve hours that first day,” Luft says with a chuckle. “They were exhausted and felt like they’d saved the world.”

  In 2000, the transports began. The Humane Alliance realized that it had a state-of-the-art facility for performing spay/neuter operations, but it didn’t have the volume of clients that it needed locally. Asheville is the largest city in western North Carolina, nestled in the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains with a population just shy of 85,000. The Alliance thought it could make a bigger difference, and stay financially afloat, if it increased the client base by adding twenty-two neighboring counties and their hundreds of thousands of residents. Drivers began leaving the facility at dawn, collecting dogs from as far as 150 miles away, and bringing them back for the operation plus an overnight stay. By the time the incoming dogs are unloaded, it’s time for the transports to turn around and return the previous day’s sterilized dogs to their owners. The facility’s box truck can hold eighty animals, and the van can hold another thirty. Each of the vehicles, Luft told me, averages about sixty thousand miles of driving every year.

  About 20 percent of the dogs sterilized in the Asheville facility are from local homes, while about 80 percent arrive by way of the transports. Almost nine in ten of the dogs have owners, as opposed to being in the care of rescue groups. Demand for these transport services turned out to be so great that, in 2009, the Humane Alliance moved into its current facility—a 13,000-square-foot space where about 120 animals are spayed and neutered during operating days. It’s about half and half, dogs and cats, which means a total of about 11,000 dogs a year. And the facility is once again preparing to expand to meet increasing demand, not only from the public, but also from animal activists and veterinarians who want to learn how to export the business model nationwide.

  The ultimate goal is to achieve in the neighboring counties, and across America, what the Humane Alliance has been able to document in its home base of Buncombe County—a 75-percent decrease in euthanasia rates at the local shelters since the spay/neuter services became available in a low-cost, highvolume, high-quality way.

  “Most of the people who come here to learn our model are animal rescuers who have been trying to re-home dogs in their own communities, and who at some point realized they weren’t making a dent in the problem,” Luft says. “They realized that spay/neuter is the ultimate answer, so they decide to focus on that.”

  There are actually three programs that fall beneath the Humane Alliance banner. The first is the spay/neuter clinic, which means the surgeries along with the transports. The second program is continuing education for veterinarians as well as externships for veterinary students. The third program is called the National Spay Neuter Response Team, which is where people from all across America can learn how to start
a similar facility in their own community. In September 2011, the Humane Alliance trained its one hundredth team as part of NSNRT. All but one has succeeded in re-creating the business model in their own neighborhoods, which are located in states as far away as Oregon and Massachusetts.

  I scratched my head for a moment when I heard that, and I tried to think of something else, anything else, that had a 99-percent success rate when trying to deal with the question of shelter dogs. My first thought was that the people creating these outposts must be seriously committed to the cause.

  “Typically,” Luft told me, “the groups that want to be trained approach us. And they almost never are led by veterinarians. It’s almost always rescue groups, or groups created specifically to open a spay/neuter clinic. They are often people who come from the middle of nowhere, who have mortgaged their homes, who have begged, borrowed, and stolen to try to save animals from the shelters and then decided to move into spay/neuter as the answer.”

  Generally, after being accepted into the program, the applying group takes about a year to get logistics in place. This means everything from finding a local space for their future clinic to ordering equipment and figuring out staff. Grants from PetSmart Charities and the ASPCA are available to fully fund this part of the process, Luft says.

  Next, the applying group must show that it has at least $35,000 cash on hand. Without this cushion, Luft says, most new clinics— like most new businesses—will not be able to cover operating expenses during the start-up phase.

  “Even if you have a great veterinarian on your team,” Luft says, “they right now may be able to do about fifteen sterilizations a day. Well, they need to get it to at least thirty a day to be a financially stable nonprofit. Now, if an angel gives you a building and you have no mortgage to pay, you might be able to ease up on that number a little. But generally speaking, new teams need that cash on hand to succeed.”

  After that, the Humane Alliance considers the new facility ready to open and invites the group for a week’s worth of training in Asheville. In the second week of training, two members of the Asheville team go to the group’s new clinic to help them get up and running. The third week of training usually occurs sometime within the first three to six months of a new clinic being open, when a specific location’s unique needs become more apparent. The Humane Alliance sends people back out to the clinic once more, to help the new team surmount whatever hurdles exist.

  “There are PetSmart grants to cover all of this travel, too,” Luft told me. “And then, if a new clinic expands by adding a new veterinarian, they can start the process all over again, also with a PetSmart grant. So the costs of starting up are greatly alleviated, and then we at the Humane Alliance stay in touch with all of the groups that went through the program. They stay in touch with each other, too. It’s meant to be a system of continuing support all across the country.”

  And word is spreading about it, fast. In March 2011, the Humane Alliance organized a national conference for spay/neuter best practices in Asheville. They were hoping like lottery players that they might luck out and get 600 attendees.

  They ended up with 850 and ran out of room in the hotel ballroom for more people who wanted to participate.

  “Something has happened, especially just in the past couple of years, where there is a groundswell of knowledge about making spay/neuter the solution,” Luft says. “And I don’t just mean the rescuers and vets. I stand at our entrance some days, and we have people come in here with their animals. They say, ‘Okay, I get it, I want the surgery done. But please don’t cash my check until Friday, because that’s when I get paid.’ Now, that’s a person making serious choices in life, and we’ve reached an education level where they’re doing the right thing anyway. They are no longer going to be the people bringing boxes of puppies every six months to the shelter. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I just go and stand at our counter, and I wait for that person to walk in. It makes me feel so much better that they’re starting to walk in almost every single day. What we do here is not sexy. We can’t put a picture of a puppy on a mailer and ask people to donate money for vaccines. We’re telling people to do something to prevent something else from happening. It’s so encouraging to me that more and more of the general public are getting it.”

  As a member of that general public, I couldn’t help but recall my own reaction when I was first told that Blue had been neutered “in the back of a van.” I had been horrified and disgusted at the thought. I had bought right into the stereotype. I’d been completely ignorant of the great lengths to which Dr. Wendy Royce at POP-NC had gone to make the procedure safe, accessible, and affordable inside her thoroughly professional mobile clinic. At the time, I could not begin to imagine a mobile facility like hers, nor like this building where I now stood as a guest of the Humane Alliance. The phrase “back of a van” had left me with ridiculous visions of tattered Led Zeppelin posters and a sputtering fog machine where anesthesia devices and sanitized tools should be.

  The ASPCA often hears people react just as I did when they first encounter its mobile spay/neuter clinics in Manhattan. The stereotype is nationwide. It stems from benign ignorance, from the simple fact that so many people with the means to pay for their dogs to be sterilized typically have the surgery done in a standard, full-service veterinarian’s office.

  “We are so very touchy about that,” Aimee Christian, vice president of spay/neuter operations for the ASPCA, told me by telephone. “We started with one van in 1997 in New York City. It really was small, with the capacity for about fourteen animals a day, and people still call our mobile units vans because of that. But in 2001, we had a company in Texas design a custom mobile clinic that is a box truck. It’s a forty-foot-long hospital on wheels with state-of-the-art equipment and the ability to do sterile surgeries. We now have five of them going out seven days a week in New York City to provide services to low-income residents, and we have a sixth mobile clinic that goes even one step further. That thing is a tank. It’s a freight liner that can go clear across the country to support small rescue groups and people who want to learn how to do high-quality, high-volume spay/ neuter. I really can’t stand it when people call it just a van. It’s so much more than that.”

  And when the ASPCA is using it, the purpose is not just to perform sterilizations. It’s to take yet another step toward solving the problem of homeless dogs—by gathering what may be the first-ever reliable documentation about the financial and statistical difference that spay/neuter programs can make to shelters all across America.

  In order to collect this data, the ASPCA’s mobile clinics work regularly with the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC Animals. New York City passed a law in 2000 requiring all dogs who enter shelters to be spayed or neutered before they go to homes. Two years later, the Mayor’s Alliance was founded in part to broaden the effort. It’s a coalition of more than one hundred fifty rescue groups and is the parent of the Maddie’s Spay/Neuter Project, which provides low-cost or free services in all five boroughs. While I would have to fork over several hundred dollars to get a dog like Blue neutered at my local veterinarian’s office in New Jersey, the Maddie’s Project offers the service with co-pays as low as twenty bucks in New York City—and for free if you are a dog owner who receives public assistance such as welfare, food stamps, or public housing.

  As of December 2010, working in cooperation with the ASPCA, Humane Society of New York, The Toby Project11, and New York City’s own Animal Care and Control shelters, the Maddie’s Project was helping to perform a little more than 52,000 sterilizations each year—and just as the Humane Alliance documented in North Carolina, the New York City operations were directly correlating to big-time changes inside the local shelters.

  “In the year before we started our spay/neuter program, in 2002, they were killing 74 percent of shelter animals in New York City,” says Jane Hoffman, president of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC Animals. “By the end of 2010, we had it down to 33 percent, and we expect it
to go to 28 percent by the end of 2011. That’s because of a confluence of things, and spay/neuter is a huge part of it. That, plus marketing these great dogs to get them homes, plus educating people that they should adopt dogs instead of buying them.”

  The ASPCA is also now rushing its mobile clinics to any New York City neighborhood where shelter intake numbers spike. The hope is to use sophisticated mapping software to determine precisely how many spay and neuter surgeries need to be performed in “hot spots” before the balance tips back.

  “It’s never been proven how many spay/neuters need to be done and how long that pace has to last before you see a significant difference in the shelters,” Christian says. “The only previous study that was done was proved not so scientific. So we are gathering the data now, to back up what we already know from many years of anecdotal evidence.”

  Once the ASPCA has the data compiled, it plans to make it available to counties and cities nationwide. A shelter like the one where Blue was found would be able to see—say, at the time the county’s annual budget is being allocated—what it is spending to kill dogs versus what would likely be achieved if the same number of taxpayer dollars went toward a local spay/neuter project.

  “You have to change attitudes about this not just in the public, but also in the shelter system and even among veterinarians in a lot of places,” Hoffman told me. “You need somebody in charge of the shelter who sees himself as more than just the dogcatcher-in-charge. You need somebody who’s going to change the culture at that shelter, somebody who will look at the costs of killing dogs and disposing of their bodies, and then look at the similar cost of holding an adoption event to save them, and then look at the cost of spay/neuter in the big picture, and then check their own attitude. These places that have gas chambers—that, to me, should be embarrassing to any community that still has one. It is a stain and it is a shame. These gas chambers are barbaric. There are resources out there to help you change, if you actually want to change.”