Little Boy Blue (10 page)

Blue was in the long row of cages, she told me. He was one of the dogs the shelter did not deem preferable for adoption.

“He was a shy one,” she recalls. “He was reserved. He wasn’t a bouncy, crazy puppy. He was playful, but he had a very gentle spirit. The other dogs, they all ran up to the front of the cages when I walked near them, but Blue wasn’t up front wagging his tail. He is the kind of dog that this shelter always called unadoptable, the kind of dog they would always deny me the right to take out. But I could see it in his eyes that he was just plain scared. A lot of dogs who come out of that shelter are changed. They can smell death in there. They can hear the screams from the other dogs in the gas chamber. Blue was just so gentle and loving after all of that. I remember him like yesterday. There is no other word to describe him but scared.”

By county ordinance, Shaw told me, even the dogs in the preferable cages can only be held for fifteen days at most. He does everything he can think to do within his budget, he said, to try to get them homes during that time. His staff puts their photographs on
Petfinder.com
. They also run “Pet of the Week” advertisements in the twice-weekly
Courier-Times.
He instituted a “Strut a Mutt” program for local residents to come inside the shelter and walk the dogs, to get to know them. He created a gravel trail out behind the kennels, in a wooded, parklike setting, so potential adopters can have some alone time with their favorite pooch and hopefully fall in love.

But few people respond, he said with a sigh. “We only have about thirty thousand people in all of Roxboro,” he explained. “In the past five or six years, factories have left. Every year, my budget gets cut by 5 or 6 percent more. There are only so many things that we can do, and unlike these rescue groups from all over the country, we have to try to adopt locally. There just aren’t enough people here who want all these dogs.”

I asked him what he thought of the multistate transports like the one that brought Blue home to me, matching dogs from places like Person County with locations like mine where there are lots of potential adopters. He didn’t know the logistics of how they worked, so I explained that Blue was put into an RV here in North Carolina by the local rescue group, and that I was told to wait for his arrival in New Jersey with the Pennsylvania rescue group by my side.

Shaw thought for a moment about the lack of official oversight. It surely seemed counterintuitive to him, given the way he feels he is asked to operate every day.

“I just hope that these rescue people up North, I hope that they’re keeping an eye on these dogs to make sure they’re okay,” he said. “It sounds like an awful lot of room for error to me.”

And it is—for adopters as well as for the dogs. It is a system based entirely upon one rescue trusting the judgment of another about a dog’s temperament and where he should end up. A good number of the people involved feel so strongly about saving every dog’s life that they will give some dogs a behavioral benefit of the doubt that is unwarranted. Shaw does not have that option. He is required to err on the side of human safety. Not every dog is as sweet and loving as Blue, though just about all are advertised as such. As with any dog acquired from a shelter or anywhere else, there must always be an element of “buyer beware.”
²

Even so, as Shaw talked about room for error in the rescue system, I couldn’t help but notice that we were standing about two feet from the long row of cages where my happy, sweet, and very much alive boy Blue once sat with an orderly, carefully monitored, state-approved death sentence. The rescue system that has emerged in recent years may be haphazard, but it’s the only thing that saved Blue’s life—and that continues to save the lives of a lot of great dogs just like him.

Shaw must have seen me stumbling to collect my thoughts, because that’s when he told me a story that I didn’t even ask to hear. He started by acknowledging the notebook in my hand and saying that he wished I wouldn’t put what he was about to say into this book. Then he decided to tell me the story, anyway.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I wanted to be two things. One was an animal-control officer. Growing up in Maryland, I used to deliver newspapers, and I’d find all these stray dogs and bring them home. After a while my dad would call me over and say, ‘Son, the fence is only so big. You have to take these dogs down to the pound.’ So I would call the local animal-control officer, and we’d have a good, long talk, and the next week, when I was delivering my newspapers, I’d see that dog’s picture in the paper. I figured that’s a pretty good job, being an animalcontrol officer. It means you get to find homes for stray dogs who need them.”

“The other thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a Marine,” he continued. “That’s what came first for me. I was in Beirut working at a checkpoint, and there were all these stray dogs around. We were ordered absolutely not to feed those dogs or be nice to them, but a few of us, you know, we gave them food and petted them. They were just the nicest dogs. Now, one day, a terrorist drove up to that checkpoint. Those dogs knew it was a terrorist. They started barking. They alerted all of us Marines. And all of those dogs, they died that day in the explosion, but not a single Marine did. All of the Marines lived because the dogs helped to save us.”

I looked right into Shaw’s eyes as he finished that story, and I realized why he didn’t want his fellow soldiers and current colleagues in the Animal Control Department to know it.

He was starting to cry.

2
For tips on bringing home a shelter dog, see “
What You Can Do
” at the end of this book.

Truth in Numbers

The microfilm machine at Person County Library was making me blind. Well, maybe not completely blind, but certainly in need of a cold compress across my eyelids. I’d call the machine ancient, but I’ve seen ruins in Turkey that have held up better over the centuries. And my research efforts weren’t being helped by the fact that the ultra-kind, yet ultra-small, library staff had no index of articles. To find anything about the local animal shelter dating back to the first printing of the newspaper in 1881, I literally had to read years’ worth of copies, inching the ever-jamming microfilm tape forward, page by poorly scanned page.

It was like finding a gold nugget in a Rocky Mountain stream when I saw the front-page article from Wednesday, January 18, 2006. The headline read: “Larger shelter sparks hope for more animal adoptions.” It was written by an intern named Grey Pentecost who has since become a staffer. It included a photograph of construction getting under way for the kennel addition in which Ron Shaw and I had stood that same week, the one with the long row of cages where Blue had once sat.

The paragraph that caught my eye was buried on the story’s jump page, almost at the end of the article itself. It stated that thanks to the new addition, “the shelter will be able to hold fifty dogs, twelve more than before.”

That sounded awfully good to me, as I’m sure it had to every dog lover in Person County who read it and ponied up the tax dollars to pay for it.

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 Facebook
³
. 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.

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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.