Little Boy Blue (12 page)

And that Davie County puppy is not alone in having survived an actual gas-chamber session. Rescue worker Randy Grim wrote the book
Miracle Dog
about a pooch who shocked shelter workers in St. Louis by standing there, staring back at them from atop a pile of dead dogs, when workers opened the chamber door after turning off the gas. A rescue advocate in North Carolina told me that shelter workers don’t even check to see whether limp, unconscious dogs are actually dead, either. “One guy who works at a landfill told me that he has seen dogs digging themselves up out of piles of trash,” she told me. “Another guy who drives a dump truck from a shelter told us that he sometimes sees dogs still twitching.”

I’d like to think that Blue would have been one of those so-called fortunate ones, with the spirit and strength and, let’s face it, luck to survive the assault. But in my heart, I know that Blue is too gentle and sweet to achieve this kind of a miracle moment. Blue is the dog who lets toddlers take toys right out of his mouth, then waits politely until they give them back so he can play some more. Blue is the dog who runs eagerly into the living room of my neighbors and their hundred-pound Rottweiler, Rocky, thinking that maybe, just maybe, this one time Rocky won’t sit on his little head while they romp. Blue is the dog who races across the house when I holler that I have a treat for him, realizing only after a few chews, when it’s already too late, that what I really want is for him to take a bath or let me clip his nails or do something else that feels like doggy scutwork. Blue is the dog who falls for it every time. He is childlike and trusting in the best senses of those words. He would have gone into that gas chamber filled with tender innocence, probably licking the shelter worker’s cheek if given the chance. He would have been unsuspecting and unassuming and then, suddenly, unable to breathe.

Blue would have been, in other words, like the majority of dogs who find themselves in the Person County Animal Control system, and in the many shelters just like it that still use gas chambers across America today.

“It’s bad enough that we can’t find homes for these dogs, that any of them have to be killed at all,” says Jane Zeolla of Lulu’s Rescue. “But these gas chambers, they just add pain and suffering. They must be made to stop.”

The only thing that makes Blue different from all of the dogs he once sat caged alongside is that he was among the handful in a hundred who had the good fortune to get pulled out of the shelter before he was killed. He happened to catch the eye of Rhonda Beach on the day that she happened to walk through this particular internment camp offering a chance at salvation, the way a game-show host might bestow a million-dollar prize on one lucky member of a studio audience. If you’re the guy sitting next to that big winner, the guy who just gets stuck with the hand that fate dealt him, then the whole show sure can feel fixed against you. I wonder if the dogs who sat in the cages next to Blue’s even knew what a big prize, what a literal chance of a lifetime, they had just missed.

At this point, I had visited the shelter in Person County, talked with both Annie Turner and Rhonda Beach, and gotten a sense of what usually happens in gas-chamber shelters. I now understood the initial fate from which Blue had been saved. Yet I still had questions about how he had come to be coated in bleach, not to mention about how he’d apparently been neutered in the back of a van. Turner had told me that she had used bleach on Blue’s rash because she’d been told to do so by the veterinarian in that van.

Thus, I decided that the next thing I needed to do was take a drive and go knock on the door of Dr. Wendy Royce. I found her converted RV in the side parking lot of Orange County Animal Shelter in Chapel Hill. In the past, Chapel Hill had always made me think of expensive college tuition and fanatical basketball fans. This was, though, a different world within the North Carolina town. This was the reality that dogs like Blue know, not the reality that sports broadcasters see. The shelter looked pretty big and nice, but the RV where Royce awaited me was on the hot asphalt close to the Dumpsters. I expected the smell to be worse, given the summer heat.

The RV was hidden from the main parking lot by a couple of trees, and if I hadn’t known to look for it, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it. I walked right up with my notebook once again in hand, rapped a few times on the door, and waited for it to open.

And then for about an hour after that, I stood in the very spot atop four wheels where Blue had been intubated for surgery. I watched how Royce and her staff treated the dogs in their care, and I double-checked Turner’s claim against what I saw.

The more I learned that day, the more I realized there was likely something more that I hadn’t yet been told.

As Many, and as Fast as They Can

Dr. Wendy Royce is even softer spoken than a church mouse. She’s more like a church librarian’s hamster, even cuter and tinier and just trying to stay out of trouble while she runs and runs and runs on her wheel.

Royce became medical director and surgeon for Pet Overpopulation Patrol of North Carolina in 2005, following a stint as a veterinarian for the SPCA shelter in Wake County. There, she had to decide which dogs would die on any given day. In her POP-NC mobile clinic, which she drives from county to county for the sole purpose of performing spay/neuter operations, Royce gets to help limit the number of dogs who arrive at shelters in the first place. Blue is among the 20,000 dogs and cats Royce has personally sterilized in the past six years of running the mobile clinic, and he is one of more than 30,000 she has spayed or neutered throughout her career. She showed me the calluses on her thumb and finger, which are both deeply scarred from holding the same type of needle all day, almost every day. Heavy-machinery operators have nothing on this tough working woman. She looks just as tired, and just as weary, albeit in hospital scrubs from the petites section as opposed to a pair of forty-long coveralls.

Person County is one of the lowest-income areas that POPNC serves. In 2006, the county began working with the nonprofit agency AnimalKind out of Raleigh to create “the $20 fix,” a program that lets low-income residents get a dog or cat spayed or neutered for just twenty bucks. Royce’s POP-NC is the only veterinary agency that accepts the $20 vouchers inside Person County’s borders, she says. Her company is then reimbursed by AnimalKind for the rest of her expenses. For rescue groups like the one that saved Blue, the price per surgery is in keeping with the rates at local veterinarians’ offices, but comes with a 15-percent discount. In a good year, Royce says, she breaks even, but she gets to do the right thing.

“I started this when I was very young,” she told me with a chuckle. “I didn’t realize I needed money back then. I just felt that I could make more of a difference if I kept the animals out of the shelters in the first place, because in my job at the shelter, I saw that once they got in, they had very little chance of getting out the front door.”

Her clinic is an RV that has been converted into a veterinarian’s office. I expected to step inside and see something resembling a homemade bomb shelter, but instead, I found a facility that looked much like my own veterinarian’s office back home, albeit more compact. At the front of the RV, just behind the steering wheel and seats, was a station with a counter where two veterinarian assistants handled paperwork and prepared dogs and cats for surgery. Syringes were neatly organized in plastic bags, and operating instruments were cleaned in a sink before being placed in a sterilizing machine. Along both walls of the RV were about twenty cages filled with dogs and cats in various stages of loopiness thanks to sedation and pain medication, with another twenty or so cat carriers stacked up nearby. In the back of the RV, where a bedroom might otherwise be, stood Royce’s operating suite beneath the same swing-mounted, halogen lamps that doctors and dentists use to perform operations on humans. There were two operating tables side by side, one where she was performing a surgery, and the other being prepped for the next surgery to begin at the next possible moment.

The idea is for her to be operating almost constantly, with the dogs and cats being prepped and brought to her in assemblyline fashion.

“I’m aware of the stigma, that we’re doing operations in the back of a van,” she told me, as if burrowing into my own brain and the prejudices I had assumed when I first heard about where Blue was neutered. “But it’s really like walking into a vet’s office on wheels. Our RV must pass inspection by the state’s veterinary board every two years, just like regular offices. We also answer to OSHA [the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration]. The way we’re different from other, full-service vets is that while they may do three or four spay/neuters in a day along with everything else they have going on, we average thirty. It’s the only thing that we do.”

Person County is a good location for the POP-NC spay/neuter business model because the people who live there often cannot get their dogs spayed or neutered any other way. Meredith Barthelemy, the program director for POP-NC, told me that driving to within easy distance of the clients makes it more likely that they will participate. With high gas prices on top of the economic recession, many dog owners in Person County cannot afford the fill-up to get to a veterinarian on the outskirts of town, even if the surgery itself is only going to cost $20. Heck, even if it were free.

Plus, POP-NC accepts dogs before 8:00
A.M.
and is willing to hold them until well after working hours for owner pickups. Most full-service veterinarians only allow drop-off after 8:30 or 9:00
A.M.
, with post-operation pickups before 5:00
P.M.
sharp. For anyone who works a twelve-hour shift, as POP-NC says many of its clients do, getting a dog spayed or neutered could mean walking off a job that might not be there the next day.

“Person County has our nicest clients,” Barthelemy says. “Absolutely the nicest people. They care about their animals. There is just a lack of education and finances. A lot of our clients in Person County don’t have a television. They don’t have the Internet. Their grandmother had dogs that had puppies. Their mother had dogs that had puppies. So now they have dogs that have puppies. It’s what they do. It’s what’s always been done.”

Royce knows that she, alone, cannot spay and neuter dogs fast enough to make a documentable impact on the intake numbers at Person County Animal Control, but she also knows that she is making at least something of a difference. Her two visits each month work out to about sixty dogs in Person County who will not breed additional puppies. Blue’s mother may not have been spayed, but at least one part of his family chain of unwanted pups being dumped inside the metal gate will stop with him. The line was drawn with a scalpel on Royce’s operating table in the back of her RV.

Actually, Blue’s new destiny with me began at the POP-NC mobile clinic, too. Rhonda Beach told me that Annie Turner had brought Blue there for his surgery at a time when something had been preventing a good photograph of Blue from getting uploaded onto adoption websites. Beach said she had been asking and asking Turner for Blue’s picture, always to no avail. So, while Turner held Blue and waited outside the RV to hand him over to the POP-NC veterinarian assistants, Beach snapped the photograph that I saw on
Petfinder.com
. It’s the photo that made me fall in love with him. Blue actually looks like he is smiling in this photograph, almost as if he understands the bigger picture of which he is becoming a part.

This story about the photo being taken, of course, reminded me about how Turner said the spay/neuter veterinarian had told her that Blue had ringworm, and that she should treat it with bleach and Monistat. Having spent a fair bit of time getting to know Royce and the way she conducts her business, I wasn’t quite sure I believed that story anymore. Then I repeated the story to both Royce and Barthelemy—and they both physically recoiled at the thought. They actually went completely silent for what felt to me like a few awfully heavy moments.

Royce shifted her body forward before saying anything in response, like a teacher leaning in to make sure a student hears her point clearly. She shook her head no, incredulously, as if I’d just told her that her assistants had recommended bathing a dog in antifreeze. And then she explained, in as definitive a way as she could: Not only is bleaching not a recommended treatment for ringworm, but she does not give medical advice of any kind to clients who visit POP-NC to receive her very specific services.

She couldn’t. She’d be out of business, and fast.

“We try not to irritate the local vets by doing anything other than spay/neuter,” she said. “We don’t want them to think that we are trying to steal away their business. We may have described a lesion that we saw as part of our routine exam, but we do not diagnose, and we do not recommend treatment. We recommend follow-up and testing at a regular, full-service veterinarian. Doing business that way lets us get our job done, focusing on spay/ neuter, while keeping the local vets happy and even sending them new clients.”