Little Boy Blue (15 page)

But still, complaints persisted. They piled up along with the bodies of dead dogs for a half dozen more years. According to
The Robesonian
newspaper, the worst of the public outcry spiked less than a year before I arrived in Robeson County. In December 2010, a puppy was found among newly killed animals en route to the county landfill. The puppy had been sedated, but not actually given a lethal injection. That brought a state fine of several thousand dollars and a temporary ban on all killing at the shelter, until officials could figure out what was still going wrong. “What happened was they finally built the new shelter, but they didn’t change the people in charge,” Walker says. “I begged them to hire a new director who was experienced in animal control, but they didn’t, so we ended up with the same problems in the new facility, only now on a bigger scale.”

Given this decade-long drama about the conditions inside Robeson County Animal Shelter, it’s no wonder the new facility was built in a place that nobody would ever find unless they made an effort to go looking. When I made the turn down Landfill Road, the first sign that I saw warned, all too presciently, “Dead End.” Next, I saw the row of Dumpsters where local residents sometimes leave unwanted puppies because they can’t be bothered to drive any farther. Beyond that stood the county landfill, an actual mountain of trash. And then, once I passed that, I found the Robeson County Animal Shelter, good and hidden away from civilization and any possible comforts that it might offer.

The people in charge at the new building today are not the same ones who were in charge when it was built. They hadn’t even been there a full year on the day that I walked through the front door. They, as well as Walker, told me that one previous director was a man, and one was a woman. Both of them drew so much community outrage that the county’s leaders got bombarded by animal activists demanding more change. The male director, I was told, was even receiving death threats.

“The woman director who followed him, she was killing willynilly,” says Sara Hatchell, who works as adoptions and volunteer coordinator. “I heard she’d tell the people who came in to ask about dogs, ‘I’d love to stand here and talk to you all day, but I’m down on my killing.’ The rumor is that she once killed eighty dogs in a single day. Nobody even used to answer the phone by saying, ‘Hello, animal shelter.’ They’d just pick up the receiver and say, ‘Yeah, this is the pound.’”

Hatchell came to work for Robeson County Animal Shelter in November 2010, just one month after the current director, Lori Baxter. They arrived to find an annual budget of $382,474 for all animal control and more than 3,100 dogs entering the shelter each year. That’s three times the number of dogs entering the Person County facility where Blue was found, and only onethird more dollars to deal with them. Robeson County is also more than twice the size of Person County, at about 950 square miles. On any given day, the animal-control officers in Robeson County have to cover a heck of a lot more ground.

Baxter hails from Ohio, and Hatchell from Napa Valley, California. Baxter arrived with previous animal-control jobs on her resumé, including having been director in Cumberland County, North Carolina, while Hatchell spent thirty-five years as a groomer and obedience instructor. Hatchell had zero experience working with rescues and adoptions before she got the job of coordinating both for Robeson County.

They were not hailed as saviors, by any means. Baxter was an unknown person to many of the local rescue advocates, who immediately began researching her history. “One of them,” Baxter remembers, “called my boss and gave him every address where I’d ever lived and every last name I’ve ever had. She told him, ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that she’s moved around so much and been married so many times?’” The shelter’s own telephone continued to ring constantly, too. Walker kept calling and calling, demanding faster and faster change, once aggravating the staff to the point that Baxter said she was resigning before she’d barely had a chance to get started.

Baxter and Hatchell didn’t immediately trust one another, either. While Baxter reports to the county’s health director, Hatchell’s position was created so that she could report directly to the county manager. Everybody in power wanted somebody on the inside in case of another negative publicity explosion. “The rescue people,” Baxter says, “wanted somebody who reported directly to the county manager so they could keep an eye on all of us who work for the health director. It’s lucky that we get along so well and that we have learned to share the same philosophy, but at first, I thought she was nothing more than a spy.”

Both women told me that what they faced inside the shelter wasn’t any less a blasting fire hose of constant pressure, either. They inherited a system of record keeping that looked an awful lot like an obstinate teenager’s bedroom. Papers and files were strewn around the office without the basic rhyme or reason of a Dr. Seuss book. The adoption process consisted of workers saying, “Give me five bucks and you can take a dog.” They lack confidence in the statistics that previous directors provided, but Hatchell says they are certain the kill rate was at least 90 percent, and probably higher. There was never a gas chamber in this facility, but even after the heart sticks stopped, Walker continued to call every single day about all the dogs being killed. “That woman was riding the county officials to town and back to get changes made,” Hatchell says. “Just in the past four or five months, she’s stopped calling. I guess she liked the changes that she sees us making.”

Hatchell presumes that there’s a written job description for her somewhere in the county bureaucracy, but in practical terms, from the day she started she knew only two things: There was a huge public outcry about so many dogs being killed, and she was hired to find homes for as many dogs as she could.

“I didn’t know how to get started,” she says, “because I’d never worked on rescue before, but I figured as good a place as any was to take their pictures and give them names. I just started giving every dog that came in here a name, which to me means they matter in the world.”

Now, Robeson County Animal Shelter is a kill facility, just like the shelter where Blue was found. Make no mistake about that. Not every dog will be saved. Some are rabid, some are vicious, and some are too sick with mange or heartworm or other treatable illnesses to be cured within the facility’s budget. Others who are perfectly wonderful, like Blue, will get killed for space when adopters cannot be found in time. Hatchell and Baxter were clear about those things when they spoke with me, but they said them in a way that made me think they meant them differently than the director I’d met in Person County.

Then Hatchell showed me around the kennel, and I could see that while the language may be similar, the attitude here was different.

In Person County, the larger section of cages where Blue was found is reserved for dogs considered non-preferable for adoption. In Robeson County, the opposite is true—by a multiplying factor of five. There are fewer than twenty cages separated off to the back for what Robeson’s staff calls “the biters and the diseased,” while a full hundred cages are for dogs the staff believes are deserving of, and likely to thrive in, good homes. Those cages are up front, not in the back like in Person County, and they start within steps of where potential adopters walk through the door. The first thing folks find are dogs deemed “good” instead of having to get to those dogs after walking past the ones who are considered less preferable. The kennel is much bigger and therefore better able to handle larger intake numbers than the one where Blue was found, and it has been organized in a way that gives far more of the dogs like him a chance of getting out.

Robeson County Animal Shelter had a Facebook page when Hatchell started, but like the one in Person County, it rarely got used by the three animal-control officers or the three kennel attendants. Hatchell started regularly posting the photos she took of the dogs. She also found computer software called PetPoint that logs a dog’s photograph and information into a kennel’s back-end system while simultaneously uploading it to websites including
Petango.com
, which is similar to
Petfinder.com
, only smaller. The more Hatchell realized that rescue groups from well beyond Robeson County’s borders were responding to those websites, the more she tried to figure out how to use them to get the dogs inside the Robeson shelter noticed.

“For one thing, I started taking the dogs’ pictures outside,” she says. “Nobody had ever taken them out of the cages to take their pictures. I thought that taking their pictures out in the grass was a lot better than showing them behind bars. It makes them look so much more adoptable.”

She did this for all the dogs who arrived at Robeson County Animal Shelter, not just for the ones destined for the preferable adoption cages.

“The thing is, and I know this from years as an obedience trainer, dogs can go from bad to worse in this atmosphere, or they can go from rotten to great,” she says. “If we have the time and the space, then we work with the dogs that aren’t naturally easy to adopt out. If we don’t have the time and the space, then we have to make choices that are hard, but everybody who works here now is down with the program. They know that the goal is to get every possible dog out and into a home.”

That attitude, of trying to get every possible dog a home, is one shared by millions of Americans who have made the Internet the fastest-growing tool in dog rescue. Hatchell was realizing the same thing I had learned back home when I’d logged on to the Lulu’s Rescue Facebook page: that the stream of homeless dog photos is endless, and for a very good reason. Advocates are learning that the more dogs they display online, the more people like me will find them and adopt them. Geography is irrelevant. A good story and a great picture will get a dog a home plenty of times.

Some people have so embraced this attitude that they’ve coalesced into a new force within the rescue movement. They’re known as cross-posters, people who spend their entire days sitting at computers and republishing information about homeless dogs to gain as wide an audience for each dog as possible. Some cross-posters receive messages from shelter workers like Hatchell and then republish as many as two hundred of them a day, each featuring a different homeless dog. Some of these crossposters have more than one Facebook page because they hit the five-thousand-friend limit on their first page or two.

Every dog’s photo that a cross-poster publishes is akin to a chain letter or telephone tree being set in motion. Rescuers then communicate about each dog by posting a series of comments. A typical series starts with something like this: “I have space for this dog in my program, but no way to transport him to the foster home.” Another rescuer then comments: “I can transport him tomorrow, but I can’t get him from the shelter in time. Can somebody pull him from the shelter tonight and keep him safe until morning?” And then another rescuer states: “I can get him out tonight and meet you tomorrow morning. What group is reposting him on Petfinder to find his forever home?”

And so on, and so forth, until a group of people who were formerly strangers have formed a chain of rescue—one that can span hundreds or thousands of miles from the shelter where the dog actually sits on death row, just as Blue did about five hundred miles from me. Hatchell told me that Robeson County has adopted dogs to people in the North this way, including not far from where I live in New Jersey. The Internet, she said, has been Robeson County’s main tool for creating change.

It didn’t happen overnight, she said, but about eight months after she started posting the photos of Robeson County dogs online, the shelter’s Facebook page got the attention of a large rescue group called Pet Pardons. Just as with cross-posters, Pet Pardons has a large number of followers who share information among rescue groups. In just three days, Pet Pardons converted more than nine hundred of its Facebook members into fans of Robeson County Animal Shelter. All of those people could then see the photos that Hatchell had been so diligently uploading.

The adoption and foster requests, Hatchell told me, flooded across her desk like the first truly cool breeze ever to blow through the gates of hell. And about a week after that, Robeson County Animal Shelter celebrated its first-ever back-to-back days when not a single dog had to be killed for space. The staff were positively cheering—including Timothy Mason, even with his bad shoulder.

Hatchell was telling me about those two glorious days as she pulled out a clipboard to make a notation about one of the dogs who had just been requested by an online adopter. I asked if I could see what she was writing, and she handed me the paper without hesitation. It showed the shelter’s adoption statistics so far for that month. In that period of less than three weeks, the staff at Robeson County Animal Shelter had gotten twelve dogs adopted locally. They had gotten seven more adopted within North Carolina, beyond the Robeson County borders. They had found homes for another fifty-six out of state. And they had transferred another twenty-seven to rescue groups.

That’s 102 dogs with new homes in less than three weeks, with three-quarters of the heavy lifting done by the shelter itself as opposed to the rescue groups.
⁵

“A lot of our dogs end up in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, just like Blue,” Hatchell told me. “Ideally, the dog is kept either here or in foster for about ten days. He’s monitored for behavior. He’s neutered. He’s vaccinated. And then he’s moved in a way that is comfortable and safe, not packed in like sardines. To me, if that’s what happens, I’m all for it. Those transports are helping us get more and more dogs out of this county where they really have much less of a chance of being adopted at all.”

Baxter is also thankful for the transports that take dogs like Blue to safety, but she knows they are not a panacea for the greater problem that the Robeson shelter continues to face— the same problem that is happening in so many counties like the one where Blue was found.