Little Boy Blue (16 page)

“What I’m worried about now is that, while we’re definitely doing more adoptions than this shelter ever did before, there’s no longer this big emergency because people think all the animals are being tortured and have to be gotten out by any means,” she says. “I want to see local people coming in to adopt these dogs. I want to see local people getting their dogs spayed and neutered. The truth is, as much as I love these rescue groups, it’s just a Band-Aid. Eventually, New Jersey isn’t going to need any more dogs.”

As I drove away from Robeson County and thought about my home state, I stopped to grab a sandwich and call my parents, who were graciously dog-sitting for Blue. In our family, dogs are treated far differently from all the ones I’d seen in North Carolina. They don’t stay in kennels, ever. They are treated like children, given room and board at a relative’s house, and spoiled rotten by whichever grandma or aunt is in charge of their care. When I travel for work during times of the year when my husband is also working long hours at his job, Blue always stays with my retired parents and their Doberman pinscher, Quincy, who is one of Blue’s best friends. My parents love Blue like a grandchild, and he plays every day with Quincy in their big, fenced backyard until he passes out in exhaustion on my mom’s lap.

Quincy is a great dog, but, unlike Blue, he is a hand-chosen purebred who holds many American Kennel Club ribbons and the distinction of being a champion. He has been pranced around countless rings by the same handlers who appear every year on television during the famous Westminster Kennel Club dog show in New York City. While Blue was once considered worthless and, ultimately, deemed worthy of a $400 adoption fee, Quincy cost four figures at the outset and has had thousands more invested in establishing the awesomeness of his pedigree.

I always find this to be an interesting disparity when the two of them are wrestling or cuddling or chewing bones side by side, behaving in exactly the same way. I like to say snarky things to my dad like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” recalling the days when I was a teenager who absolutely, positively had to have the name-brand designer jeans that he thought were a waste of hard-earned cash. Marketing, I argue today, is a powerful force. Somebody has convinced them that one of these two wonderful dogs is far more valuable than the other, only because he comes with a well-known label.

My mom always argues that purebreds are indeed special because responsible breeders like the one who created Quincy are attempting to perfect the standard of each breed. She says that not everybody is breeding dogs purely for profit and dumping the runts of the litter off at shelters to be killed in gas chambers. “Our breeder has people lined up to buy puppies before she even breeds them,” Mom always says. “That’s responsible. She is making sure those dogs have homes.”

I used to see the logic in that reasoning, especially because I love Quincy so much, just as I’ve loved all the purebred dogs my parents have brought into our family over the years. But after I visited Person and Robeson counties, after I walked through the kennels and saw cage after cage of beautiful, healthy puppies like Blue who were lined up to be killed, after I realized that people were buying purebreds as everyday pets for a thousand dollars or more instead of saving these dogs for a couple hundred bucks—something inside of me changed. It was hard for me to think about what was happening to these dogs like Blue as anything other than immoral. I had spent the past few days looking at the faces of some of the estimated 14,000 companion animals a day who die inside America’s shelters. These puppies had licked my hand. Their tiny little eyes had looked with wonder into mine. And they would all be dead before I got back to New Jersey, for a simple lack of homes, while more and more puppies continue to get bred and sold at higher prices.

I could no longer see the intentional breeding of more puppies for sale as pets as acceptable in any way, at least not until the killing in the shelters has stopped.

This was not a topic I was comfortable discussing with my parents, whom I respect a great deal. I know they love their dogs just as much as I love mine. They plan to breed Quincy someday, which is why they refuse to have him neutered. My mom, especially, looks forward to giving one of his puppies a home in exchange for collecting any stud fees of any kind. To her, breeding Quincy isn’t about making money. She just thinks he’s a great dog, and that more great dogs should come from his genetic line.

I’m never going to change my parents’ minds, or the minds of people who share their opinions, but I did decide during my time in North Carolina that maybe I could help to change others. I realized that I could do more than simply having adopted Blue, and I set about helping even more dogs like him.

I started with just two.

4
A heart stick is just what it sounds like, an injection directly into a dog’s heart. National veterinary standards require sedation before it is used, as well as worker training to ensure that the injection actually goes into the dog’s heart. Without sedation or proper staff training, I was told by rescue advocates as well as by Person County Animal Control Director Ron Shaw, a heart stick is a painful and cruel way for a dog to die.

5
By the end of that month, Robeson County had found homes for a total of 185 dogs.

More Lucky Pups

I had mentally prepared, before I even arrived in North Carolina, to see dogs and puppies who were going to die, dogs and puppies I could not save, dogs and puppies for whom nobody but the Grim Reaper would come. All throughout my journey to trace Blue’s past, I’d tried to do what journalists all around the world do every day when they encounter things that are traumatizing. I sucked up my feelings of disgust the way an alcoholic’s liver sponges liquid poison. I lay in bed at night trying to think about pretty beaches and smiling faces that are far less likely to induce nightmares. I reminded myself again and again and again that getting to the truth of the hardest chapters is often the only thing that can change the bigger story for the better.

Ultimately, though, there was only so much I’d been able to anticipate or brace myself against. I knew I was going to hate the things I saw inside the high-kill facilities, but it hadn’t occurred to me to prepare mentally for the same feeling of powerlessness to hit me after going to Blue’s foster home. Some of the things I’d seen at Annie Turner’s house, instead of calming my worst fears, had only made the pit in my stomach swell. I kept seeing the desperate eyes of that big brown dog looking up at me from inside the really small crate in Turner’s spare bedroom. The dog’s face got stuck in my mind like a splinter. It was big enough to crack an entire psyche.

I’d thought more than once during my travels that I should turn the car around and go back for a few of the dogs whose faces had become a looping slide show in my brain. But then I kept telling myself, even out loud sometimes,
Just stick with the plan
.

Jane Zeolla at Lulu’s Rescue had educated me in advance about why it was a lousy idea to scoop up whichever dogs I wanted and make a run for the border. She explained that dogs in this area, even if they’re in the care of a shelter, are likely to have kennel cough, the parvo virus, heartworm, and other medical issues. The shelters don’t typically treat for those conditions. Often, only the rescue groups do. Newly saved shelter dogs require quarantine and care that is expensive up North. They need vaccines and neutering, too, which can be done far cheaper in Person County than it can be done where I live on the outskirts of New York City. I didn’t want to get myself into a situation I could not handle, and I most definitely didn’t want to expose Blue to any dogs who might have contagious diseases.

“Your best bet,” Zeolla had told me, “is to take a few dogs that Rhonda Beach has already pulled from the Person County shelter and gotten ready for adoption. Bring them home to save the cost of transport and serve as a foster home for them while we market them to find permanent homes. That way, Blue won’t be exposed to any illnesses, you won’t go broke, and you’ll be opening up a few spots in the pipeline for new dogs to be pulled from the shelter who can also be prepared for transport and adoption.”

And so I did exactly that. I tried to put out of my mind all of the dogs at Turner’s house, all of the dogs at the shelters, and all of the dogs who’d barked at me as if begging for a chance. I realized that I couldn’t be a hero and save every single one. I accepted the fact that the best I could do was my part, which meant joining the existing pipeline that so many other people had so diligently laid before me.

I made room in my car, and in my life, for two little black dogs named Izzy and Summer. Beach had pulled them from Person County Animal Control, and they’d been living in foster homes in North Carolina while they got spayed and vaccinated. Beach agreed to let me drive them up to New Jersey and take care of them while Lulu’s Rescue marketed them for adoption. Their spaces in the North Carolina foster homes would thus become vacant, and two more dogs could be saved from Person County Animal Control.

It’s no small thing, accepting two dogs into your life when you’ve never before met them—especially having learned through Blue’s rash and the situation at Turner’s home that things are not always what they seem in the world of dog rescue. But during my travels and interviews across North Carolina, I’d learned to trust Beach the same way that legitimate Northern rescues are continually learning to trust legitimate Southern rescues, and vice versa. Everything Beach had told me had panned out when I’d double-checked it, even when the facts didn’t make her look perfect. As with so many things in life, good and smart people seem to find one another and figure out how to best make a difference. Lots of people may have good intentions, but the people actually doing the most good, I’d learned, are the ones like Beach who actually walk into the Southern shelters, get dogs like Blue out, and follow up to make sure they receive appropriate care. That’s who I wanted to associate myself with, along with the team from Lulu’s Rescue up North. I was happy to help people who had proved to me that they were doing things the way that seemed reasonable and right.

Beach arranged for me to collect Izzy and Summer from her early on a Friday morning at the Carolina’s Finest diner in Roxboro. I met her in the front parking lot, and I was pleased to see a woman who fit the mental description I’d conjured. She had long, dark hair and a distinctly businesslike air about her. She shook my hand as if we were meeting in a conference room, and I noticed that she had files for Izzy and Summer ready to hand over along with the dogs themselves.

The first thing we did was take the dogs for a walk on the grass out back. They’d been in separate foster homes and had only just met each other that day, and now they were meeting me for the first time and, unbeknownst to them, about to begin an eight-hour drive north. Beach and I both thought it was a good idea to give them some exercise, some hugs, and some time to simply adjust to their new crowd.

Beach and I chatted a bit while we walked, and I told her what I’d seen and learned during my week in North Carolina. I hemmed and hawed a little when describing what I’d seen at Turner’s house, since I didn’t want to seem accusatory or out of line. After a few minutes, though, I got the sense that Beach has standards similar to my own when it comes to dog care. I finally asked her flat out if she knew anything about Blue’s life at Turner’s house a year ago.

“I didn’t want to say anything about it because I didn’t know you when you first called me,” she said, almost apologetically. “But right before I stopped working with her and the Canine Volunteer Rescue and started my own rescue, I saw inside that house. I saw the same thing that you did, and I didn’t want to be a part of that at all. It’s not what rescue is supposed to be. Now, I may have more dogs than most people at any given time, but I don’t have dozens of them. And I keep my house clean. The dogs who are with me get proper medical care, too.”

I followed her lead when she mentioned medical care, and I asked her if she knew anything about the bleach that had been applied on Blue’s rash.

“Bleach!” she cried, almost gasping to get the word out.

Her eyes bulged from her head like deviled eggs laced with hot sauce. She shook her head, and she sighed.

“Did I ever tell you the story of Blue’s transport day?” she asked. “You had offered to adopt him, so we had to get him on the RV. Annie and I were supposed to meet at the Country Kitchen just up the road here. She was going to bring Blue from her house, and I was going to take him with these two other Labrador puppies to meet the transport in Raleigh at 3:30. She was supposed to be there at two o’clock, but I just sat there, waiting and waiting. Now, Raleigh is a solid hour’s drive away, so it got to be 2:25, and I’d called her and everybody else I knew at the Canine Volunteer Rescue, and finally, I decided to leave without Blue. He just wasn’t going to make it on time.

“Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw another rescue volunteer come racing into the parking lot with Blue at the last minute,” she continued. “That dog was dirty. He hadn’t even gotten a bath. I knew his skin looked funny, and I called Annie to say that we could get in real trouble for transporting a sick dog across state lines. She told me he was fine, even though I knew he hadn’t looked like that at the shelter when I tagged him for rescue. I trusted her and called the transport people and asked them to wait for me in Raleigh. Luckily, they were running twenty minutes late that day, too, or Blue wouldn’t have ever gotten to you at all.”