Little Boy Blue (19 page)

And as much as I missed my little maniac, as much as I tried to convince myself that giving Stella up had been the right thing when it further cracked the already broken shards of my heart, I soon came to realize that perhaps the universe had a plan when it brought the two of us together for just a few years. Maybe she was always meant to be my husband’s dog, and I was destined instead to reap the benefits of the years spent working with her on good behavior—so that I could put everything I’d learned toward helping Izzy, Summer, and lots more foster dogs like them.

Unlike many first-time fosterers, I had every puppy supply that I could possibly need thanks to Stella’s early days of nonstop training challenges. Small crates, big crates, squeaky toys, plastic puzzles, regular bones, plastic bones, movable gates, regular leashes, training leashes, flexi-leashes, tennis balls, hard plastic balls—I’m pretty sure I looked like Santa Claus to Izzy and Summer as I took out what remained in my neatly packed doggy toy bin and dumped it across the floor to let them pick through the goods and figure out what they liked. Once I got a sense of their preferences (Izzy likes things that squeak, while Summer likes puzzles filled with treats), I started putting their favorite toys into large, open crates. Neither of them had been crate trained, and Izzy’s foster mom from North Carolina had actually written to me that Izzy hated confined spaces. But I knew that to get them good homes, adopters would want to see some crate training. Their favorite toys became lures, along with bones filled with peanut butter, and by the end of day two, both Izzy and Summer were going happily into their crates to play with their favorite toys and take naps. After an hour or two, when they woke up, I’d let them out into the yard with Blue and the play routine would begin anew. By the third day, Izzy and Summer would go into their open crates to hang out and relax, without my even asking.

Blue, Izzy, and Summer formed a happy pack inside of about three days. They didn’t so much walk into the yard as they galloped across the deck and then hurled themselves gleefully onto the grass, as if they were swimmers launching from diving boards into the deep end of a pool. Then the racing would begin, with one of them running along the fence line and the other two trying to give chase. In this game, Blue didn’t have the added bonus of the other dogs wearing electric-fence collars, but he also didn’t need it. Izzy and Summer are pretty fast, but Blue knows the home turf, and he can corner like he’s on rails.

The threesome would do this at least five times a day, in between the times they spent playing with toys in my den. The tennis balls and chew toys were high on their Top Five lists, but the braided ropes usually ended up being the ultimate fan favorite. Blue grabbed the rope in the middle, Izzy grabbed one end of it, and Summer grabbed the other end. The three of them jerked all over the house in hilarious unison, like a bunch of kids trying to navigate the three-legged race at an elementary school’s field day.

Izzy had precisely two accidents in my house, both of them on the first day when she followed me upstairs and couldn’t figure out how to get back down before I realized she needed to go out. Summer had zero accidents the entire time she lived with me. By their third morning in my house, they were letting themselves out the doggy door just like Blue. Feeding time, too, brought far less drama than I’d envisioned. It took me a few tries to get Summer to eat from a bowl, but once I figured out that she preferred canned dog food to dry, I’d load up her bowl with a can of beef or chicken stew and watch her wag her tail the entire time she chewed. Blue usually finished his food first, followed by Izzy, and then Summer last, as if she were savoring every last bite. After each dog finished eating, I told them to sit in their respective corners of the kitchen. Blue did so beautifully, as did Izzy. They both watched and waited patiently until Summer was done and the three of them were all allowed to go back outside to play.

During their first few days with me, I e-mailed new photos of Izzy and Summer to Lulu’s Rescue. These pictures showed the dogs playing happily in my backyard, to replace the ones from North Carolina that showed them in the shelter environment. They looked far happier in the new photos, even healthier, and certainly more adoptable. Lulu’s put my photos on their website and on the Petfinder section where I’d originally found Blue, and I put them on my personal blog and Facebook page. The entire effort took me about thirty minutes. I also searched online for dog bandanas that say “Adopt Me.” I figured that once they came in the mail, I could put them around Izzy’s and Summer’s necks and take the dogs for walks around our local parks. I started scoping out the local soccer and field hockey practices so I’d be able to give the dogs the most public visibility with the families in town.

By Day Five, before the bandanas even arrived—and less than a month after Izzy and Summer had been pulled from death row at Person County Animal Control—no fewer than four families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had already come forward with interest in adopting them both. Lulu’s Rescue wasn’t struggling to find good homes; instead, they were deciding which adopters were the best.

And Summer, who was older and less “perfect” than Izzy because, like Blue, she’d learned to be a bit afraid in life, actually generated the most interest first. At the end of Summer’s journey from the long row of cages for non-preferable dogs, she had people standing in line and hoping they would be the lucky ones who got to give her a loving home.

I couldn’t contain my excitement, so I picked up the phone to call my sister, Michelle. She had, several years ago, fostered a dog who ended up taking the better part of a year to find a home. Our whole family had assumed I’d be stuck with Izzy and Summer for several months at least.

My, how things have changed, I told her. The Internet really does seem to make the entire process a lot easier nowadays.

“Not just that,” my sister told me. “You’ll never believe what I saw today when I took Sadie May to the vet. I walked into the waiting room, and there were these cute puppies available for adoption. It turns out my vet is doing the same thing you’re doing, taking the dogs from the shelters down South and helping to find them homes up here in the North. I couldn’t believe it when she told me. You really need to drive out and see this.”

So it was that I found myself going to meet Dr. Corrine Thomas at Aardvark Animal Hospital in Exton, Pennsylvania. I’d heard a lot of things about saving foster dogs during my travels to trace Blue’s story, but this was the first time I’d heard of a veterinarian getting involved with the cause. That she happened to be my sister’s veterinarian, I must say, made it seem like the cosmos wanted me to go see what she was doing, too.

Persistence and Hope

It all began, Dr. Thomas told me, just a handful of years ago. Although she is currently happy and thriving in her own veterinary practice, she started out in schools and at other practices absolutely hating what she was being told. She had this idea, this fantastic idea, and everyone in a position of authority shot it down. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why. To her, it seemed like an absolute no-brainer.

“I always wanted to have an animal rescue that is run through a veterinary hospital,” she told me. “I really didn’t see why it would be a problem. They kept telling me that it flies in the face of the business model. They’d go so far as to tell me not to get to know the clients too well, because then you spend too much time talking with each one. The more time with one client, the fewer clients there are to charge. And time rescuing animals? Well, that’s just a big drain on everything.”

On the day that I walked into her practice, Aardvark Animal Hospital was preparing to celebrate its first full year in business. Her lobby had already evolved into about 15 percent waiting room and 85 percent menagerie—a combination foster space and display area for animals in need of homes. While most other veterinarians think of their entranceways as places where humans and animals await appointments, Thomas, quite fittingly, calls hers a petting zoo. Among the guinea pigs and chinchillas and cats and adult dogs, I saw a large, open pen on the floor where three puppies romped with glee. One was jet black with almond-shaped eyes, perhaps a mix of a Labrador and a pit bull. Another looked like a Beagle mix. The white and tan dog, I couldn’t place; he’s what my own veterinarian would call a Heinz 57. And he sure did have gorgeous coloring, including a proud brown spot about the size of a silver dollar on his forehead, which was otherwise nearly pure white.

“They’re from North Carolina,” Thomas told me as her tall, athletic frame towered high above the puppies’ heads. “And actually, the black one and the one with the brown spot have already been adopted. The Beagle mix is the only one we’re still trying to place.”

Thomas began using her office as a foster and rescue location for dogs just two months after she opened for business. She put the word out to local rescue groups in eastern Pennsylvania that she was willing to do discounted spaying and neutering, and that she had a vision of doing more. She became involved with interstate transports when one of her local rescue partners told her about a Labrador who had just given birth to three puppies in Gaston County, North Carolina. The Pennsylvania rescuer was trying to do everything possible to save them from the Gaston County gas chamber. At most, the rescuer told Thomas, this Labrador and her pups had forty-eight hours to live.

With Thomas’s blessing, two of her veterinary technicians, Randi Warfel and Paige Lukas, hopped into a car. They began the same day-long journey along Interstate 95 that I’d made to North Carolina. At the same time, a woman working in the Gaston County shelter took the Labradors to her own home, to keep them safe until the help from Pennsylvania could arrive. Warfel and Lukas collected the dogs, turned their car around, and drove through the night back home. The sun was rising when they returned, so they clocked in to start working that same morning.

“That was how we started with the Southern dogs,” Thomas says. “The rescues, they’re not really set up to take a mom and newborn puppies. The rescues are trying to move as many dogs as they can, as fast as they can, and a mom and newborn puppies need time. They need weeks of time and veterinary care before they can be adopted. We were in a situation where we could give them that time and care.”

Since Aardvark Animal Hospital is not licensed as a kennel, Thomas kept the Labradors in her lobby by day—when potential adopters could see them and play with them—and took them to her home at night. All of the dogs, including the mom, found adopters, and Thomas began earning a reputation among local rescues as an ideal foster candidate for newborn puppies and their mothers. She made sure they had all their shots, took them home to give them even more human companionship each night, and spayed or neutered them before adopting them out. Then she repeated the process again and again, whenever space opened up for new dogs in her lobby. She started working with the kinds of ground-transport operations that moved Blue from North Carolina to New Jersey. She pays the transport fee and donates any required medical care, then adopts the dogs out of her lobby at a rate of $300 per puppy and $150 per adult dog. She advertises the pups on an electronic billboard above a local highway, believing that the idea “We Have Puppies Available” is a much stronger marketing hook than “We’re a New Veterinary Office in Town.”

In her first nine months of following this approach, Thomas found homes for more than one hundred dogs just like Blue from the South—and about 70 percent of the Pennsylvanians who adopted them became clients of her veterinary practice.

“We really do lose money on every dog,” Thomas told me, “but we feel passionate about rescuing dogs and doing our part. I think the people who stay with us after adopting through us, they see that what we’re doing speaks to our character. We love animals. We love
their
animals. There is a financial strain, yes, especially when we bring up a puppy that’s sick and needs a lot of extra time and care. But my feeling is that ultimately, we are doing the right thing morally. And I may lose money on saving these dogs at first, but I’m going to gain a client that I will work to keep forever. We haven’t been at this long enough to document the financials, but I believe that in the long run, the money will work out. I think it’s a real win-win.”

All of this, to me, was just starting to seem way too good to be true. Izzy and Summer had received adoption applications awfully fast. My sister’s veterinarian seemed like a poster child for rescue who had dropped out of the clear blue sky.

If fostering and finding homes really is this easy,
I thought,
then
why isn’t everybody doing it?
The question led me to start a search for somebody who had a challenging case—a dog with problems who would seem far less likely than Blue or Izzy or Summer to ever find a home, a dog who could not be advertised as healthy, a dog who had endured serious trauma. I also looked for a dog in the care of a first-time foster parent who might get stuck with far more than he anticipated, for far longer than he wanted.