Little Boy Blue (27 page)

The second thing I noticed was that immediately after I walked through the front door, I was inside a bright foyer with wall-size windows on all sides. To my right were windows into two rooms, one with dogs for adoption and the other with cats. The puppies had plush beds to lie on, lots of toys to play with, and plenty of room to romp if they felt frisky. To my left was a wall-sized window into another room where I saw decorations being hung for a child’s birthday party. This, I would learn, is the shelter’s Humane Education Room. It’s where senior groups, school groups, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and friends gathering for parties can learn about the shelter’s mission, meet the dogs available for adoption, and play with dogs or cats for as long as they like.

I had to remind myself that I was seeing all of this while standing in the entry foyer. I wasn’t even inside the actual shelter yet. I hadn’t even stepped foot into the lobby, and I was already smiling at the cute, happy dogs available for adoption.

The lobby itself was topped by a large rectangular skylight that filtered in so much sunshine that regular lights weren’t even needed. The desk that welcomed visitors was low enough for virtually anyone to see over. I watched a girl no older than ten, wearing her auburn ponytail through the back of a pink baseball cap, lean comfortably on the desk while listening to her mother ask a shelter worker about the criteria for adoption. The child felt intimately involved in the process from the moment she entered the shelter, too. Behind that family were a few cages holding puppies and kittens, each with a handwritten note posted about the animal’s age, where he was from, and what his personality was like. Potential adopters were talking to the dogs in these cages the way people casually approach a bank teller at a local branch. There were zero barriers to completing the business of falling in love with a puppy and asking to take him home.

And this was just the lobby. For the next two hours, Cohen would show me all the rooms in the shelter, each of them filled with cages and runs where dogs had plenty of room to relax, move around, and feel comfortable. The walls in each room were painted shades of pale yellow, blue, and beige, all of it cheerful and inviting for the countless potential adopters who walk through every day. Not a speck of dirt, food, or even dog hair was on the floor. There was some barking, of course, but no howling or wailing or crying to indicate that the dogs were stressed in any way. And the air I breathed as I walked through the dog and cat areas seemed remarkably clean and fresh—which is really saying something, since I have a severe allergy to cats that flares up at even the hint of one being near me.

“We installed a system that makes sure the air circulates out of each room ten to twelve times an hour,” Cohen told me. “It helps with everything from cat dander to diseases like kennel cough. Everything airborne stays in the room where it should and doesn’t get into the rest of the building.”

It wasn’t until about halfway through my tour that I also realized I’d been listening to classical music the entire time.

“Do you pipe that in so potential adopters will feel more relaxed?” I asked.

“No,” Cohen replied. “I read somewhere that it helps the dogs feel calm. It’s nice for the people, too, but it’s really there so the dogs feel at home.”

The most remarkable thing I saw during my tour of Northeast Animal Shelter was not just the exceptional facility itself, but the effect that it had on the people who entered it. Wouldbe adopters arrived with baby strollers, toddlers, teenagers, and spouses. The kids skipped through the front door with the same eagerness and smiles that they might have at an amusement park. Senior citizens wandered about as if they were at the local community center, chatting up the dogs they’d known for a few weeks and saying hello to newcomers in need of a friendly, welcoming voice. The place felt cheerful, like a supermarket candy aisle with lots of great treats there for the taking. There was only one dog with a brindle coat like Blue’s, and I couldn’t help but notice how quickly he bounded up to the front of his cage to meet me. He was in no way cowering in the back, terrified, the way Blue had been when Rhonda Beach found him at Person County Animal Control. The dogs at this shelter had an easy way about them and seemed happy, whether they were sniffing my hand through their cages or playing with one another in one of the three outdoor play areas where visitors could watch.

“Does each dog get taken outside at least once a day?” I asked, watching a couple of dogs romping the way Blue does with his canine pals at our local dog park.

“Oh heavens no,” Cohen answered, showing me a log sheet that volunteers had been dutifully filling in that entire afternoon. “Each of the dogs we have gets outside at least a few times a day, sometimes six or seven times a day if we can manage it.”

Cohen also showed me the behind-the-scenes areas that make the shelter’s massive operation possible. For instance, one large room is dedicated to adoption counseling services by a number of trained professionals. That space is across from four private rooms where people can spend one-on-one time with a pup they’re thinking about taking home. “This is one of the only places where anything is left from the old car dealership,” Cohen said. “These round tables where our counselors talk with the adopters, these came from the dealership’s salesmen. They used to use them to try to get people to buy cars. I kept them because I think they’re better than square tables, where people are on opposite sides. These make people feel like we’re all working together.”

Farther in the back, behind electronic door locks, Cohen took me to see the shelter’s veterinary and isolation rooms. Massachusetts law requires dogs entering from across state lines to be held in quarantine for forty-eight hours—with dogs from different states being held in different rooms, to prevent any possible transfer of regional diseases. Northeast Animal Shelter has four quarantine rooms with a total of fifty spaces, which means fifty is the number of out-of-state dogs who can enter the shelter’s program in any two-day period. An erasable white board in the staff lounge keeps track of which rescue groups are planning drop-offs throughout the month, to ensure that enough quarantine rooms will be available at any given time.

“There aren’t any transports that move even close to fifty dogs at a time to us,” Shapiro told me, “so unless something unexpected happens, the system we have in place works well.”

The last thing I saw before I left the shelter was a computer in the lobby, placed there specifically for use by the public. Northeast Animal Shelter takes great pride in the photographs and videos it posts online of the dogs it has available for adoption, going so far as to photograph the dogs in front of blue backgrounds because research showed that they stood out more and generated more interest. The shelter also works regularly with
Petfinder.com
and is happy to direct potential adopters there instead of having them walk out of the building without a rescue dog at all.

“We figure that if people can’t find a dog they like here, then they can sit down, log on, and find another shelter that has whatever they want,” Cohen told me. “It works both ways. We’ve had people drive from as far away as Vermont to adopt dogs from us that they found on Petfinder. We really do try to do all we can to solve the problem for as many dogs as we can.”

The rise of online pet adoptions is key, she and Shapiro told me, because it makes the process a heck of a lot simpler than building a facility like theirs. When Shapiro first approached Alexander Lewyt in the mid-1970s, she said she wanted to learn how to replicate everything he’d done at North Shore Animal League in New York. Today, it’s Shapiro who receives requests from people wanting to copy what Northeast Animal Shelter has achieved in Massachusetts.

And ironically, she now reacts to the telephone calls the same way that Lewyt did when she first dialed his number.

“It’s always somebody who is trying to rescue dogs out of the goodness of their hearts, and I talk to them the same way that Mr. Lewyt talked to me,” she says. “I tell them that to be successful at this scale, you need either a business degree or reallife business experience. You need a lot of common sense. You need to know about marketing. You need to be able to absorb a financial loss for at least the first five years, just as with any startup business. You need the type of personality that can give a hundred and ten percent, working nights, weekends, and when dogs need help on Christmas Day. You have to be able to manage a staff. You have to be able to interact with the public. And you have to be able to steel yourself against heartbreak. There will be a dog that comes through the front door, that will be standing right there staring at you, that you will have to turn away. A lot of people can’t take that kind of heartache, even if they have all the other qualities for success.”

After a half hour on the phone, Shapiro hangs up. “I never hear from them again,” she says. “They have good hearts, but not the rest.”

I asked Shapiro how a place like Northeast Animal Shelter can exist, almost like the fabled city of Oz, in the same country where taxpayers are funding a shelter like the one where Blue was found. The difference is so dramatic that they seem like opposite poles of the world. Obviously, there are many kinds of shelters in between, and there are many reasons Northeast Animal Shelter succeeds where some of the worst public facilities fail—including having a different mandate. Northeast Animal Shelter is able to focus solely on adoptions, while public facilities are supposed to do them in addition to many other things, including protecting the public’s safety. Public facilities also have to accept every dog who is brought in, while Northeast Animal Shelter chooses to take the ones who seem most likely to find a home.

But in Shapiro’s mind, there is also something else at play. “The mind-set in a lot of these shelters is not to rescue,” Shapiro says. “It’s to kill. It’s that these dogs are a problem, and the job is to eliminate the problem.”

A lot of the tension between rescuers and shelter directors arises because rescuers see facilities like Shapiro’s succeeding on private donations alone. There is great public support for the cause. People are putting their money where their mouths are. When the directors of taxpayer-funded shelters say this type of work can’t be done even with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in public money—when they use gas chambers with the regularity of washing machines, trying to cleanse their communities of homeless dogs instead of working harder to help them—it frustrates the activists even more. Nobody, including me, believes that a publicly funded facility will ever have a perfect record of saving every dog. But when the ratio saved is just one in twenty, it’s hard not to wonder why those shelters are not employing at least some of the techniques that places like Northeast Animal Shelter have proved so successful.

Of course I wish Blue had ended up in a place like Northeast Animal Shelter, where people would have held him and talked to him and made him feel safe as opposed to scheduling his death without so much as a walk. It’s incredibly frustrating that shelters with kill rates as high as the one in Person County even exist, especially since the road map for giving every possible dog a home has been available in print since at least 1975, since the day
The Wall Street Journal
printed the article about Alexander Lewyt that so inspired Cindi Shapiro. In that article, Lewyt talks about how he can find a home for virtually any animal, even ones who are blind, deaf, or missing a leg. He told the newspaper that “unadoptable” dogs simply need to be treated as special cases and marketed in a way that makes their disadvantages seem like attributes. In Blue’s case, a bio might have read: “I have a few scabs from a skin rash, but I’m otherwise a happy, healthy puppy whose heart is full of love. I can be shy at first, but once I get to know you, I will be loyal forever. I just need somebody to give me a bath and a few hugs in a place where I feel safe while I wait for the rest of my fur to grow back.”

That same
Journal
article also quotes John Hoyt, then-president of the Humane Society of the United States, who says that American shelters in the mid-1970s were killing an estimated 85 percent of the dogs and cats who came into their care. By his guess, that was nearly fifteen million would-be pets a year.

Our nation’s current estimates, of as many as five million dogs and cats being killed every year, are a step in the right direction—and are a credit to the people who run excellent shelters that save far more dogs than they kill. But it’s wrenching to learn that taxpayer-funded shelters like the one where Blue found himself are still moving backward. If you don’t count the help of rescue groups, they’re killing dogs at an even higher rate than dogs were dying across America thirty-five years ago.

The ultimate solution to this now generations-old problem in America, according to every single advocate I met, requires a focus not just on supporting good shelters and finding homes for the dogs in their care, but also on creating inexpensive ways for the public to spay and neuter the dogs who already exist. Public shelters are never all going to be like the private one that I visited in Massachusetts, so change has to come from the pet population itself. Yes, some dogs are brought to shelters for real behavioral problems. And yes, some are dropped off by people who have failed to train their dogs and then get upset when they act, like, well,
dogs
. But the far bigger problem according to every advocate I met is people who let their dogs breed again and again without any intention of finding homes for the puppies. The flow of these dogs into the shelters has to be eased, and spaying and neutering is the way to do it.

“Even with all that we have done and continue to do, it’s a drop in the bucket,” Shapiro says of the more than 100,000 animals Northeast Animal Shelter has saved. “It’s a Band-Aid on the real problem. Until people in these areas start to spay and neuter their dogs, it is not going to stop. It’s going to remain a tidal wave of dogs that never ends.”

Many rescue advocates from all across America agree. As one told me: “The problem is ultimately that dogs are treated as a commodity. We’ve had puppy mill
¹⁰
owners refer to them as a cash crop. If there were cows being bred and then left to wander loose on the streets of America, the problem would be solved, but because dogs can be big business, the animal rights issues get confused with the business interests, and the problem remains. Until this country adopts a mandatory spay/neuter law, we are never going to see an end to this problem. It’s like trying to move an entire beach with a colander.”