Little Boy Blue (7 page)

Armstrong had told me during breakfast that in order for Blue to come to the attention of Lulu’s Rescue, he must have been perilously close to the gas chamber—probably on the list for asphyxiation that same afternoon, a dead puppy walking. His was, just a few weeks ago, one of the dozens upon dozens of helpless faces in these photographs.

It’s a strange thing, trying to discern a special quality in any dog based only on a photograph—especially one taken when the dog is at his most vulnerable, locked in a cage on the brink of being killed. With Blue, sure, I thought his picture was cute, but I couldn’t intuit anything substantial about his actual personality. That would have to wait for things like our daily walks at the park, like the day when we met a woman playing by the riverside with her three nieces. One of the little blonde girls, maybe three years old, took to Blue immediately. I had Stella’s leash in one hand and Blue’s in the other, and I was focused on Stella, who is so strong that she could have accidently crushed the little girls simply by jumping on them. The older girls started to play with her, and I was keeping an eye on them when I heard the three-year-old squeal with delight. I turned to see that she had inserted both of her hands into Blue’s mouth, jamming her fingers right up between his teeth and his flabby lips. All of his loose puppy skin was flapping down over her tiny little palms, and she could not have been more excited, as if she had immersed her entire body into a pile of warm Play-Doh. I immediately extricated her digits from Blue’s mouth, explaining that he’s just a puppy and we don’t want to teach him to bite people, but Blue himself was happy as could be, wagging his tail and darn near smiling from the attention.

Now that’s an impressive temperament, and it’s certainly not something anybody could intuit from a photograph taken through the bars of a cage inside of a shelter. There is far more to any dog’s personality than can be captured in that single digital shot, just as there is, apparently, far more going on behind online puppy adoption websites than I’d ever conceived could actually be possible.

Now, while Blue loves kids, he is absolutely, positively not a fan of books. Whenever he sees me take out my digital e-book reader and flip open the red faux leather cover, he lets out a sigh that could rival any hot-air balloon’s belch after a mile-high ride. If I lie on the sofa to start a new book, he crawls onto my lap and plops his head right into the middle of my stomach, forcing me to lift up the reader and pet him instead. In those moments, I call him by his well-deserved nickname—Jealous—and I swear that he actually grins at me like the Cheshire Cat.

It’s when I start reading aloud to him that I begin to think we’ve both cartwheeled down the rabbit hole for good. I’m not sure why the act seems so strange; one recent survey funded by Purina shows that more than half the people who have dogs talk to them, and that a full third of women say their dogs are better listeners than their human companions. Blue is one of those cool dogs who actually seems to be listening, too. He twists his head from side to side and perks up his ears as high as he can, as if he’s trying to understand every word that I say to him. What does it matter if, instead of asking “Want to go to the park?” I’m instead quoting to him from a best seller on
The New York Times
list?

On Armstrong’s advice, I purchased a few books to help me understand the bigger picture that surrounds Blue’s story—and I found myself shouting out quotes to him well into the wee hours, whether he was even awake or not. By reading
The Bond:
Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them
by Wayne Pacelle, who is president of the Humane Society of the United States, I learned that America is spending more than a billion dollars a year to operate animal shelters. Some of these facilities are functioning like actual shelters, meaning sanctuaries and places of safety, while others are killing more than 80 percent of the dogs and cats entrusted to their care. That’s four out of five dogs, all but dead on arrival at the doors of shelters like the one where Blue was found. Fully three-quarters of those dogs are healthy and adoptable as opposed to sickly and vicious, but only one of four dogs who end up living in our homes come from shelters in any given year. Most people get their dogs from breeders or from pet stores while perfectly wonderful puppies and dogs are left to die in shelters every single day.

Those statistics were bad enough, but the one that got me in the gut is this: If just two in four people, instead of one in four people, went to shelters instead of breeders or pet stores to get their next dog, then the entire problem of killing dogs like Blue would be statistically eliminated across the country. Geographic challenges would remain in terms of supply and demand, but according to this book, there would be more adopters than there are dogs in the shelters. If just two in four people who get a dog chose to adopt, then there would be enough homes for all of the dogs like Blue. None would have to be killed as long as the dogs and adopters could connect geographically.

True shelters that euthanize only the dogs who are vicious or incurably ill tend to have four characteristics in common, I learned from various books and articles written by leading authorities. These best-practice shelters offer low-cost spay and neuter programs, which help their communities reduce the number of unwanted dogs in the first place. They offer dogs for adoption in multiple locations instead of just at the shelter itself, so people can meet adoptable dogs in places like parks and pet-supply stores. They help families with behavioral training so that “troublesome” dogs like my Stella can stay in their homes instead of being surrendered back into the shelter system. And they work with a community-wide network of rescue groups that in turn utilize sites like Petfinder to connect dogs like Blue with adopters like me, when there aren’t enough adopters coming forward locally.

“These are the basics of the formula that is making such a difference in the Northeast, where euthanasia rates have declined rapidly,” Pacelle wrote, echoing exactly what Jane Zeolla told me at my own kitchen table on the day she came to inspect my home. “Some shelters are actually importing shelter dogs from elsewhere to meet local demand—not only finding homes for those dogs, but at the same time creating space for strays in those other regions.”

That is, of course, precisely what happened with Blue, and it’s not just Lulu’s Rescue saving lives by stepping in to fill the need. On Petfinder alone, more than thirteen thousand rescue groups are trying to do exactly the same thing that Lulu’s did for Blue. That’s an average of two hundred sixty rescue groups per state. To put that into context, the Red Cross has about seven hundred local chapters in all of America. That’s an average of just fourteen local Red Cross chapters per state, eighteen times
fewer
than there are rescue groups now working to save healthy dogs from shelters nationwide.

The scope of the dog-rescue effort is just plain staggering— and not all activists are willing to be politically correct in describing it. Some are so fed up with the status quo that their contempt drips from the pages of their books like wet ink. Nathan J. Winograd, in
Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation
and the No Kill Revolution in America,
argues that some of America’s publicly funded shelters have quite simply become places where quick “mercy killing” is now standard operating procedure. He claims that killing dogs like Blue is nothing more than an excuse used by shelter workers who are too underfunded, too exhausted, or too plain lazy to even try to find homes for the majority of dogs left in their care.

While Winograd’s tone is less measured than that in some of his colleagues’ books, I couldn’t help but notice that his underlying facts appeared to be the same—and I gave him some extra attention because Michele Armstrong at Lulu’s Rescue had told me that he is one of her heroes. Winograd doesn’t stop at the statistics the way other activists do, saying that if only more people would adopt, the problem could be solved. While he does say that the public should make a greater effort to spay and neuter their dogs, he doesn’t draw the larger curtain of blame down over the general public itself. He instead points a wagging finger at every shelter director whose salary is paid by taxpayers, whose facility is funded by tax dollars, and who continues to kill more healthy, adoptable dogs than are saved. He talks about professional animal-control workers who insist they simply cannot do what the rescue groups like Lulu’s are able to do as volunteers, that they’re not equipped or staffed for it, and that it is instead the rescue groups—not the shelters themselves—failing to do enough to save dogs like Blue.

“Imagine hypothetically a Department of Social Services director attacking a private soup kitchen or homeless shelter for not having enough beds or serving enough meals, meaning the department itself has to feed or house the remainder,” Winograd writes. “As a private agency, the soup kitchen or homeless shelter does what it can. The mandate to care for homeless people, by contrast, belongs with the city department.”

“The mandate to care” is a noteworthy phrase. While I understand that every issue has its many sides, along with its institutionalized personalities and intricate politics, I also began to realize that every book and article I was reading contained shared points that seemed to underpin everything I knew so far about Blue’s life story. He was a perfectly wonderful, adoptable dog about to be killed for no discernable reason other than space. To the best of my knowledge, nobody from taxpayer-funded Person County Animal Control so much as took his picture and uploaded it to an adoption website before scheduling his death. It was volunteers in North Carolina working together with volunteers all the way up in Pennsylvania who kept Blue safe, provided basic veterinary care, and made an effort to get him into the home of a willing adopter like me.

I couldn’t help but wonder why the tax dollars being spent at the Person County facility didn’t simply pay for that handful of things in the first place. We’re talking about curing a common rash, giving a puppy food and a clean place to sleep, and publishing his digital photograph online. None of this sounded particularly colossal in scope to me, and not nearly so vigorous that a cross-country network of volunteers should have to exist to get it accomplished. The more I read, the more puzzled I felt.

And the bigger question, I pondered, is how many of the billion dollars doled out to American shelters each year are being spent on gas chambers instead of digital photographs? How many shelters are there in the United States with operations like the one that nearly claimed Blue’s life? How widespread is this problem of gas chambers, in a nation where more than half the pet owners surveyed say they call themselves Mommy and Daddy?

The complete answers, unfortunately, were not available to me in any book, on any website, or from any of the leading animalwelfare groups in the United States. I’d have to collect the data on my own, state by state and county budget by county budget— a task that would take me as many months of research as Blue had spent on the planet.

In the meantime, something that Armstrong told me at breakfast continued to weigh on my mind. She’d said it toward the end of our chat, only after she’d pegged me as a kindred spirit to whom she felt safe unburdening just the smallest, most splinterlike, but still-painful piece of her soul.

“You can’t imagine the feeling of being at one of these shelters, one of the high-kill operations that use these gas chambers every day,” she said. The sparkle had left her eyes, which at first had been filled with hope, but that, the more we talked, came to look as hollow as the gaze of a terrorism survivor. “Walking into these places is bad enough, but having to walk back out, leaving innocent dogs behind, that’s something that doesn’t leave a person. You cannot see something like that and just go about your daily business. You cannot see something like that and not want to stand up and do more.”

What I see every day is a loving puppy who wants only to romp, play, and be forever by my side. On the first day that I left Blue out of his crate and alone in the house—for about 90 seconds while I walked up the driveway to get the mail—he chomped his way clear through one of the painted white wooden window grilles that he saw not as a colonial window adornment, but instead as a barrier to the two of us being together. Had I not walked back inside quickly enough, he no doubt would have begun bashing his teeth against the window glass itself. I’d been away from him for less than two minutes, and he’d been able to see me the entire time, but even still, he marked my glorious return from the mailbox with kisses and whimpers and the kind of bounding leap into my arms that
Life
magazine used to capture among returning sailors and their pregnant wives in the aftermath of World War II. The moment was, at least in Blue’s mind, a genuine homecoming. It was a parade-worthy cause for celebration.

Now that Blue has grown a bit older and more comfortable in his own home, he understands that my walking up the driveway to get the mail does not constitute his abandonment. He also has made his peace with my taking out the garbage and doing the laundry (though he remains wary of the vacuum and continues his multifaceted campaign to bark it into submission). And even though I know that the day with the window grille was just a puppy reacting to his new mom doing something he hadn’t expected, the thought of how he tried so desperately to stay by my side left me wondering how he must have felt at the moment another human being plopped him into a cage at the North Carolina shelter. The metal door closed in upon him, and then the person walked away with his back as well as his heart turned on Blue—forever.

Though I’d never stepped foot in a place like that, or inside any animal shelter, for that matter, my everyday encounters with Blue had already left me plagued by the same sense of moral imperative that Armstrong talked about at breakfast. I’ve never been the kind of person who quits after starting a race. When my sister talked me into attempting a triathlon, the organizers literally had to follow me in a pickup truck, removing orange cones from the street as I unceremoniously became the very last competitor to bicycle past them—but I eventually made it, red-faced and gasping, all the way to the finish line. When it came to learning more and more about Blue, I figured that if I already, albeit inadvertently, had become a person who played even a minor role in this national grassroots effort to save dogs like him, then I’d better make every possible attempt to fully understand the problem. The underlying questions about this world that Blue so deeply embodied were nagging at me, plain and simple. They were rattling around in my brain like the chains of a restless ghost.