Little Boy Blue (9 page)

And then he started to talk about life inside this facility as he has lived it, beginning back in the days when things were much worse than they are now.

For about the first two years that he held the job, Shaw told me, he was required to kill every dog who came in unless somebody could prove the pup had been vaccinated against rabies. Plenty of raccoons, foxes, bats, and skunks in Person County are rabies carriers, and far too many dog owners fail to vaccinate their pooches against the disease. The county’s rules meant that if a family’s dog got loose, and the family could not produce a rabies vaccination certificate, the dog would die at animal control even if the parents and children came looking for him. Period.

Shaw says this was too much for him to bear, so he went to the county Board of Health and asked if he could at least seek new homes for dogs found in areas where no rabid animals had been recently found. “After some controversy,” he recalls, “they said yes. And immediately, we were allowed to work with rescue groups and do adoptions. We thought it was great. We started ‘Pet of the Week’ in the local paper.”

At that time, the building filled with offices where we were now sitting comprised the entirety of Person County Animal Control. It wasn’t just office space. It held all the cages and animals, too—and precious few people knew or cared that it existed. Shaw describes those days as almost a full decade’s worth of years before rescue groups became prominent or vocal, and before people beyond his officers paid any attention whatsoever to what went on inside the shelter. He and his small staff were awfully isolated as he learned firsthand what it felt like to be the human being in charge of enforcing county and state rules regarding unwanted animals. He hardened himself to a job that required him to show up on time, kill healthy puppies, and then get up the next morning and do so again. He tried to do the job and follow the rules in as professional a way as he could, even though the work itself sometimes strained at the best parts of human nature.

Then, in the mid-2000s he learned that the state was going to begin inspecting county shelters and requiring training for the three legal ways to kill a dog in North Carolina: by lethal injection, by gunshot, and by gas chamber. “I didn’t have all the rescue groups on my back then,” he told me. “I came up with this brainstorm on my own, that we needed a better facility before these inspections started. I came up with a plan and went to the county. There was controversy about that, too—one county commissioner asked me, ‘Can’t you just have a roof and some cages?’—but they spent about $600,000 to build an addition and make the facility better. And all of a sudden after that, people got interested in us. They realized we existed. And we started hearing from all these rescue groups that put down our employees. Some of them wanted to help us do our jobs, but some said they didn’t have to abide by any rules and were going to do whatever they wanted. We had no idea how to work with them.”

During the past two or three years, Shaw says, a lot of his time has shifted from doing what he likes best—being out in the community helping people and animals—to defending himself and his employees against animal-welfare activists. The tone that some of the rescue groups take makes Shaw uneasy, to say the least. He felt he had done the right thing by asking the county for the building improvements, as well as for new funding to provide professional euthanasia training within the bounds of state law. He ran a clean operation. Not once, he told me, has his kennel ever been shut down because of parvo or another disease outbreak the way other shelters are because they are dirty and poorly run. He grew so concerned about what felt to him like an onslaught of negativity that he even started reading the fine print when applying for grants that might help the facility improve further.

“I have to make sure the grants aren’t attached to a group like PETA,” he told me. “They have a history of coming in the back door and taking control. My staff works hard. The job here is hard. Most animal-control officers last two, three, maybe five years. I have a much better retention rate because we give the staff training and send them to conferences. I love animals, but my job is to manage this facility and keep the community safe. Some of these rescue groups, they see a dog on the side of the road suffering and a person on the side of the road suffering, and they ignore the person to save the dog. I put people’s safety first. That is part of our job here at animal control. I go by the rules and regulations of the county. I am paid to uphold the law.”

Shaw spent a good hour sitting and talking with me, and making sure that I understood how professional his animal-control operation was. But he knew, because of questions I’d submitted in advance, that I also wanted to talk about the gas chamber. It has fast become a lightning-rod topic for him and his fellow animal-control directors throughout the country, as rescue groups call it everything from cruel to barbaric to evil. Shaw made sure to tell me, even before I asked, that the gas chamber is a tool of animal control. It is nothing more, and nothing less. He said that it is not only one of the three legal methods of killing dogs according to the state of North Carolina, but that it is also an approved form of euthanasia by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

I nodded with understanding, and then I asked him whether he was aware that just two months earlier, in June 2011, the AVMA had issued a new proposed set of guidelines. Unlike in so many years past, the group was now specifically stating that gas chambers should
not
be used for routine euthanasia of dogs.

Shaw looked surprised, and then concerned.

And that’s when he offered to give me a tour and show me how it worked.

“This is where we’re getting to Blue’s story,” Shaw said as we walked out the back door of the original building and into the area that separates it from the new addition, which is the dog kennel. Local folks call this in-between space a sally port. I’ve always heard spaces like this referred to as breezeways. No matter the lingo, the construction is the same. We stood on concrete in the open air. On either side of us were floor-to-ceiling chainlink fences with large gates that connect the old building and the new kennel, and that swing open from the middle. This is where cars drive in to drop off puppies and dogs on one side, and where trucks arrive to collect them on the other side after they have been killed.

Blue most likely came in through this drop-off gate, Shaw says. If he was only four or five months old when he arrived in New Jersey, and he had already been neutered and healed from the surgery, then the odds are good that he was no more than two or three months old when he was left here. Since the shelter doesn’t name the dogs who come in, there is no way to tell exactly how Blue arrived, but Shaw’s best guess based on what he’s seen every day for nearly fifteen years in this place is that Blue was part of an unwanted litter of puppies. That means Blue would have been dropped off by a car here in the breezeway, about ten steps away from the gas chamber in plain view.

Now, I’m the first to admit that most pieces of machinery in my own basement are like alien spaceships to me. If I hadn’t seen a photograph of the gas chamber beforehand, I would have assumed it was some kind of air handler attached to the original building. It’s a large stainless-steel box, about the shape of a palette of bottled water cases being delivered to a convenience store. Its height is about four feet tall and its depth appeared to be a bit longer, making the entire chamber about the size of four bottled water cases stacked atop one another. As people drop off puppies like Blue, the chamber stands off to the right, clear as day. Many people probably don’t even notice it, the same way I don’t typically look at my own furnace all too carefully. When I asked around town later that day, every local resident I met seemed surprised to learn that they lived in a county that still used a gas chamber at all.

Shaw says that having the gas chamber here is a decision made by the county and the state—not by him. It is a legal tool that he is given in order to perform his job, just like lethal injection.

“Now, in my opinion, it’s not a cruel way to euthanize an animal,” he says. “There really is no humane way to euthanize a healthy animal. But if I thought it was cruel, it would be lying in a ditch somewhere instead of standing in this building.”

He walked over to the chamber and swung its door open so I could look inside. I saw three stalls, much like the ones that separate racehorses at the start of the Kentucky Derby. The separating walls of each stall were see-through thanks to large holes that let the gas flow between them. If Blue had been placed inside, he most likely would have pawed at the separating wall to get to the dog next door, the same way that most puppies paw from inside kennels or crates to get to dogs or people on the other side.

First, Shaw showed me how his staff uses the gas chamber to kill cats. He grabbed a cat carrier from atop a nearby stack and explained how it fits inside the gas-chamber stall.

“Is that size carrier the same as what you would use for a little puppy like Blue?” I asked.

He thought for a moment—and then his eyes grew wide with epiphany.

“If he was really that little, if he was really a puppy, then he wouldn’t have gone into this gas chamber at all,” Shaw blurted. “Any dog four months or younger is killed by lethal injection, not by the gas chamber. That’s the rule. We take ’em inside the euthanasia room. We love ’em and rub ’em for a few minutes. And then we say good-bye.”

Shaw next pointed out the carbon-monoxide detector installed just above the chamber door. We were in the open air, so it really wasn’t doing much good, but he said the law requires it so his department has it for safety.

I recalled that a carbon-monoxide detector was among the AVMA guidelines for proper gas chamber use. Those guidelines also state that all workers must understand the hazards of the chamber itself. I asked Shaw if his staff had been informed of the reports from the state departments of Health and Labor that showed chambers from the same manufacturer had leaked gas and overexposed workers to fumes in Sampson and Davidson counties.

As with my earlier question about the newly proposed AVMA guidelines, he looked surprised. “I hadn’t heard about any of that,” he said quietly before continuing our tour.

That’s when I started doing some mental math. If dogs are required to be separated inside the chamber, and there are only three stalls, and the chamber has to be loaded, filled with gas, and then unloaded to complete a single cycle, then killing dogs in a gas chamber according to the guidelines really isn’t all that much faster than killing them by lethal injection, which advocates say is far more humane.

I asked Shaw if he ever puts more than one dog into each of the three chambers, for efficiency. Rescue advocates I spoke with allege that some shelter directors do just that, including gassing litters of puppies in violation of the law. These critics said that since the shelters don’t know the actual ages of abandoned dogs anyway, they take the easier route of gassing any puppies they can versus giving them individual, lethal injections.

In fact, a shelter director in Gaston County, North Carolina, did an entire analysis to show how much more cost effective the gas chambers are compared with lethal injection. He deter- mined that killing in the chamber costs $4.66 per animal while killing with injections costs $11.21. “With the [gas chamber] flexibility of euthanizing multiple and not individual animals,” the Gaston County director told the local newspaper, “there’s certainly less time involved.”

Shaw didn’t say anything about using the gas chamber in Person County to save time or make the job easier. He once again referred to the way he works within the bounds of the law. “This is a professionally built chamber,” he told me. “Before I worked here, it used to be a wooden box that they backed a car up to. Now we have this, and before the state came and said we had to divide it, they’d put five, six, seven dogs in here. But now, it’s three.

“I’m not going to say it’s only vicious dogs,” he continued. “That would not be true. If we have thirteen dogs to go down in one day, we might not have enough [lethal injection] juice to do the job, especially if they’re bigger dogs. I have never allowed an animal to be shot inside this facility, so there are times when this chamber is the only legal option.”

Our tour ended inside the recent addition, which is the dog kennel. It has two sections of cages. The one closest to the gas chamber contains fourteen cages side by side. The second section, in the far corner, contains ten cages across from one another with five on each side—five for dogs the shelter has decided are preferable for adoption, and five for dogs that rescue groups have offered to take. The dogs in these ten cages are the lucky ones. The dogs who are in the larger row of cages, Shaw told me, don’t even get a walk outside before their three legally mandated holding days are up.

“Now, anybody can come and adopt any of these dogs in any of the cages,” Shaw said. “It’s not like we’re saying the ones in these cages have no chance at all. But the dogs in the back have been temperament tested with people and with other dogs, and they’re the ones we think have the best chance.”

Rescue groups that have attained 501(c) (3) charity status are allowed to enter the kennel and choose any dogs they want to save, except for ones the shelter has deemed rabid or vicious, Shaw told me more than once. He pointed to a cage in the larger row where a dog had been tagged for rescue as an example. I looked down and saw a puppy wagging his tail and trying to jump through the cage to get to me. Next door, in a cage that had not been tagged for rescue, was a tiny little brindle just like Blue. The date on his card was just two days from now. It reminded me of the expiration dates on gallons of milk at the grocery store.

At the time when Blue was here, a volunteer named Rhonda Beach from Canine Volunteer Rescue in Person County would walk through the kennel with Annie Turner and choose the dogs to be saved. While Shaw had no idea which dog Blue might have been, Beach told me that she remembered him distinctly. I spoke to her more than a year after she tagged him for rescue at the shelter, a year when he was one of more than three hundred dogs she helped to save. She could still remember the way he had looked at her, his brown eyes wide and worried, his body cowering with fear.