Fifty Years in the Doghouse

by Lloyd Alexander

  "Bed hell," Ryan said. "I haven't even started this job."

  "You got the horses out," said the policeman, through chattering teeth. "Oh, sure," Ryan said. "I got them out. Now what do you think I'm going to do with them? Let them take a walk in the park? They'll catch pneumonia if they stand out here any more."

  "So will I," said the policeman. "But I'm doing it anyway."

  "You have to," said Ryan. "They don't." The policeman was in no mood for worrying about horses. "Why don't you just knit them some jackets? Maybe some little booties to match."

  "I think I can do better than that," said Ryan.

  He had noticed a quilt factory next to the stable. "Do me a favor, will you? Just break down that door a little bit."

  "Oh, no," the policeman said. "You aren't going to take them animals in there."

  "I want some quilts," Ryan said. "I need seventy-six big quilts. They'll be as good as blankets."

  "Quilts!" shouted the policeman. "Why don't you get some feather beds while you're at it? You know we can't go breaking into private property."

  "If that quilt factory was burning," Ryan said, "you'd break in, wouldn't you?" The policeman gave Ryan a strange look. It crossed his mind that Ryan was perhaps capable of setting fire to the building just to get his seventy-six quilts. "Look," the policeman said, "there's an emergency phone number on the door. If you're going to smash a man's factory and take off with his merchandise, the polite thing would be to sort of tell him about it ahead of time. It's a small courtesy, I know. But people appreciate it. You'd be surprised." The policeman promised to phone the owner. "Tell him it's an emergency," Ryan called. "And tell him it's too damned cold out here to wait around." By the time the policeman came back, Ryan had already put his shoulder to the door and was rummaging around a pile of quilts. "He says it's all right," the officer advised. "He says he never heard of anybody wrapping up horses in quilts. But if that's what you want, go ahead." All the quilts Ryan found were too small. One quilt would barely cover half a horse. Two per animal, he decided, would be just right. On a worktable, he discovered a heavy needle and some pack thread. Pulling the quilts into a pile, Ryan squatted down in the midst of it and began to sew.

  "You know, Ryan," said the policeman, "you'd make one hell of a leprechaun."

  "Don't waste time talking," Ryan muttered, his mouth full of thread. "Just get sewing." In a little while, Ryan had transformed the pile of quilts into suitable horse covers. "Now all we need to do is get the horses to the shelter."

  "We?" asked the policeman. "Do you want them galloping all over New York?" Ryan asked. New Yorkers are used to odd sights and take pride in not being startled by them. But even the most blase New Yorker would have been mildly surprised at Ryan's cavalcade that night. Marching ahead, lantern in hand, Ryan shouted orders to a squad of blue-coated policemen, reinforced by a hastily recruited contingent of Skid Row residents, trying to keep seventy-six horses in line. The horses wore the quilts Ryan had stitched together and the ensembles were most attractive: floral patterns, entwined roses, acanthus leaves in a variety of colors, reminiscent of the Easter Parade. At the ASPCA shelter, Ryan parked horses wherever he could find room. He filled the stalls with horses. He drove the Society's trucks into the street and filled the garage with horses. He made room in the kennels for horses. The only thing that kept him from filling up the offices and lavatories was that he eventually ran out of horses. Then he went to a bar. "Whiskey!" Ryan ordered. His face by this time had acquired alternating layers of soot and ice. The bartender took down a bottle and began pouring a shot. "No, no," Ryan said. "More!"

  "A double?" the bartender asked. "More than that," Ryan cried. "Man, I need a case of whiskey!"

  He carried the whiskey back to the shelter and dosed each horse. Later in the morning, after the animals had been sorted out and checked over, Ryan sat down to catch his breath. "It's amazing," said one of the Society's veterinarians. "Those horses are in perfect shape. But I wish I'd seen the expression on that bartender's face."

  "It didn't surprise him," Ryan said. "I guess I looked like I needed a drink. The only thing he wanted to know was: should he wrap up the case of whiskey or did I want to drink it there?"

  Ryan needed no whiskey one night in midsummer. What he needed most he could not get: time. On Charles Street that night, fire had swept a big stable so quickly that it was practically an instant ruin. The damage was to reach a quarter of a million dollars. "We're licked," the fire chief told Ryan. "It's gone too fast. If we had every hook and ladder in New York it wouldn't do us any good."

  "How many horses are in there?" Ryan asked. "About seventy. They're all dead. Burned or suffocated."

  "What do you mean dead?" Ryan shouted. "My God, man, I can hear them in there screaming."

  "That's on the second floor," said the fire chief. "But they're done for, too. We can't get near them. You might as well forget it-" Before the chief could say any more, Ryan had dashed across the fire lines into the burning stable. The chief had been right. Blackened bodies of horses filled the first floor. The ramps and stairways to the second floor had been burned away. Overhead, Ryan could hear the cries of the animals still alive. The heat forced Ryan outside again. Next door to the stable was a one-story building the flames had not quite demolished.

  "Get some men over here with a ladder," shouted Ryan. When it came, he clambered up to the low roof. Through a window at one end of the stable, Ryan saw about fifty horses milling inside. "I need a ramp," Ryan called. "Get me a ramp and I'll bring out every one of them."

  "No good!" the chief shouted back. "That roof's going to go. If the fire doesn't get them, the smoke will."

  "There's two big window." Ryan said, "and a skylight. Smash them in. Those horses will suffocate if you don't."

  "Fresh air won't get them out."

  "No," Ryan said, "but it'll keep them alive till I do." Ryan, who had been a custom tailor for horses during the winter, now became an architect. The chief dispatched what men he could spare to help Ryan haul up some beams from a subway construction in the next block. Throughout the dawn and early morning, the sweating men shored up the roof and built a makeshift ramp. Ryan gritted his teeth and climbed to the top of the building again. One by one through the smashed window, he led the horses across the roof, down the ramp to the street. By late afternoon, Ryan was back at the ASPCA headquarters. He looked at his watch. "Five o'clock," Ryan said with surprise. "I guess it's time to call it a day." He had spent fifteen hours at the fire. He had rescued fifty one horses. The Society awarded Ryan its Distinguished Service Medal for those fifteen hours. No one doubted he deserved it-including the fire chief. "But you know, Ryan," the chief told him later, "I can't figure why I listened to you when you told me to smash in the skylight and those windows. Making a draft like that's against every rule of fire fighting. You're OK with horses," the chief added. "But you sure don't know a damned thing about being a fireman."

  7 - The Friendly Persuaders

  Ryan admits he would never have made a good fire fighter, and prefers his official title: "Inspector and Training Instructor." As such, he is attached to the heart of Society operations, the Humane Work Division. Since its founding, the ASPCA has undertaken dozens of humane activities, even sponsoring pet shows. But the public sees only the more obvious examples: the Perils-of-Pauline rescue of a cat from a window ledge; the puppies and kittens in the adoption wards; the hospital, the shelters. For a good many people, 'Be Kind to Animals' is a hand-embroidered platitude in the category of 'Home Sweet Home' or one of those commendable yet nebulous ideas like the Fourth Dimension. For the Humane Work Division, prevention of cruelty is the reason for its existence, a 24-hour-a-day, year-round job. It leads to some strange places. One such was a ripe, rat-infested dump in Long Island's Moriches Bay area. Reports had come in that the spot swarmed with tiny ducklings. Shocked by the complaints, hardly believing anybody would toss out live poultry with rubbish, Arthur L. Amundsen, present Director of Operations,
hurried to check on it himself. The reports were true. "This is one of the cruelest things I've ever seen," Amundsen says. "Dozens of ducklings with broken or twisted legs, maimed, burned, half eaten by rats, or starved to death."

  Amundsen and Society agents found ducklings dragged into rat holes or trapped under cans, bottles and heaps of trash. Despite the blistering midsummer sun, many of the tiny creatures had managed to survive. The agents collected 30 or 40 ducklings and transported them to the shelter; scores of others, crippled or burned beyond help, had to be humanely destroyed. Commercial duck raisers, the Society learned, had been dumping barrels of surplus eggs. In the warmth of the sun and the smoldering trash fires, fertile eggs soon hatched. The little ducks emerged not into a brave new world of water and green grass but a nightmare. An incubator, the dump was also a death trap. The farmers themselves could have spared the unhatched ducklings this torment by taking a few minutes to break the eggs they intended to discard; or to let them stand briefly in cold water. When the Society asked for cooperation, the growers agreed. But the following season, the egg dumping continued. Although Society agents, as peace officers, have authority to make arrests and issue summonses, no agent may sign a complaint on his own unless he personally witnesses an act of cruelty. Nobody from the Society had, so far, actually seen farmers throwing out fertile eggs. For weeks, agents patrolled the area. It was not a pleasant assignment. Finally, one of the Society people caught a grower dumping barrels of eggs in varying stages of hatching. Along with the eggs were 13 live and peeping baby ducks. This was the on-the-spot evidence the Society required to go to court. It was an open-and-shut case of cruelty. Even the defense attorney suggested the need for an ordinance against disposing of eggs at a public dump. Township authorities acted quickly, passing a local law carrying a fine and jail sentence for violators.

  At the trial, the ducklings were star witnesses. Later, Amundsen himself adopted a number of them. Under his care, they grew large and sleek; they tramped happily around the Amundsen garden, quacking as well as if they had been born on a model farm instead of a desolate dump. Far from Long Island's duck farms, the New York waterfront has figured in the Society's humane work, although in this case, it wasn't a matter of investigating deliberate cruelty, but, in a sense, carrying a small flag of truce in a labor management dispute. On the eve of a shipping strike, a stevedore telephoned the Society about a special problem. "We're going off the job," he advised. "And that's OK with me. But it won't be OK with the cats around here." Some of Manhattan's cats have chosen to follow careers on the waterfront. They leave the hard work of loading and unloading to the deckhands but help out by keeping down the rat population. Stevedores are tough characters; so are the port side cats, and the two groups get along splendidly. The stevedores share their lunches with the cats and make sure there's food left for them. The strike, leaving the waterfront deserted, threatened the cats with loss of their daily rations. The Society contacted shipping offices in the area and a night watchman agreed to feed the animals. The cats weathered the strike and, as soon as it was settled, went back to sharing the stevedores' ham sandwiches. Cats are notoriously indifferent to disputes between humans, but in this case the stevedores judged the cats' sympathies to be with the union. Throughout the strike, no cat ever crossed a picket line. The stevedore had the right idea. He wanted to stop a bad situation before it started and the Society wishes more people would think along those lines. Animals, just as humans, have well-defined legal safeguards and the Society will protect a mistreated animal to the limit, using, if necessary, all the machinery the law provides.

  But it has never assumed the attitude of an avenging angel, smiting the wicked in its wrath. The Humane Work Division's basic aim is not to punish but prevent cruelty. To achieve this, the Division makes more than 8,000 inspections a year. Special agents attend every performance and rehearsal of circuses and rodeos, every official horse show within a 65-mile radius of Columbus Circle; they check circuses and rodeos, race tracks, poultry markets, riding academies, kennels, zoos, pet shops, stockyards and slaughter houses. These last two, in Bergh's time, ranked among the worst offenders. Through the Society's constant efforts, most meat processors today have learned that humane treatment pays off in safer, more efficient operations, less waste and a better product. The Federal Government recognizes this, too, and meat packers selling directly or indirectly to the government must abide by the federal humane slaughter legislation passed in 1960. This covers about 90 percent of meat bought in the United States, and 480 federally inspected establishments. The smaller packers that don't sell to the government aren't obliged to install humane slaughtering methods unless state laws require them to do so. (Fifteen states have already passed legislation of this type. New York, usually a leader in such matters, is not one of them and the Society still presses for a humane slaughter law.) If the Society finds a violation-or potential violation-in any of the places it inspects, an agent explains the situation carefully to the person responsible and suggests ways of correcting it. Most people willingly cooperate. In flagrant, persistent or deliberate violations, the Society has authority to bring the offender to court. On top of the continual inspections, the Society investigates more than 5,000 alleged cases of cruelty each year-an average of 15 per day.

  Until recently, it had to perform this task with a frantically overworked staff operating from a crowded cubicle at the Manhattan Shelter. The reorganization and expansion program gave the Division more room to turn around in and some more personnel to carry out the anti-cruelty activities. Director of the Division is the sandy-haired, six-foot Colonel Rowan. The much-decorated Colonel's quick smile shows a certain optimism and indefatigably-and he needs every bit of it. Rowan keeps on the go as much as his men, hurrying out to check on an investigation in Upstate New York, driving back again that night to follow up another one in Manhattan. Rowan insists on being at the scene in case of emergencies-an attitude which costs him numerous nights of sleep. New York State laws relating to cruelty to animals are among the best if not the best animal laws in the country. Nevertheless, Colonel Rowan and his agents frequently run into legal snarls of varying magnitude. One law which perennially raises a storm of protests to the Society has to do with 'set tails' on gaited show horses. It has been the vogue for these gaited animals to sport tails that arch up abruptly from the hindquarters and cascade or fly in the breeze, sometimes with benefit of artificial lengthening and thickening. Producing the desired set-tail effect comes from an operation which severs certain muscles. Handlers maintain the artificial arch by keeping the horse's tail in a 'bustle' a large part of the time it isn't in the show ring. For many years large groups have sought to outlaw the practice of tail cutting and the showing of horses so treated. It's against the law in New York to perform this operation unless the owner can produce a veterinarian's certificate that the operation is necessary for the health or life of the creature. It also is against the law to show such an animal without the same veterinarian's affidavit. Once the set-tail law became part of the New York State code the ASPCA set out to enforce it.

  A large-scale rhubarb ensued, and some members of the ASPCA Board of Managers resigned. Then came the stumbling block not known to the public in general. Because many horses with set tails are imported from outside New York, the New York statute was on two occasions held to violate the commerce clause of the United States Constitution. The latter of these court findings came in August of 1962. As a result, the law is unenforceable; but the tirade against the ASPCA continues. Currently the Society is seeking some way out of this predicament. Conceivably an enforceable law will come. Getting around the interstate commerce angle is a poser, however. Possibly horse show officials all over the country may be persuaded-even if a moratorium of several years is necessary to permit existing valuable animals with set tails to pass into retirement-to show gaited horses the way God made them. Time will tell. Meanwhile, the ASPCA has been advised that summonses issued under the present law will be thrown
out of court.

  Special agents under Rowan's supervision total 15, plus 2 inspectors and a Deputy Director. At one time, agents had to report back to the Manhattan Shelter no matter how far afield their investigations led them. Now, among the many other efficiencies Rowan has implemented, the agents work as flying squads or rotating teams; during any given assignment, they make the nearest ASPCA shelter their temporary headquarters. It has saved considerable shuttling back and forth through overcrowded New York and the agents can get onto their cases faster than ever before. They also telephone their office hourly and, in emergencies, the agent closest to the scene investigates immediately. In addition to the New York City staff, volunteer agents help the Society cover the entire state. These volunteers make on-the-spot investigations in the outlying areas; the Society follows up if the situation so requires. One of these volunteers alerted the Society to one of its most distressing cases in several years: neglected livestock on a dairy farm in Upstate New York. From the road, the big, rambling buildings appeared well kept. But inside the reeking, encrusted barns, the Society found 75 starved, dead or dying Jersey cows and their calves.

  The owner and her assistant, both of them elderly women in grimy, spattered house dresses, lived in the decaying farmhouse. "It's so lovely here," murmured the assistant. "A beautiful, happy place. And the animals are so happy, too."

  "My God," whispered an agent to the Society veterinarian who had driven up to check over the cattle, "she's looking right at a dead calf." The veterinarian shook his head. "Some people only see what they want to see. The picture in her mind is a lot prettier than the one in front of her. No wonder she likes it better."