Rescue Road

by Peter Zheutlin

  Next to board are some Labs4rescue dogs bound for forever homes as well: Duchess, an eight-month-old black Lab, and then a puppy pair: Nikki and Natalie, four-month-old black Labs. Puppies are used to being in close quarters with their littermates. As anyone who has ever watched a litter of puppies knows, they sit on each other’s heads, flop and fall all over one another, and sleep huddled close together. So doubling them up in the kennels won’t bother them; it will likely provide some comfort and companionship during the long journey. Greg is feeling better about accommodating each dog in comfort because Keri has many sets of puppy siblings among the forty dogs she’s going to board. But at every stop, Greg will check to make sure the dogs appear content together. If there are signs that dogs sharing a kennel need to be separated—repeated nipping, restlessness, or constant scratching at the kennel door, for example—he’ll make changes.

  • • •

  With about half a dozen dogs boarded the skies open up and it begins to pour. With nearly three dozen more waiting to be loaded onto the truck, we’re going to have a lot of wet dogs and wet people by the time we finish, but I’m struck by how calm the dogs are as they get on. The puppies are easily passed to Greg or Tommy and offer no resistance as they’re put into their kennels. Those large enough to climb into the trailer do so matter-of-factly, some eagerly, as if they can’t wait to get going. I didn’t expect the dogs to be so malleable and cooperative; after all, they don’t know us, and there’s a lot of commotion to put them on edge.

  But it all changes suddenly when a man referred to as Mr. Robin, a vet tech at the Haas Animal Hospital, leads Teddy, a seven-month-old shepherd mix, to the trailer.12 Found a few months ago in a cow pasture with an emaciated mother and nine littermates, Teddy is wary of the trailer. You can see it in his posture as he slinks forward, ears flat, and in his fearful, furtive gaze. Just as Mr. Robin lifts Teddy up into the truck and Tommy reaches out to take him by the collar, Teddy lashes out, snarling, biting, writhing, and involuntarily urinating and defecating everywhere. Greg yells to Tommy to release his grip. For about thirty seconds, it’s pure pandemonium as everyone tries to subdue Teddy without hurting him or getting hurt as he strikes at anything that comes near him. Then, as quickly as it began, it’s over. Teddy tumbles out of the truck and flops onto the pavement and lies so still Greg thinks for a moment he’s dead. Greg watches as Mr. Robin, someone Teddy knows, crouches over him and strokes his head and back. He lies still with his stomach flat on the pavement. When it’s clear Teddy isn’t hurt, just scared, Mr. Robin gently leads him back to the clinic, where Keri decides he’ll need more socialization and individual attention before he’s ready to travel.

  Then I notice Greg rubbing his hand. Teddy has nipped Greg, just a mark, no blood, an unusual but not unprecedented occupational hazard. Mr. Robin has been bitten too, but his wound is thankfully superficial also. The whole episode is so terribly sad. There doesn’t seem to be anything vicious about Teddy; he was simply overcome by fear. Greg tells me scenes like this are extremely rare in his ten years of experience. But for me, seeing the boarding process for the very first time, it’s stunning. Because events like this are so rare, Greg hadn’t even thought to tell me it can occasionally get a bit dicey.

  Tommy and Greg work quickly to remove Teddy’s waste from the truck floor, so we can continue loading. We have several hundred miles to drive to pick up dogs this afternoon in Baytown, outside of Houston, and then back to Lafayette, Louisiana, so we’ll be ready first thing tomorrow morning for pickups at Lafayette Animal Aid.

  In addition to ten Labs4rescue dogs and six Mutts4rescue dogs, Keri now wants to board two-dozen dogs for the Rhode Island adoption event to be held this coming Sunday, but she’s only made thirty reservations in all. Adding to Greg’s frustration, dozens of the dogs haven’t even been micro-chipped yet—injected with a tiny silicon chip readable by a scanner that can be used to identify the dog if it ever becomes lost—so Micheal Mitchell, a vet tech at Haas Animal Hospital, is injecting the dogs with their chips on the truck after they’ve been loaded.13 This adds to the delay, much to Greg’s chagrin. And with Micheal in the aisle between the kennels, it makes it hard for Tommy to keep loading dogs that have been micro-chipped already. Ideally, all this should have been done in advance.

  Greg isn’t sure how he’s going to manage if he lets Keri board ten more dogs than she has reservations for, but he keeps his cool and gently reminds Keri he wishes she were more organized. It’s a discussion they’ve had before and seem destined to have again. Keri is always playing catch-up, and constantly on the move; if a dog needs to be rescued, paperwork is going to wait. Eventually, Greg relents, his frustration with Keri outweighed by his respect for her and his love for the dogs. He tells Keri she can board them all. As I would learn in the days and months ahead, improvisation is a constant in all aspects of canine rescue work, and as we make our pickups down the line, Greg will figure out how to accommodate every one.

  Molly, a seven-year-old basenji mix is next. Keri tells me she was found with sixty-nine other dogs in a horrific hoarding situation Keri intervened in. Some of the dogs were bleeding, many had severe mange, a potentially lethal skin condition caused by parasitic mites that cause severe itching, and some were so vicious they eventually had to be euthanized. What some of these dogs have endured beggars belief. I have a strong urge to apologize to them on behalf of the human species and assure them better days lie ahead, at the end of the ride they are about to take.

  Keri has been fostering Molly herself until finally, after a year and half, she found someone in Connecticut willing to foster and hopefully help Molly find a forever home. Why send Molly to another foster home rather than wait for a forever home? Just moving one animal from foster in Louisiana to another in Connecticut frees up a space at Keri’s house for yet another dog that might otherwise be put down. So even though Molly’s next home won’t necessarily be her forever home, it ensures she’ll be well cared for and another dog will be allowed to live.

  When Keri explains this to me, it really hits me how crucial foster homes are to the rescue process. This is very much a one-dog-at-a-time, step-by-step process and fosters, whether in the South or up north, play a critical role in keeping the rescue train running. Fostering can also be a good way to make sure a dog is compatible in your household if you’re thinking of adopting, but it also comes with the responsibility of taking an active role in finding a forever home if you aren’t going to keep it. Many people who foster proudly become “foster failures”: they fall in love and keep the dog.

  Next on the truck are Popcorn, the hound mix, and Trudy, the young Catahoula. A distinctively Louisiana breed named after Catahoula Parish, Catahoulas are known for their loyalty and gentle, loving temperaments. They are a medium- to large-sized breed and the state’s official dog. Trudy was born deaf and almost completely blind and is very attached to Popcorn, with whom she was fostered. Trudy’s owner surrendered her to the Alexandria shelter; Popcorn was a stray who landed there too. Perhaps because of her impairments, Trudy is a bit ungainly and rambunctious. But because she’s so attached to Popcorn, Greg decides the two will share one of the larger kennels for the trip north. Trudy and Popcorn are part of the group bound for the Rhode Island adoption event, a group that includes another dog Keri boards, T-Bone, a beautiful one-year-old black-and-white fox hound–pointer mix, one of six puppies dumped on a rural road with their parents in Natchitoches Parish in northwestern Louisiana. A family nearby called animal control and agreed to take the parents. A neighbor agreed to care for the six puppies while they searched online for a humane society to help, and within a few days the puppies were all in Keri’s custody.

  Siblings Jupee, a black Lab mix puppy, and Pam, a chocolate Lab mix pup, are next, two of the group that has come to be known as the “tub puppies.”14 They too are bound for the Rhode Island event and look as healthy as puppies should, but their health belies their backstory, which is even more frightening than most.


  On a cold morning in March, Micheal, the vet tech, came to work early with Mr. Robin and found a sealed, unventilated five-gallon Rubbermaid tub at the clinic door. There was no sound or movement coming from the tub, but when he peeled the cover off, he saw fourteen small puppies huddled together. From the condensation on the bottom of the lid, he knew they’d been there most of the night, surviving only on the oxygen inside. Eleven were Lab mix puppies about five weeks old, and three were rat terrier mix puppies about four weeks old.

  Normally Micheal comes to work at seven thirty, but he arrived early that morning to clean kennels and feed animals being boarded at the clinic. It proved fortuitous because the puppies’ temperatures had dropped into the low nineties (normal is about one hundred); they were on the brink of freezing to death, shivering and lethargic. Once they got the puppies to the treatment area, Micheal and Mr. Robin warmed towels in the dryer, grabbed heating pads, and filled soda bottles with hot water and inserted them into socks, so the puppies could huddle against them. Slowly, the puppies’ temperatures started to rise, and within the hour they started to whine and cry, a welcome sound. Micheal mixed a little milk with what he calls “A.D.”—a diet high in nutrients used to feed critical-care animals. (“A.D.,” he told me, means “almost dead” in rescue speak.) It is a food of last resort, and if animals refuse this or are unable to ingest it, they will almost certainly die. Micheal could only pray the puppies would eat it. To his relief, most of them took to the mixture, though some had to be syringe fed.

  When Dr. Bari Haas, the clinic’s founder, arrived shortly thereafter, she examined each of the puppies. All had gastrointestinal parasites—hookworms and/or roundworms—and had to be dewormed (deworming is accomplished by means of an orally administered medication).15 Given their young age, they likely contacted the parasites in utero from their mothers or through the mothers’ milk. Dr. Haas later told me it’s not uncommon at her clinic, and others in the area, to nurse back to health dogs and cats that were found leashed to a post, tossed over a fenced enclosure, or left at the doorstep in baskets or kennels. While this may sound indescribably inhumane—and it is—at least this shows some conscience on the part of the owner or whoever left them; countless others are simply abandoned in woods or by roadways or Dumpsters, or, perhaps more mercifully, shot.

  When they were strong enough, Micheal took the three rat terrier puppies home to foster. “But I’m a bad foster,” he told me. “A few days after I brought them home, I decided to keep them.” All fourteen of the tub puppies survived. The commitment of people like Micheal can restore your faith in humanity; that he and Mr. Robin were able to save every single one of the tub puppies seemed nothing short of miraculous.

  • • •

  Finally, the S puppies board last: Sally, Sylvia, Sully, Seth, and Salyna, three-month-old Lab mix siblings from a litter of ten born in a rural area fifteen miles outside of Natchitoches. They were born to a silver lab mix mama who belongs to the Nash family. Salyna is the only yellow one (she also has a lot of white); one is silver, and the others are black. Salyna’s face is as sweet as a baby harp seal’s, and surprisingly, she has an entirely blue tongue. At first I think maybe she’s oxygen deprived but am assured by Greg that some dogs just have solid blue tongues.16 She’s handed up to me, to pass to Tommy, who is now putting dogs in kennels about midway down the trailer. She seems especially nervous—she’s trembling—so I pull her close and she lays her head on my chest, one paw draped over my shoulder. For me, it’s love at first sight. For Salyna, I’m sure, I’m just a warm shoulder to lie on. Like many of Keri’s dogs on this trip, she’s also bound for the adoption event in Rhode Island. We have our moment and I pass her to Tommy. Best not to get too attached.

  • • •

  Whenever there are groups of dogs in kennels, whether in the trailer or shelters or yards, the appearance of people invariably sets off a relentless cascade of almost unbearable, blood-pressure-raising barking and howling, unless, like Greg and Keri, you’re accustomed to it. A few dogs will remain calm and quiet, but most will join the chorus. Now, as we finish loading the last of Keri’s dogs, all the activity and commotion has sent the dogs into a barking frenzy. Even those that were seemingly calm getting into the truck have caught the fever.

  Consider this: A normal conversation between two people is conducted at about sixty decibels. But like the Richter scale, which is used for measuring earthquakes, increases in decibels are exponential, so seventy decibels, where a typical dog’s bark begins, registers one hundred times louder than sixty decibels. According to Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, a single dog bark can spike at 130 decibels. Put eighty dogs in a trailer or shelter, and the racket can be excruciating. People who work in shelters or in rescue have to work amid this noise all the time, and if you’re trying to communicate with a coworker, you can shout and still not be heard over the din. As the truck has been filling up, the din has been growing louder and louder.

  By 9:30 a.m., we’ve loaded all forty of Keri’s dogs. Typically, she doesn’t have this many on Greg’s transport—the average is between ten and twenty—but the Rhode Island adoption event has swelled the numbers. And that’s not all: In addition to the two-dozen adoption event dogs we have on board, Keri and Greta will be driving another forty to Rhode Island themselves, mostly puppies and small dogs, in a van. They’re hoping to return home in an empty van, each dog successfully adopted.

  This will be a high-stakes event for Keri: like many rescue organizations, the Humane Society of Central Louisiana operates on a shoestring. Before she can complete a planned merger with the CenLa Alliance for Animals—“so we can be bigger and better,” says Keri—she has to pay off over $10,000 in debts owed to two veterinary clinics, including Dr. Haas’s. She’s hoping the adoption fees collected in Rhode Island can help close this gap.

  It takes another hour to make sure the paperwork for all forty of Keri’s dogs—interstate health certificates and other medical records—is in order. At 10:30, later than he hoped, Greg is ready to get moving again. The next stop, 225 miles west, will be Baytown, Texas, on the outskirts of Houston. For all the dogs we’ve boarded this morning, their final journey home has begun. There are many miles for them to travel still, but for so many others who will never find their Keri or their Greg, this is the road not taken. All I can think of those on board is, Lucky dogs.

  10.Greg lists Alexandria as the pick-up point on his website and always refers to it, on Facebook and elsewhere, as Alexandria, but the actual location is in Pineville.

  11.In truth, the HSCL is Keri Toth, Greta Jones, and a handful of volunteers; it has no offices, no staff, no phone number apart from Keri’s, and no formal budgeting or fund-raising processes, just debts owed to local veterinarians who treat the animals Keri and her volunteers rescue. When I visited, Keri was in the process of merging HSCL into the CenLa (Central Louisiana) Alliance for Animals (CAFA), another scrappy rescue organization run by Sara Kelly, a highly energetic, determined, multitasking physician and mother of two young daughters. The two organizations merged in the late summer of 2014.

  12.Robin is his first name. In parts of the South, including central Louisiana, it is still common, as a sign of respect, to refer to people this way. I was introduced and referred to often as “Mr. Peter” while there.

  13.That’s not a typo; he spells his first name Micheal.

  14.Because these are not purebred dogs, it is not uncommon for siblings to be of varying colors.

  15.Heartworms, unlike roundworms and hookworms, invade the heart and treatment is longer, more complex, more costly, and in many cases, riskier than the treatment for parasitic worms.

  16.Contrary to popular belief, a blue tongue doesn’t necessarily mean a dog has Chow Chow in its DNA, a breed known for its blue tongue, but it suggests the dog may have some Chow Chow in its lineage.

  4

  SAVING DOGS

  ALL OF THOSE LUCKY DOGS NOW IN THE ba
ck of the truck had come from somewhere and I knew they had beaten long odds to be at the door of Greg’s trailer on that warm, rainy morning in Alexandria. But I wanted to know where they had come from and how they wound up on Greg’s transport, on their way to a second chance at life and love. So I went back to Louisiana a few weeks later to find out more about the one thing (or person, I should say) all of them had in common, including my own Albie: Keri Bullock Toth, a four-foot-ten-inch dynamo in her late thirties whose orbit each of these pooches had the good fortune to fall into.

  As I stand talking with Dr. Bari Haas in an examination room at her Alexandria area clinic one day, Keri comes in with two terrier mix puppies under her arms. In addition to the endless hours she devotes to rescue, she works full-time here as a vet tech. The pups are about three months old and were dropped off by a woman who’d been given Keri’s name by a local pet supply store. Months earlier, the same woman called Keri and told her a dog had been hit by a car and had limped into her yard. Could Keri help? When the injured dog was brought to the clinic, Keri was suspicious—she has uncanny instincts about dogs and about people with dogs. When pressed, the woman admitted the dog was actually hers and it was often left free to roam. The ploy was to try and get veterinary care paid for by the Humane Society of Central Louisiana by pretending it was a stray found by a Good Samaritan. Keri has seen so much of this, and worse, that she often simply shrugs as if to say, “People. What can you do?”