“These are the days,” she ended, “that make me question how much longer I can do this.”
But, knowing Kathy, I knew she’d be back at BARC tomorrow morning, looking for another shaggy dog to rescue.
22.Puppies require three parvo vaccines three weeks apart to be fully immunized. Tadpole had only his first and because Kathy kept him in isolation, he must have been exposed earlier. If a dog already has parvovirus in the body, the first vaccine won’t usually protect or heal them, unfortunately. Because it can be costly to treat—Kathy had spent $900 for treatment before Tadpole died—and is highly contagious, many shelters, and even some rescues, will put puppies down as soon as they show symptoms of the disease.
7
HARD TIMES
THE BRAZORIA COUNTY SHELTER IN TEXAS is a tiny facility, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, with additional pens outside, and can accommodate a few dozen dogs. The land here is as flat as a pancake and bakes in the south Texas sun. When you walk on the nearby grass, you have to be careful where you stand. Pick the wrong spot and you’ll be crawling with fire ants before you know it.
Some of the dogs Greg picks up in Baytown have been pulled from this shelter by Tom English, the mathematics professor I first met in Baytown while riding with Greg. On my return visit to Texas, after spending a few days in Houston with Kelle and Alicia and Kathy, I also spent some time with Tom observing his work near his home in Texas City.
Tom comes to the Brazoria County shelter once or twice a week. It’s about a forty-five-minute drive from Texas City, a refinery and chemical production city on Galveston Bay about forty miles from downtown Houston. The county has no food budget for the shelter, so Tom and other donors deliver food. And though he isn’t a veterinarian, Tom also brings and administers vaccines. He has negotiated a volume discount from Schering-Plough, the major pharmaceutical company, and resells them, at his cost, to several shelters in southeast Texas. He also draws blood samples from each new arrival, which he ships to a lab to determine which dogs have heartworm, photographs each dog, and distributes the photos to a network of rescue groups. The Brazoria County shelter has no adoption program—it’s too remote and too small—and if it did, it would be required by law to spay and neuter the adopted animals and has no facility for doing so.
But over the past few years, with Tom’s help and a devoted county employee named Tammy Grable, the shelter secretary, the euthanasia rate here has dropped from about 80 percent to 20 percent. In June 2014, for example, of the 178 dogs and cats the shelter took in, 129 were taken by rescue organizations. Tom has also helped establish an intake protocol that has improved infection control at the facility. When animals arrive on the county’s animal control vehicles, they are vaccinated for distemper, parvo, and bordetella, deflead, dewormed, and given a heartworm preventative before they enter the shelter. This means fewer dogs are put down for health reasons.
This small shelter has become a bright spot in the often-dark world of rescue: dogs who wind up here have a decent shot at getting out and finding a home. Indeed, later this week, seven dogs Tom has pulled from here will be traveling north with Greg, six to Rottie Empire Rescue in New York state and one to a forever home in Connecticut.
• • •
Today, the temperature is in the upper nineties with humidity to match. There’s hardly a cloud in the sky and no nearby trees to offer shade. I’m wilting in the intense heat after driving here with Tom; his friend Vince, a fellow mathematician; and Jenni Hendricks of Southern Comforts Animal Rescue of Hitchcock, Texas, which adopts out about 150 to 200 dogs a year, primarily to the Northeast, from various shelters in southeast Texas.
Every day, seven days a week, Bobby Lee Richardson,23 fifty-three, walks about a hundred yards from where he lives to this shelter to take care of the dogs. Mr. Richardson, as I call him, is wearing what he wears to work at the shelter every day: loose-fitting orange pants tied at the waist and an olive T-shirt with a name tag sewn above the left breast. His silver hair is cropped close and his neck, arms and strong-featured face are nearly black from the sun. A sharp Texas twang inflects his words. But the most interesting thing about Mr. Richardson isn’t his twang or his appearance, but where he lives and what he does. Just a stone’s throw away is the Brazoria County jail, where he’s serving a fifteen-year sentence for driving under the influence, his fifth DUI offense.
After we unload the food we’re delivering, Tom begins the process of photographing each dog, taking blood samples, clipping nails where needed, and examining gums to estimate their age. Mr. Richardson fetches each new dog from its kennel and offers his own assessment of its temperament, which is important for Tom to know before he pokes it with a needle for the blood draw. That way Tom will know if a dog is likely to be docile or a potential biter. I’m awed by Mr. Richardson’s care and knowledge of the dogs: he’s very tender with them, has great empathy for them, and is a keen observer of their personalities.
The first is a young boxer whose left rear leg is swollen from an attack by a pit bull in the kennel they briefly shared three days earlier. Next is a Chow Chow mix suffering from flea dermatitis. One at a time, Mr. Richardson brings them from their kennels and Tom and Jenni go to work in the withering heat. Only one of the dogs seems too frightened to have his blood drawn, a bulldog mix, so Mr. Richardson places a towel over his head and holds him firmly while Tom inserts the needle in a foreleg.
Getting good photographs is key; a photo showing a dog at his or her best can mean the difference between rescue and euthanasia. In this case, looks do matter: Tom places most of these dogs with other rescue organizations and the photograph is the most important factor in their decision whether to take a dog because it will likely be an important factor for potential adopters. As Tom coaxes one of the dogs, a white pit bull, to look at the camera, a crop duster buzzes the fields behind him. Despite the heat, Tom keeps at it until he has the shot he wants of each of the two-dozen or so dogs.
• • •
“I’m a taxpayer,” Mr. Richardson offers during a short break, perhaps his way of telling me not to write him off as nothing more than an alcoholic and a felon. After seeing him with the dogs, I know there’s a lot more to this mysterious man than meets the eye. “I have two kids in college. One in San Antonio wants to be a history teacher. I did hydro testing for chemical plant pipes. I was in my third year when I got arrested again. I started drinking when I was in the military and I’ve been in trouble ever since.”
He’s working under the supervision of the sheriff’s deputy, Amanda Kaylor, who’s in charge of the shelter. She’s a short, no-nonsense, cowboy-boot and dungaree-wearing woman with a pistol on her hip, a squint in her eyes, and a cigarette in her hand. But she trusts him enough to leave him to his work while she drives off for about fifteen minutes in her government-issued pickup truck to run an errand.
“They used to give each dog seventy-two hours,” Mr. Richardson tells me as he cuddles an eight-week-old pit bull mix covered with fire ant bites. “The freezers were full of dogs. I know each dog, which are friendly, and which will get you. But I’ve never been gotten.
“He’s my little baby,” he coos to the puppy.
I’m not sure what freezers he’s referring to but assume somewhere on the premises, or perhaps at the prison, euthanized dogs were kept in freezers until their bodies could be disposed of. The image is an awful one.
I also have no way of knowing how much of what Mr. Richardson has to say is accurate, and his accent is so thick I’m not even following it all. Still, whatever his crimes or flaws, I’m taken by his affection for the dogs.
Three of the dogs Tom is sending north with Greg in a few days are four-and-a-half-month-old Plott hound mix puppies that came from this shelter. Mr. Richardson would walk them every night around a small lake next to the prison and thought they were special. Tom took them home and arranged for Rottie Empire Rescue to take them.24
When the work is done, and everyone has sweated through their
T-shirts, we take a look at a litter of puppies, no more than ten days old, and their mama, a black mouth cur mix, brought in over the weekend. The pups and their mama were found in a culvert pipe, and when sheriff’s deputies couldn’t get them out a woman who lives nearby used a pool net to reach them. Each puppy is wearing a green plastic collar with a number to tell them apart, but Mr. Richardson points out to Tom that the collars are irritating the mother as the puppies push against her to nurse. And puppies grow fast and the collars could quickly become too tight. He sees no point in the collars—at this age they don’t need to be told apart—and Tom agrees. After checking with the deputy on duty, Tom cuts the collars off.
“It’s extremely rare for a shelter to allow volunteers to do everything we do here,” Tom says.
• • •
Tom English is in his late forties, with brown hair and a sturdy build. In recent years he’s devoted less time to pulling dogs for adoption and more working to improve the lives of dogs in the Brazoria County shelter and on the streets of some of the poorer areas of Galveston County. He initially approached the Galveston County shelter about working with them, but they weren’t interested, so he moved on to neighboring Brazoria. A native of Erie, Pennsylvania, he attended graduate school in New York state and came to Texas City in 1998, leaving a lectureship at the University of Miami to teach at College of the Mainland, a two-year community college serving Galveston County.
“I was here for a few years before I realized there was a huge animal overpopulation problem,” he tells me sitting at a table on the deck overlooking an expansive yard where the dozens of dogs he keeps, some permanent, some fosters, can roam. “My neighbor and I each had two Rottweilers and one night, it was 2005, he said to me, ‘A Rottie was picked up by animal control outside your house the other night.’ I thought someone had lost a dog and went to the local shelter to see if I could help reunite the dog and its owner. I was overwhelmed. The shelter was dingy, damp, and stinky and had no windows. It was overcrowded with dogs coughing and wheezing, and with runny eyes and ears. I left that day with four dogs: two more Rotties and two Lab mixes. I adopted three of them and still have Gertrude, the lost Rottweiler my neighbor told me about.”
Tom then tried working with a local rescue group, but found it dysfunctional and ineffective. He later connected with a New Hampshire–based rescue, For the Love of Dog, which was trying to save three Rottweilers in Houston. As his passion for canine rescue grew, his romantic life suffered.
“I had a girlfriend at the time, but the stress of rescue work and the number of dogs in the house led to our breakup,” he tells me. At the time of my visit, he was in a new relationship with a woman, Lisa, who seemed as passionate about dogs as he is.
“Three or four years ago, I started Nutmeg Rescue with a woman from Connecticut,” he continues. “It was ad hoc, not incorporated. I was sort of a freelance rescuer placing dogs through many other organizations such as Labs4rescue, Mutts4rescue, For Love of Dog, and Rottie Empire Rescue. I’ve placed more than two thousand dogs over the years.”
About fifteen hundred of those dogs traveled north with Greg Mahle. Many others, mostly smaller breeds and puppies, flew north through Continental Airlines’ PetSafe program, essentially air travel for dogs.
“In rescue we all use the Sophie’s Choice analogy,” he explains regretfully, referring to the William Styron novel in which a woman, caught in the Holocaust, is forced by the Nazis to choose whether her son or daughter will be spared. “Who lives and who dies? Adoptability is a huge criterion in saving a dog. You want dogs that will be adopted quickly so you can save another. It’s a numbers game. How do you save the greatest number?”
Tom believes the overwhelming scale of the overpopulation problem makes euthanasia inevitable.
“If you don’t euthanize dogs, you get dogs piled up on top of dogs,” he explains, realizing his view isn’t popular with many in rescue, especially those firmly committed to the no-kill philosophy. “You get a disease-filled facility where you can’t keep up with the cleaning and the feeding. Even a healthy, adoptable dog in such a facility will live a horrible life if it doesn’t find a home and [has to] stay in the facility. Some go crazy and turn on one another. I am supportive of ‘no suffering’ rather than ‘no kill.’ Then we can try and go from no suffering to no kill. I don’t want dogs dying of disease in a shelter. Better to die by needle than flea anemia. You just can’t jump right to no kill, but I support it as an aspiration.”
After several years, he burned out on rescue and switched his focus from adoptions to what he calls “shelter and community support.”
“I can go out and rescue dogs willy-nilly, but it doesn’t change the big picture,” he says. “So I looked for situations I could turn around, whether a particular shelter, such as Brazoria, or a community, such as San Leon, where we’re going tomorrow. At Brazoria they almost never euthanize a healthy, adoptable dog anymore. That’s where doing my part has made a difference.”
I ask Tom if there was anything in his early life experience that triggered his passion for canine rescue.
“I was a fat, shy kid with few friends,” he tells me. “When I was eight, we adopted a dog from the Erie shelter and he became my best friend. His name was Midnight, a thirty-five pound shepherd mix. We were so attached. He was smart and special, and it impressed me that he was a thinking, feeling being. It got imprinted in my mind that dogs are not disposable.
“There is an addictive component to rescue,” Tom continues. “You get a high rescuing a dog that’s been living in a shelter and you bathe it and care for it and see it running in the yard. You get addicted to that feeling.” Greg said much the same to me on several occasions: he does what he does, he told me, “because it feels so good.”
Jenni Hendricks of Southern Comforts Animal Rescue agrees. “Rescue is addictive,” she says. “You want to take a break and clean up your house, but the phone rings and it’s about a puppy and you’re on your way.”
“Dogs are like children at their very best age,” Tom continues. “They look up to you. They adore you. They want to be with you. Lots of people in rescue don’t have children and the dogs become a substitute. I wanted to have kids at some point, but it didn’t happen. And if I spend $30,000 a year on the dogs, it’s a bargain because I’m doing what I love. How many people get to do that? Rescue people will have no trouble spending $1,000 on a dog, but they won’t spend $30 on a pair of shoes.
“Because you can only save a relative few, you get beaten down again and again,” he muses. “You lose much more than you win. But you keep going. How can you not feel defeated coming back from a shelter? I don’t know what’s going to happen to any of those dogs we saw this morning. I post the pictures and hope rescues will contact the shelter and pull them. But I don’t follow up because I don’t want to know. There are a lot of crappy rescues out there, but you hope for the best for each one.”
• • •
After we had returned from the Brazoria County shelter, I helped Tom move some lumber he’d cut to make eight wooden pallets. Tomorrow we’ll deliver the pallets to give eight dogs a space a few inches above the ground where they can stay dry when the dirt yards they live in turn to muck in the rain.
The next morning, with the pallets loaded into a large white van Tom bought specifically for his rescue work, we head off, with Vince, to pick up Sarah Manns in nearby San Leon, a community on Galveston Bay northeast of Texas City. Sarah and one helper comprise Companion Animal Outreach of Galveston County, an effort to improve the lives of neglected and maltreated dogs in San Leon. Tom has agreed to lend a hand. This is what he means when he speaks of “community support” work, also known as “embedded animal welfare”; it’s what Kelle and Alicia of the Forgotten Dogs of the Fifth Ward Project do in Houston.
House by house, block by block, Sarah is trying to help the countless yard dogs living in squalor, many next to tin-can trailers on trash-strewn lots in San Leon and neighboring Bacliff. Lik
e Houston’s Fifth Ward, this is an area of extreme poverty and it seems there’s a dog, typically a pit bull mix, chained to a metal post in every yard.
One of those dogs, a one-year-old pit bull named Gauge, has become tangled in his chain and can move only a few feet, unable to reach his only water source, a kiddie pool filled with fetid water. There is no sign of the owners. In the hot Texas sun, those chains can become hot to the touch if there’s no shade. Today, the heat index is well over one hundred degrees; there will be stretches here where the heat index will be in triple digits for weeks on end. Gauge seems starved for affection and is overjoyed to see Sarah and feel her touch as she and Vince work to untangle his chain. Gauge is one of the dogs getting a pallet today.
“When they’re young, they’re very affectionate when strangers come by, but after years on a chain, he’ll eventually become non-social,” Sarah explains.
“You do what you can in small steps to earn people’s trust and try and help them become responsible pet owners,” Tom tells me as we drive the neighborhood with Sarah. “You can’t just lecture them and tell them what they’re doing wrong. We’re just trying to give these dogs out here a reasonable existence. If you take a dog away they just get another dog that’s condemned to the same kind of life.”
At one tiny trailer, in a yard filled with debris including thousands of sharp oyster shells, there are two chained dogs that become excited when they see us. They run back and forth as far as their chains will allow. Sarah says the trailer’s occupants are mentally ill; either they’re not home or decide not to venture out when we approach. A bag of dry dog food she delivered last week sits unopened by the trailer door. A case of canned food sits in the hot sun, also untouched. As Vince places a pallet near one of the dogs, Sarah gives the dog a treat and some affection.
Rescue Road Page 15
