Movies and advertising campaigns unintentionally spawn more tragedy. The children’s animated film 101 Dalmatians prompted thousands of parents to buy Dalmatian puppies, which do not make good pets for children. The Taco Bell commercial featuring a digitally-altered talking Chihuahua brought thousands of tiny dogs into homes where they were not properly cared for. Crazes for potbellied pigs, emus and ostriches, llamas, and donkeys have resulted in similar increases in animal casualties. By any standard, this degree of suffering and these staggering death rates constitute an animal catastrophe. It is inexcusable. It is unnecessary. And it is preventable. What we hope to address with Saved is that these precious beings deserve better.
When we mistreat animals, we miss out on what they have to teach us: forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. This is what Hilleary Bogley tries to instill in the children she meets in the Virginia hills, where dogs spend their lives starving on short, heavy chains. She may bring dog food (as well as food for their owners), but what she hopes to nourish is the same empathetic understanding and great-hearted-ness in people that dogs—even abused dogs—have in abundance.
As Judy and I traveled from coast to coast, we visited people who care for animals one on one and others who are organized on a formidable and effective scale to raise money and awareness. We also saw forgiveness extended to people over and over again: by horses that had been beaten, dogs that had been tortured, cats turned out to fend for themselves, and ferrets left to starve in a cage in an empty apartment. They forgive not by religious dogma or moral principle, but because they love without thought or reservation. They trust again in circumstances where perhaps a human being would remember the abuse and never regain trust. In St. Louis, Missouri, we met Quentin, a dog that made the ultimate leap of forgiveness—he survived the animal pound gas chamber and lived to love and work with Randy Grim, rescuing dogs from the streets on behalf of Stray Rescue St. Louis.
These animals are only asking for a chance, some kind words, and food and shelter, and when they receive them—through the generosity of, say, Patricia Reever, who takes the most damaged, medically expensive, and ill animals into her home in Fairfax, Virginia—their voiceless gratitude is boundless.
The animals we met found a friend in their rescuers—and that friendship worked both ways. As a wheelchair-bound woman in an Arizona nursing home said simply about a little mongrel who visits her: “I have a lot of depression, and he helps me.”
Much of the abuse and neglect is related to pet overpopulation. We cannot adopt our way out of this crisis, which is powered by short gestation periods and abundant fertility. Prevention, through rigorous spay and neuter programs—subsidized for those who cannot afford the cost—is essential. Not doing what is necessary to resolve this crisis cannot be justified as a matter of economics. It would actually cost less to prevent the births of unwanted animals than to rescue, shelter, euthanize, and dispose of them.
Never before in human history has more money been allocated to animals: in food, gourmet treats, fancy beds and carriers, doggie day care, luxurious stables, animal chiropractors, acupuncturists, and psychologists, and pet grooming services. Companion animal care is a multibillion dollar business. Yet the plight of the millions of mistreated animals remains hidden. We have an obligation to care for animals, to consider their highest welfare, to treat each creature with compassion, and to never—ever—put them in a position where we will need their forgiveness.
The dogs play with Kim Evans, a resident of the home who suffers from cerebral palsy.
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MY WHITE ANGELS
DON AND DARLENE AHLSTROM AND THEIR DOGS, CHANCE AND HOPE, AT L’AMOUR ET L’ABRI HOSPICE AND ADULT FOSTER CARE
KIM EVANS’S EYELASHES are long and thick as a pony’s, and she looks through them with large dark-blue eyes, her head cocked permanently sideways against the black leather neck support. Beyond the cuffs of her plaid shirt, her nails sport cherry-colored polish on hands bent double against their wrists. Kim is tiny—about half the weight of each of the two great white dogs that gaze at her, lick her hands, and bump softly against her immaculate white tennis shoes as she sits lashed to the blue wheelchair.
Chance, the male, and Hope, the female, are Great Pyrenees herding dogs with low-slung tails and wet, kind brown eyes set in drifts of snowy hair. When they move away from Kim—through the two living rooms of the large rambler to Michelle’s bed or Peter’s chair or to visit Mildred in the recliner—they make a scuffing noise on the gray carpet, each one hopping on three legs.
Out beyond the deck and past the horse barn, long slim v’s of geese are gliding down into the snowy corn stubble in the late winter fields around Rochester, Minnesota.
Don and Darlene Ahlstrom opened this small suburban hospice and adult foster care, L’amour et L’abri (love and labor), in 1984 and named it in honor of the years they’d spent in France while Don was in the Air Force.
In 1998, the couple saw a television news show featuring the dogs, which had been found in a ditch, starving and crippled. The Wright County Humane Society was making a plea for medical funds for Chance and Hope, who hobbled hopefully toward the cameraman, each dragging a useless hind leg. The society received seventeen thousand dollars in donations—enough to pay for surgery to amputate the legs and to start a fund for other abandoned, abused animals in need of surgery. Hundreds of people applied to the society to adopt the dogs. Don and Darlene, the last to be interviewed, won custody.
Chance and Hope are now canine caretakers for the residents at the home, which serves as hospice and as long-term permanent care for five severely disabled people.
“I work for God,” says Darlene. “These are beings I can love and care for, where I feel like I can do some good. This is the home of love and spoil.”
The oldest resident, Mildred, in her late eighties, has Alzheimer’s disease. “I have been here five weeks,” she declares, over the sound of Animal Planet on the TV, her right hand stroking Chance, who often lies next to her recliner. “She has been here four years,” Darlene whispers.
Michelle, resting in a mobile bed with an IV looping away from her arm, has end-stage multiple sclerosis. She once worked in an animal shelter and loves horses as well as dogs and cats. She can no longer move, but her eyes follow the dogs around the room.
Peter, in a wheelchair similar to Kim’s, has severe cerebral palsy. He has been here eighteen years and looks half his age—a boyish forty. He is less in control of his body than Kim and seems less aware of contact, although Darlene speaks to him just as she does to anyone else.
“There are lots of angels here, and Darlene’s one of them,” says Peter’s mother, Carol. Darlene, in turn, calls Chance and Hope “my white angels.” The angels rise early and hop from bedroom to bedroom, taking inventory, greeting each person. Their enormous tails sweep slowly like great white plumes behind them.
The angels also have idiosyncrasies. “Every weekday at 12:38 p.m., they howl at The Bold and the Beautiful theme,” says Darlene. “We don’t know why. It’s the only one they do that with.”
Darlene limps too, the toll from keeping up a house with three kitchens, half a dozen bedrooms, meeting rooms, and recreation rooms, and raising four children and two of her eleven grandchildren.
Wheelchair ramps for the residents make it easier for Chance and Hope to hop down to the garden, where a pergola provides shade above a fountain and a collection of bird feeders donated by Poppa, a former resident who died at age ninety-five.
“We got the dogs five weeks after their surgeries, and they could hardly make it outside and down the ramp to go potty,” Darlene explains. The University of Minnesota veterinarian who treated Chance and Hope estimated the dogs were about ten months old when they were struck by a forceful swing with a bat or iron bar. When discovered in the ditch, they were between a year and a half and two years old.
“For having been beaten, they do trust. I hope they forgot. I hope they don’t dream about it,” says Da
rlene.
Chance and Hope seem to know something about having sound minds and good hearts trapped inside injured bodies.
Kim, in her mid-twenties, will be here for life. When she laughs—fragmented, wet cries—she raises her arms, her elbows half-bent like wings. The dogs snuffle at her to make her giggle. At lunch, Darlene cradles Kim’s head and spoons minced chicken and rice into her mouth or holds a glass of milk to her lips, a white towel tucked under Kim’s chin to catch saliva. Chance dozes under the trestle table. “Good girl,” says Darlene. Kim gurgles.
Chance and Hope check each patient at bedtime, hopping softly from room to room—to Michelle’s room, where a photo of a big bay Budweiser Clydesdale looms over a laughing Michelle. The photo holds the place of honor among stuffed plush horses, horse pillows, stuffed unicorn toys, and a horse-collar clock.
The dogs move cheerfully on to Kim’s room, where a small ornamental china plaque declares, “It’s Hard Being a Princess,” and wild horses gallop on the wallpaper border above a single hospital bed draped in a white chenille coverlet. On the shelf is a treasured photo of Kim’s boyfriend, Randy, who also has cerebral palsy.
Chance and Hope, jesters, comforters, guardians in the night, also sit nearby when residents die. “The dogs are there then, and they are very quiet,” says Darlene, her hands deep in their fine, clean fur.
“Do you believe in angels?” she asks. “I do. I have them here all the time.”
2
SHE’S MY GIRL
WALT AND BEVERLY KUCHLER AND THEIR DONKEYS AND HORSES
THE DONKEYS COME trotting in pairs when Walt Kuchler calls them: Abigail and Patches, Sunshine and Snowflake, Pancho and Dusty. They are bushy browed and pixie hooved, with dorsal stripes running from their outsized ears to their undersized tails atop bodies that are cream and pinto and gray.
And then there is Mabel. Mabel is a bay Percheron mix with a black mane so thick it cascades down both sides of her huge neck. A nine-year-old mare with the sloe eyes of a belly dancer that belie her sixteen-hundred-pound physique, she is darkly feminine and built like a medieval war horse.
“She got a butt on her,” says Walt admiringly, brushing the big mare. “It was love at first sight. I love big drafts. She’s my girl. I couldn’t sell her for a hundred grand; I like her that much. People up here got their champion bred this, outta a champion that, and I’m just as proud of Mabel. I love you, girl.”
Walt is 6½ feet tall, leggy, wearing a tan cowboy hat decorated with a horsehair hat band, and so tanned by the high mountain sun that “People think I’m a Mexican,” he says with a wide flash of very white teeth beneath a salt-and-pepper mustache.
He and his wife, Beverly, and their herd live in the Garner Valley of California, a community of thirteen hundred in meadows thick with Ponderosa and Jeffries pines flanked by the San Jacinto Mountains. On the morning we arrived, up the hairpin turns from the desert 4650 feet below, the valley looked eerily familiar, and it was: scenes from the 1960s TV series Bonanza and The Cisco Kid were filmed in this valley, and car commercials are filmed here today. Walt and Bev’s yellow geodesic dome home sits in a grove of pines on a small rise.
“This house was a repo, total trash, and it stunk so bad you couldn’t be in it for more ’n five minutes,” says Walt, who spent months hauling trash to the dump. They share the house with an African Grey parrot, three dogs, five fish, and a gecko. The house overlooks the pole barn and paddock that Mabel occupies with a sorrel quarter horse named Tex. The sign at the front gate reads: Camp Kuchler. “Everybody up here’s got a ranch or a hacienda, so I’m campin’ with my horses,” Walt explains.
In 2000, Bev and Walt and their son, Sam, were living in Orange County. Bev worked for the phone company; Walt was a pipe fitter. Sam was tall like his dad and trim with blue eyes. He played high-school football and was goalie for every water polo game at his school, Valencia High.
“Kids are cool—I loved being a dad,” says Walt. “I didn’t babysit my kid; I raised him. I always hugged on him. But when he turned thirteen, I hugged him and he said, ‘Dad, what are you, gay?’ I said it’s a man hug; there’s nothing wrong with a guy hugging his son or his dad.”
“He called me Belly Boy,” says Walt, patting a modest middle-aged paunch. “It was his way of screwing with me. That’s the handle on my CB in my jeep. He called me Wally too. That’s a kid’s way of saying they love you.”
Then Sam went to college. “He hung around with the wrong guys, drank beer with them, and they kept bugging him to try heroin,” says Walt. “One night, his resistance was low. That’s all it took.”
Walter Kuchler rides Mabel, his rescued draft-horse cross, on the mountain trails of California.
Sam entered chemical rehabilitation treatment twice. “It’s pretty sad when you go into rehab and listen to your son talk about putting a needle in his arm and crying in the bathroom. When you’re the parent, you are supposed to protect him,” Walt says.
At twenty, Sam and his girlfriend placed their newborn son into a sealed adoption. Ten months later, Sam died of a heroin overdose, sitting on a toilet with a needle in his arm. “They didn’t know if they should get married or keep it or what,” Walt explains. “He was asking me, ‘Dad, what do I do?’ I said it’s up to you. So he adopted his baby out. It’s a closed adoption through the Mormons, and now Sam is gone and we can’t find the baby, and that sucks. I wish I had my grandson.”
Bev and Walt quit their jobs and fled Orange County for the mountains, acquiring the donkeys and horses along the way. Now Walt visits drug rehabilitation facilities, doing what he can to prevent tragedy for other families.
“I take a picture of Sam hugging his mom, and I take his ashes in the urn and a picture of him dead on the toilet of the heroin overdose,” he says. “I hand ’em to the kids and freak ’em out. They are good kids, but kids do some stupid stuff. I just tell ’em my story. And I say go home and hug your parents; they love you more than anything. If you die they will cry every day.”
“There’s a war going on in this country, but this one they don’t put in the paper,” Walt adds. “There are kids dying and the obituaries aren’t telling the truth, why they are dying. Before my kid was on drugs, I thought addicts were scumbags—when I went to rehabs, I saw they are just ordinary, normal people. It’s in every family. President Bush had a drinking problem, his daughter has a drinking problem—it’s everywhere.”
Now Bev makes quilts at home, and Walt and Mabel ride the mountain trails. “I can’t get enough riding; I ride anytime if anyone wants to go,” says Walt, saddling Mabel as ravens call in the pines among the boulders. He fits her with a leather breast collar, an outsized western saddle, and a bridle with a copper mouth roller bit. Mabel spins the roller with her tongue, champing, and makes a muted rattle.
“I ride with women,” he says. “The guys don’t ride much here. I like to go for five or six hours, and I call the guys’ horses rental horses ’cause they only ride for one hour. I just take a bunch of aspirin and go.”
He purchased Mabel from a ranch in Anza despite the fact that she was, says Walt, “all messed up—the shoer hit her in the face with a file. I couldn’t even sit on her she was so wild.”
That was lucky for Mabel, since unrideable horses, especially big fleshy ones like Mabel, often go to the horse-meat or “killer” buyers. It took a good two years of loving and being nice to that horse, says Walt, before he was riding her and she began to trust him.
“Then one day we were ridin’ and my hat blew off, and she took off. I lost a stirrup and reins, she ran for the low trees, and I went to the hospital. I was on crutches, black and blue from my hip to my ankle. I was within inches of selling her.”
It took another year, but Walt rode again. “Although we were both shaking when I got on,” he concedes. He just had to ride, he says.
“My heart’s broke. When your kid dies—parents who lose a kid know—you wanna die and be with your kid. And when you’re riding a horse
, you have to think about it, have to pay attention. You become one with the animal. Like they say: the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. When you ride, all your hurts and problems go away.”
“Is there something wrong with me ’cause I kiss my horses?” he asks unabashedly. “And I hug ’em every night. When I go out and feed, I hug every one of them. I love havin’ my critters. I wish Sam could be here; he loved dogs . . .”
Walt has an idea that what heals him would help others, particularly addicts. “First off, it doesn’t do good to put people in jail for drugs,” he says. “You put ’em in an environment with animals, put ’em in the woods, have ’em do some work, get away from the city, and do that for a year or two. People are nicer out in the country. The city is all blacktop and buildings. This is where God’s at.”
Sunshine, the saucy gray donkey filly, attempts to climb into the golf cart Walt and Bev use to drive between the donkey pasture and the house.
Walt’s only child died of a heroin overdose, and riding Mabel brings him peace. “Out here is where God is at,” he says. “When you ride, all your hurts and problems go away.”
“The donkeys are sweet,” says Bev. “If I have fresh lipstick on when I go out to see them, by the time I get done they have pink stuff on their faces.”
“The animals help, because it’s holding onto them and loving them that brings peace,” says Bev. “These are our babies, and we love them like our family. Walter’s always saying I’d bring them in the house if I could.”
“Animals are it; they take your heartache away,” said Walt. “I lost my boy to drugs, and my horse saved my life—just the therapy of riding. Animals are God’s gift to us.”
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