Fortunately, we have arrived at mealtime: in the sunlit kitchen off the parlor, twelve-foot walls are festooned with framed paintings of cows, tapirs, pigs, sheep, and chickens, and sixteen large pastel bowls are laid out on a butcher block. A white cat sleeps in the sunbeam, and a commercial-size soup pot simmers on the stove.
Don Marro and Lillian Clancy of Virginia take in abandoned dogs and lobby for legislative change to stop overbreeding and to make affordable spay and neuter services available. “Dogs give us an opportunity to improve humanity,” says Don.
“Bones for the outdoor dogs—to keep them busy, they get one every day,” explains Lillian, ladling bones and broth onto the vitamins and medication in the rainbow of bowls. There is the scrape of claws on the back stairs, and a large black dog growls on the landing above the kitchen. “Come on, honey, sweetie, no one is going to take your food,” Lillian calls to a skeptical Labrador mix named Lacey.
As the pack romps and roves the rooms, Don recounts their histories: Howard, a Doberman mix, was hit by a car and his owners left him to die. George, a basset hound, came wandering to their house, unkempt and going blind. Lobo was saved from a shelter. Eddie was found wandering the freeway median.
“And that painting is Angel Annie,” says Don, indicating a dog portrait near the stove. “She was dumped by somebody who was angry that she was older at the end of her life than at the beginning.”
Don is a doer. He got tractor trailers banned from the stretch of Highway 17 that runs between Route 66 and Route 50 at the Ashby Gap, not only reducing noise and pollution in the historic valley of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but also stopping almost all of the loss of life—human and animal—from speeding tractor-trailer trucks.
He and Lillian are now tackling a tragedy on an even larger scale. “Animal shelters in the commonwealth of Virginia kill 135,000 dogs and cats a year,” says Don. “The reason is the disposability mindset, no population control, no other cultural tradition. And it’s killing, not euthanasia. A state that can’t feed its children properly, educate them effectively, or balance a budget consistently nevertheless is content to spend $62 million on handling and killing pets,” he says.
“Most animal welfare groups focus on ways to devote enough money and time to rescue dogs, but no state official funds the effort to correct overpopulation.”
Don starts at intense and gets more so as he speaks. His gray beard and hair, high arched brows, New York accent, and sure speech coalesce in a picture of tough, smart fury. “And there are a number of people who breed dogs for evil purposes, or just extra money. They sell puppies at Christmas, breed them to fight, breed them then kill the excess inventory or used up breeding stock. This is incredible. If we don’t license, regulate and tax breeders there is no accountability, no consequences.”
“It’s part of farm culture that reacts to pet breeding regulation as stifling, a slippery slope,” says Don.
Don and Lillian began helping animals in need when they lived in San Francisco, where he worked in computer software, and she ran an executive search firm specializing in biotechnology companies. Their first rescue was Bruno, a Doberman with a broken leg. It’s a family calling: their daughter Elizabeth Ross took part in preventing the U.S. Air Force from sending its space exploration chimpanzees to testing laboratories. “It’s her life’s work to make change too,” says Lillian.
Don and Lillian believe “you need to be responsible for every animal you give life to.” Their attempt to introduce legislation to raise license fees and tax breeders to fund wide-scale spay and neuter services failed, but they plan to reintroduce it next session. “Inertia defeats it,” says Don, “the same lazy and defective logic that excluded women from the right to vote and kept people in bondage. Today those things are regarded as unconscionable, but there are other dark chapters still, the Holocaust or ‘ethnic cleansing,’ for example. There has to be some catalyst that triggers outrage, some threshold event, to say enough is enough.”
Don has long since had enough. He is big, smart, fearless, and furious. And he and Lillian are ferociously organized. Through their group, Virginia Voters for Animal Welfare, they craft, introduce, and track legislation on pet breeding, owner education, pet and breeder licensing, and pet euthanasia methods. There are times when Don would like to act more directly. “I know of a dog that survived a lethal injection at the pound, and the guy stuffed a hose down its throat and drowned it,” he says, his eyes darkening. “That creep should get hosed himself.”
We pile into his van to tour their land, to give Don a chance to decompress while freeing Lillian to feed the pack. To the north of the antebellumstyle house are a fenced orchard of fruit trees and raised beds of a large garden. To the west, on the gentle slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the stable and adjoining paddocks have been converted to kennels. Brenda and Alice, mixed-breed brindle puppies, dash around the paddock to greet us. And Rosemary, a blind golden retriever mix, barks as we drive by. We round a curve and a small rise, and Don recounts another rescue.
“Gordon was a bluetick hound mix who was kept in a cage so small he couldn’t stand up, and when he was rescued, he had to learn to walk, to run, to bark. He had spinal problems and trouble in his back legs, and he did not have much time. It was the greatest joy to me and to him when he learned he could roll on his back in the grass. Finally, he couldn’t climb stairs anymore. And there are a lot of stairs in our house. My bedroom is on the second floor. On the day before he died, I found him up there; he had made it all the way up those stairs to see me.”
“This is Gordon’s place,” and he points to crocuses and forsythia blooming among rocks. “It motivates you; it makes you sad,” he says. “You gotta take care of those who depend on us, who don’t know better. What kind of morality would willingly allow this killing and cruelty to continue?”
Don and Lillian already stopped death on this road in the historic valley beyond their gates. If they succeed with their new legislation, they may forever improve Virginia state law for animals, setting a national precedent.
There are things, however, they can’t control. When we are out of Don’s earshot, Lillian lowers her voice and tells us, “Don has spinal stenosis and neuropathy; he can’t feel his feet. We are moving to a different house because he can’t climb stairs easily anymore.”
For Don and Lillian, time is crucial now, and time is even more precious with their animals. “Dogs give us an opportunity to improve humanity,” says Don. “Animals are happy. Emotionally, it’s like a runner’s endorphin rush to be with them. On a metaphysical level, they add a meaning in life.”
This is where Don and Lillian have chosen to make a difference, for the good of animals on a large and small scale. “This is how society improves, when people care: about freeing slaves, about giving women the vote, about ethical standards,” says Don. “This is people who make changes. This is social evolution.”
Epilogue
In 2008, the Virginia General Assembly banned gas chambers for pet euthanasia, curtailed puppy-mill operations and placed them under scrutiny and state regulation, and increased penalties for dogfighting, including making it a RICO offense punishable by at least five years incarceration and a million dollar fine.
Faerie Fleur simply showed up in their house on the sofa one morning, joining Don and Lillian’s pack of formerly homeless dogs.
Chuck and Sue Thoreson have structured their lives to care for unwanted, crippled horses, dogs dumped in the country, and castaway cats. One cat—a formerly feral barn kitten named Emma—repaid their love by doting on Sue’s mother throughout her life and keeping vigil through her last illness.
8
SUCH DEAR FRIENDS
CHUCK AND SUE THORESON AND THEIR ANIMAL FAMILY
“COMEON, KIDS!” Chuck and Sue Thoreson call, heading down the driveway with the family for a walk. Behind them runs little bowlegged Gauss, a tricolored Shih Tzu named for an eighteenth-century mathematician. He is followed by roly-poly Sophie,
a speckled Labrador cross; Chum, a café-au-lait-colored poodle-terrier cross; Chelsea, a pale cocoa standard poodle; and Babington, a plump white cat. They swerve and dart off the trail, hop, skitter, and pant, and look adoringly at Mom and Dad. Chuck carries a small brass hunting horn and blows random toots to encourage the distracted among the group to keep up.
Back on the Thoresons’ farmhouse porch, the shrewd Emma, a calico cat with a limp, and a small, gray tiger-striped cat, Portia, still sleek and shiny at seventeen, watch from a sunny step.
“Dumped in the country” is the refrain when the Thoresons explain how they built their animal family. Fortunately the country was near Rise Over Run Farm, their farm in western Minnesota. “Chelsea is the only dog we purchased since we were married thirty-two years ago; the rest were found,” says Sue.
Sophie was a six-month-old pup. Chuck and Sue suspect somebody took her out hunting, didn’t like her performance, and abandoned her in the woods. Sue found Gauss, muddy and matted with burrs, crouched under a mailbox on a hot July day. And Portia arrived in a load of hay.
There are also nineteen horses on the farm, mostly Thoroughbreds no longer able to race, breed, or be ridden. Bay and black, gray and roan, they stroll the paddocks and sun themselves in loafing sheds. It takes Sue or Chuck more than an hour to concoct and serve the special diets for their elderly horses, and still more time to administer medications. Sue’s beloved first horse, Whiff, died recently at thirty-two, his life and comfort prolonged by daily nutritional cocktails of glucosamine, chondroitin, and hyaluronic acid. “I don’t begrudge them a moment,” says Sue, who has nursed as many as thirty horses at one time.
Chuck is a retired math teacher in the grip of a golf mania—he plays daily in good weather. Sue still commutes to the Twin Cities, where she runs the 401(k) plan for a large health-care organization.
“We can’t travel because of all the animals,” Sue says, looking a little wistful. “Aging horses, dogs, and cats need meds. And we ended up working more years, because we spend a lot of money on them. But we wouldn’t do this unless there was a lot of enjoyment. So the house gets dirty—they’re still a joy.”
Fortunately, Chuck and Sue have created a welcoming place to stay home with their big family. They remodeled their late-nineteenth-century clapboard house, adding a white kitchen with granite countertops, a dining room with French doors leading to a deck, and a woodstove in the front parlor. Photos of their racing Thoroughbreds decorate the back hall, and the living-room walls are lined with bookshelves stacked with equestrian art and books by Walter Farley, Marguerite Henry, Will James, Rudyard Kipling, and A. A. Milne.
When they first married, Sue explains, they were living in a townhouse with four stray cats, which gave Chuck a horrible time with his asthma and allergies. They chose to keep the cats, defy the allergies, and bought ten acres in the country. Between the barns and the house, they now have six cats. “We would have more, but the resident cats won’t let them integrate,” Sue explains.
And then they added Emma. Her mother was a feral cat that gave birth in a hay shed, but when Sue noticed her kittens were disappearing one by one (meals for tomcats or skunks, she guesses), she brought her into the house and nursed her with feline formula. Young kittens not only need to be fed but also stroked every three hours in order to urinate, so Sue parked Emma with her mother, Lois, for kitty day care.
“One day I put her in a kennel to protect her from our poodles, and when I came home, the dogs had gone at the kennel and dragged it by the heating pad cord, and Emma was missing part of her paw,” Sue says. “She was so traumatized, and now she couldn’t function as a farm cat.”
Emma the farm cat became Lois’s cat. Lois had suffered from severe bipolar depression all her life, and Sue (an only child) recalls her mother spending hours in a darkened room. “When I was a kid, Mom didn’t know what she had, and neither did her doctors,” says Sue. “It showed up as migraines, stomachaches, and back problems. When she got older, what it actually was became more apparent. Mom’s depression was so bad, she became immobilized, and Emma and Fritz, her schnauzer, were her constant companions.”
Years later, when Lois decided to forgo treatment for kidney failure, she moved into Rise Over Run Farm, bringing Emma with her. Emma never left her bedside for the week that Lois slept, slipped into a coma, and died. Emma the cat had made a commitment to Lois, and she kept it.
People need to be that reciprocal, too, the Thoresons believe. “We need to educate that a pet is a lifelong commitment similar to a child, because you are responsible for their well-being,” says Sue. “People as a species are not the greatest. Their treatment of animals is better than it was, but it is slow to improve.”
“People are more delicate and difficult, and our relationships are more tenuous,” Sue muses. “With people you have to be so careful. Animals take you as you are. They are nonjudgmental, just happy you are there, good company. They’re such dear friends.”
“And animals are very tactile,” she adds, as Gauss wiggles up against her on the sofa and gives a crackly growl that Sue assures us is a dog version of a purr. That blissful mutual touch extends to bedtime too. With part of their pack sharing their bed every night, sometimes the Thoresons get displaced. “I slept on the floor once; it was so crowded and one dog was not well,” Sue says with a laugh. It’s the sort of thing any mom would do. “If I’d had a child, I’d feel not one iota different about animals. Maybe I’d have less time, but I’d feel no different about them.”
9
FEARSOMELY ATTUNED
BJ ANDERSEN, TERESA MCKENZIE, AND THEIR DOG, LIBBY
WE ARE HEADED up into the villages of Sublimity, Stayton, and Scio in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades, which boast a climate so moist that moss sprouts even on concrete curbs and lichen seems to inexorably consume everything that doesn’t move. This is small-farm, medium-ranch, and big trail-riding country. Horses, llamas, and alpacas graze in small, lush pastures bordered by druidic-looking cedars, ditches thick with dormant sword ferns, and fields of neatly sheared rows of future Christmas trees. At a local tack shop and feed mill, pale pink, green, and blue lariats are coiled on the walls, and snap-button western shirts are for sale along with rifle scabbards, rain ponchos, and waterproof saddlebags.
Chalky plum-colored brambles form arches along the road, which winds upward past vineyards and pollarded fruit trees and nut trees, their trunks grizzled with lichens.
It’s February, and snow gleams on the clear-cut meadows at higher altitudes, while in the valley below us, golfers are moving across squelchy greens.
BJ Andersen and her partner, Teresa McKenzie, moved to one of these farms because of their love for animals and their compulsion to help those in harm’s way.
Teresa is running the tractor, grading a load of gravel on their new driveway when I cross the mud on boards that span their unfinished front yard to meet them. First I have to maneuver past a Jetta with a “My Dog is Smarter than Your Honor Student” bumper sticker and a second one proclaiming “My SUV Has Four Legs, a Mane, a Tail and It Doesn’t Guzzle Gas.”
BJ, attended by three dogs, crosses the vast deck that wraps their cheerful, sage-green home “designed for people with seasonal affective disorder, that’s why all the windows,” she quips.
Libby is glossy black, more border collie than Labrador in size, with a graying muzzle and distinctive cowlicks running the length of her spine. She greets me with a plush hippo toy, her amber eyes alight with an intelligence as profound as that of a chimpanzee. “Where’s your duck?” BJ asks, as we settle in armchairs in the generous, sunlit living room. Libby drops the hippo, trots to a basket of dog toys, and retrieves a plush grouse. “Oh, alright, it’s got wings. I suppose that’s close enough.”
“She is so stinkin’ smart,” laughs BJ, “she watches what I do and figures ways to help.” Figuring out how to help seems to be Libby’s calling. Not long ago, BJ was taking care of an elkhound-husky mix, and visiting a lakeside cent
ral Oregon lodge. It was midwinter after sunset, and BJ was in a bunkhouse behind the lodge and away from the lake. Libby ran barking to the lodge where some men were barbecuing dinner, then began running to the edge of the small frozen lake.
“They had watched Lassie often enough to know they should follow her,” she says. “When they got to the lake, they found the husky had fallen through the ice. She had tried to climb out, but her wet forelegs froze to the surface, and she hung there in the icy lake. Libby got the two men to come see the problem, and they maneuvered until they could hang off the end of the dock and grab her collar. Much longer and that dog would have died of hypothermia.
BJ Andersen and her perfect animal partner, Libby, live on a farm in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade range. Libby saved one dog from freezing in a lake and another from dying in the wilderness.
She wasn’t barking, and no one would have known until it was too late.” That rescue earned Libby the Diamond Collar Award in the category of “animal rescuing animal” from the Portland Humane Society at a gala pets and people party.
Helping BJ is Libby’s primary mission, which BJ intimates is not a coincidence. From Libby’s records, she was born the day BJ’s older brother died of AIDS. “After he passed, I decided I was ready to have a dog,” she explains. “I was thirty-five and never had one as an adult. When my brother died, that meant bedrock change. My sense of identity was I have this number of siblings and this number of parents. I lost who I was.”
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