Saved

by Karin Winegar

  BJ selected Libby at the Oregon Humane Society in Portland, where the nine-week-old puppy had been surrendered as part of an unwanted litter. Perhaps her shy temperament had worked against her—she was the last one left. The puppy’s initial reserve, however, attracted BJ.

  “She was not particularly outgoing; she hung out at the back of the kennel,” she recalls. “I was planning on adopting an adult dog so I wouldn’t have to deal with puppy issues, but I took her into a meet-and-greet room, and there was a loud noise somewhere, and she dove into my lap. I thought, okay, this is a being that thinks of me as a safe place.”

  Libby was a huge step for BJ, much bigger than getting a dog. She was finally ready to commit to something for the rest of her life. “She’s amazingly the right puppy for me,” she says. “If she were a needy, high-maintenance dog, I wouldn’t have survived. From her I got a level of commitment I was also finally ready to make.”

  Putting down roots on this ridge top with the view of Richardson Gap is part of a commitment she had never made before either. Photos of the Andersen family’s five previous homes—beginning with a rented cottage—decorate the dining-room wall of this latest house, which BJ and Theresa share with BJ’s mother, Nancy, and father, Arland, who is retired from the family-owned construction business.

  The family also includes Legend, a young black-and-white border-collie and rottweiler mix, who capers up, snapping his jaws in a playful, conversational way, and an elderly bobtailed Australian shepherd named Dee O Gee, who bumps against my knees and gives me a soulful look.

  Libby and Legend escort us around the property, which was head-high in poison oak and blackberries until the women took a bulldozer to it, clearing the choked land back to its natural balance of oak and fir. BJ points out checker mallow, buttercup, columbine, and Douglas fir bearded with lichen, while Libby scouts earnestly for mice and rabbits.

  Their horses are mostly rescues: Sky and Ed are foals from a PMU ranch (PMU, or pregnant mare urine, is the chief component of hormone replacement therapy for women. Large herds of mares are kept pregnant and stand in collection barns, where tubing funnels their urine to a tank. Foals are sold off at three months and the mares rebred); Blackberry and Juniper are mustang rescues; and Ochoco, another rescued golden mustang with a dreadlock mane and ground-sweeping tail, is being bullied gently around the pasture by Zephyr, BJ’s curvaceous bay Lipizzan-Clydesdale cross. A miniature stallion, seventeen-year-old Jupiter, looking like a bay burr in his winter coat, nickers to us in the hopes of getting hay. The horses are part of BJ’s long-term plan to partly subsidize her rescued menagerie through training horses and riders in natural horsemanship (a philosophy of working with horses through communication techniques that build a partnership with the animal rather than dominating it) and by selling the modestly priced horses to good new homes.

  For a few minutes, we watch Teresa running the tractor—like BJ, she is middle-aged, trim, and silver-haired. Under her baseball cap, Teresa’s face has a striking, androgynous beauty. “I thought Richard Gere was handsome until I saw her,” says BJ.

  “What does Libby give BJ?” I ask Teresa.

  “Everything,” says Teresa.

  Libby is BJ’s first dog, and Teresa is the first person she’s ever settled down with. “Before her, I’d never had a relationship more permanent than with a cat,” says BJ. “I bond wherever I go, but ask me to commit for the rest of my life, and I wouldn’t make it. I was always reinventing myself, and I never expected a person to keep up with me, let alone an animal.”

  The reinvention included two stints as a college student (a self-described compulsive learner, BJ has a degree in equestrian studies, with later schooling in religious philosophy, environmental studies, and art), two years in AmeriCorps, several years caretaking a YWCA camp, and somewhere along the way, a couple of years as a Buddhist nun.

  “The hardest thing about being a Buddhist nun was giving up my two cats,” she admits. “I had to give up everything in my life to devote to a life of service to others. People you can break up with and they understand, but you can’t break up with animals.”

  Currently, she works in another dimension of service to others as kennel manager at the Willamette Humane Society in Salem, Oregon. Some twelve thousand unwanted animals pour through the shelter each year, and BJ credits Libby for giving her the confidence she needs to handle the job. The dog is a partner when it comes to the part of BJ’s work that involves temperament testing, and BJ’s belief in the fantastic qualities of shelter dogs came from Libby.

  Libby’s opinion can mean life or death for some of those unwanted dogs. “We do temperament testing on dogs that come in,” BJ explains. “We test them around food, other dogs, and in situations with people to see how they react, how adoptable they might be. Libby sends calming signals to the dogs; she de-escalates their anxiety and stress.”

  “She’s so appropriate and so accurate that if a dog will respond to her, then we know that’s a dog we can work with; it just needs to be taught some ways and boundaries. When we have a difficult or borderline dog, she is our expert.”

  Libby’s sense of responsibility came in handy not long ago when BJ was caring for a friend’s newly-adopted Doberman-rottweiler mix. “We were out felling trees for firewood, which scared the dog and she went piling out of the truck,” says BJ. “Libby saw I was wound up, figured out I was trying to find the dog and started down the dirt road, sweeping like a scent-tracking dog. The friend and I followed her.”

  The road became a trail, the trail vanished, and the panic-stricken city dog disappeared in the jungle-like Oregon Coast Range. The women, following Libby, tracked the runaway dog for a mile and a half before they could catch her. “That dog would have died in the wilderness, but Libby figured out she could help,” says BJ.

  Living and working in the Oregon woods, BJ stays in the moment with her dog. “With people, I can get all conceptual and not really there. With Libby, I stay present, very grounded in a companionable silence of sharing the greater-than-human world.”

  “Some beings are more sentient than others, and she’s so stinkin’ sentient,” says BJ fondly. “There was a hole in my family, and I was okay with the psychological replacement. We are fearsomely attuned.”

  Libby is “border-collie smart with a pause button” says BJ. She has given BJ the confidence and skills to perform the job of kennel manager at a humane society.

  As a child, Drew Fitzpatrick ran away from home to escape abuse. She now shelters rescued horses, goats, and sheep at a small farm through her Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue Foundation.

  10

  DREW’S EDEN

  DREW FITZPATRICK AND HER MINNESOTA HOOVED ANIMAL RESCUE FOUNDATION

  WHEN DREW FITZPATRICK’S daughter was eighteen months old, her husband issued an ultimatum. “He told me I had an unnatural fixation with horses and that I had to make a decision: them or him,” she says. “I had known my mare for way longer than him, so it wasn’t hard. ‘Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,’ I said.”

  Horses have captivated Drew ever since she can remember. She was still sucking her thumb when she kicked her pony-ring mount into a trot at a local grocery store opening. Her parents divorced when she was five, and her mother remarried, but Drew hung on to her love of horses.

  At ten, she watched as her pony, Major Dundee, was sold to neighbors down the road. Not long after that, Major Dundee accidentally escaped from his pasture. “And he was hit by the school bus,” says Drew, blowing a tight stream of cigarette smoke. “It broke his neck and legs, but he was still alive, and I was helpless. The people who had bought him were right there, and they said it was our pony; they didn’t want to take responsibility for what had happened. They didn’t care about the suffering of the animal. I had to go to school, and he was screaming and thrashing, and nobody would claim ownership, and the other kids were teasing me because I had to go to school and my pony was screaming. The cops had to shoot him.”

  Lif
e did not improve for Drew after that. At fourteen, she encountered the naked, decapitated, and decomposed body of a girlfriend in a cornfield. Her stepfather told her it should have been Drew and continued to beat her. She went to school with black eyes and concussions. Teachers noticed, but the one who spoke up was threatened with the loss of her job by Drew’s stepfather. There was no help, no social worker, in her small Minnesota town.

  At fifteen, Drew knew that to save her life she had to leave home, even if it meant abandoning her horses. She hitchhiked east and south, living on the beach of Padre Island, Texas, and the streets of various big cities. “I didn’t seek aid from anyone; I just kept movin’,” she says. “I found different ways of surviving on the road, sometimes by begging, and sometimes I went hungry ’cause I didn’t like that. I didn’t resort to anything unsavory like prostitution. One time I strung beads with a whole bunch of street kids in a little basement room, and I remember being really friggin’ hungry. I hated it and made enough money to get out of there.”

  Things got worse. She ate road kill. “I cooked it as best I could, but it was eat a fox or forget it, so I ate a gray fox. It was nasty; they taste terrible. You can always find ketchup packets, but it makes the worst soup; it makes you throw up. I could’ve gone home, but I wasn’t gonna; I would have got the hell beat out of me. I was just too stubborn.”

  In New York, she managed the mailroom for a sixties radical underground newspaper, the Yipster Times, and occasionally went riding on livery horses in Central Park. Tom, the founder of the newspaper and of High Times, an alternative magazine, staked her to five Arabian horses that they planned to train and sell. But when Tom committed suicide, Drew fled with her horses from New York to central Florida and got a job on a horse farm. At one point she rented a stable, training horses and living in the hayloft where the only plumbing was a garden hose.

  She returned to Minnesota and was married briefly, but mostly she and her daughter survived on Drew’s horse-training jobs and other work: waitressing, dog grooming, driving a delivery truck, selling plants. For five years, she fitted shoes and appliances to diabetics and made braces for injured horses on the side.

  Today she has a small Eden of her own making, the Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue Foundation, a ten-acre farm in Zimmerman, Minnesota. Fantail pigeons dance in the sunbeams where a black frizzle rooster holds court in the open barn door of the farm. In the hayloft above them, Drew’s friend Randy, who sports a long gray beard and a tattoo of a wizard on his bicep, tosses fragrant hay bales down into the yard. Arabians, quarter horses, mixed-breed horses, and a Percheron colt mill and snooze in pastures and pens. Two donkeys—stubby, gray Joseph and tall, creamy Beatrice—demand dinner, shrieking like dissonant clarinets.

  A pair of sheep named Sven and Baabette, a Jersey cow named Jessifer and her Guernsey cow friend Clover, and a peacock and his ivory pea hen eat, drift around, or doze in the sun. “Baabette fell off or escaped a slaughter truck, we think, and appeared in a neighborhood where dogs chased her, so I took her,” says Drew, introducing us to her flock. “And Sven I bought at an auction for two dollars when he was a couple days’ old and nobody wanted a bottle lamb,” she continues, rubbing the wooly lamb’s ear. “I raised him in the house with my dogs. Talk about ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ This one would curl up on the pickup seat with me, and we’d go to the bank and the store.”

  We follow Drew into the barn, where she clips an X-ray of one of Beatrice’s hooves to a screen. The hoof curves upward and curls back like a ram’s horn. “Beatrice was lying down most of the time, because she couldn’t walk on her neglected hooves, so we took a Sawz-All and whacked the foot like this first,” Drew explains, drawing a diagonal line across the distorted hoof. Then the farrier reshaped the deformed hooves so that Beatrice could walk again. “In about forty-five minutes, they go from Turkish slippers to normal. They’re sore because the tendons and muscles snap back into place, so we have to use all kinds of pain killers.”

  Drew is in her forties, with pale skin, hair, and eyes, and a limpid and remote stolidity that reminds me of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. “I’m a real odd person, not touchy-huggy with people,” she says, blowing a stream of cigarette smoke down the front of her flannel shirt. “I didn’t fit in. We moved a lot; it was hard to make friends. Drew is an unusual name, and I got teased. Horses were a constant; they don’t tease you or pick on you. If they don’t like you, they just kick you. Horses are not as conniving and underhanded as people. People are too hard to figure out.”

  She went to a psychologist—once. “And in his waiting room was this painting, this egg all by itself on the rocks over here, and a coupla birds mating over here. It creeped me out. I went to him one time, said, ‘See ya later,’ and went and got a horse. I know what’s good for me.”

  “Don’t touch that fence; it’s so hot you’ll pee in your pants,” she cautions, as I am venturing to scratch a mare through the electric wire corral fence in the center of the farmyard.

  Drew has shaped her calling into a career of mopping up the wreckage from irresponsible, cruel, or damaged human beings, and soothing the hurt animals at their mercy. Her mission forces her into triage, into scenes where she has to be decisive, responsible, and merciful where others are not.

  So Drew does the hard and the ugly rescues—going in with the sheriff to seize forty-five starving horses in Pine County (five more were already dead), and another sixteen starved horses in Todd County that were walking over the bodies of seven of the herd, including foals. She hauls horses to the university veterinary clinic for surgery and intensive care. She euthanizes horses that cannot be saved. And she carefully screens people who apply to adopt her recovered animals. “That means a lot of paperwork and people,” she says. “I hate paperwork and people.”

  “Horses—I know what they are going to do, they do not try to kill themselves, they are predictable in their unpredictability. They are reasonable animals; people are not.”

  “I had to teach a cop how to shoot a horse the other night,” she says, with little more visible emotion than she has shown when discussing anything else. “It had got onto the road and been hit by a car and had its leg torn off, and the owner was not there, and the vet wasn’t getting there fast enough. The cop had never shot a horse before, and it was pretty emotional, but we were both bucking up ’cause that’s what you do. Say ‘Geez this sucks,’ then deal with the body, deal with the traffic. It was horrible, but you know what? I’m glad I was able to be there to help. Who else would have gotten it euthanized that quickly? And it was good for me to get closure on the whole pony incident when I was a kid.”

  “That was how many years ago?” she wonders. “It’s so frustrating and you feel so helpless when you are a child. I know what it’s like to be not in control. I want to help these animals. They are total innocents; they are our dependents.”

  Drew loves all the animals that survive abuse and come to her farm, but she has, she admits, some favorites. “The animal that has been absolutely whupped down, thin, depressed, worried you are going to hit them, that’s the animal I have the most affection for and spend the most time with until they come out of their shell,” she says. “I can see their psyche uncurl. They make themselves a little vulnerable; they give you trust and trust you not to wreck it. It’s most important they get someone who protects and nurtures that until they can really unfold and be normal and trust people.”

  She is rightfully fussy about who gets the animals she has repaired. “If a person doesn’t understand that they have to take care of the psyche, they are not getting a horse from me,” says Drew. “It’s a hard, hard thing to adopt these animals out. If the people have barbed wire on their place, no adoption. It’s my rules, my ball. All the horses are on my team. If you don’t like it, go play somewhere else.”

  Not all the humans who hurt animals do so intentionally, she says. “People who are at the end of their ropes, like going through a divorce, if you talk some sense to them
and be nice to them, if you say, ‘I’m here to help you,’ that’s okay. They are fundamentally good anyway, just horribly stressed. They understand and say, ‘Yes, please help my animals.’ That’s nice; I like doing that. But boy, the ones that are crazy are hard to deal with, and some need to have psych evaluations. We can order that as part of sentencing.”

  Drew was once called to a farm where a woman starved two horses—one to death. There were big ruts in the ground where the dying horse had continued to paddle and paddle, she says. Usually cool, Drew lost it this time. “And the other poor, skinny-ass horse with his head down was standing there lookin’ at his friend’s body . . . I just screamed, ‘Your horse starved to death! Where’s your goddamn hay?!’ I ended up doing the schoolteacher thing with my finger: ‘Shame on you!’ I had her bawling. She signed a surrender form. And I put the horse in my trailer and drove away. The woman ended up in a mental care facility.”

  Drew sees humans relating to animals in roughly three ways: one is the old school, what she calls the animals-have-no-soul group, those who see animals as objects.

  Others lavish attention and vet care on their creatures. “They are ethical and have enough money to take care of ’em, or if they don’t, they at least don’t have fifty bajillion animals,” she says. “They see the world as a whole.” In the middle are those whom Drew describes as “just attaining consciousness. They are getting into having animals and getting a puppy for their child, and the influences they bump into help to form their opinions about animals.”

  Some of the old school—those who regard animals as necessary and not much more—can change, says Drew. She’s seen it happen. “I was telling my eighty-two-year-old grandmother what I see and do and why. And she said, ‘All these years I’ve looked at animals the wrong way.’ That was really cool. Dairy cows to her were just part of life, but when she was older and animals were a luxury, she slowed down and watched and enjoyed them. I don’t know what makes people like that change, but you let them think it’s their idea.”