Bonfire is terrified of big dogs, and windpipe damage causes him to cough if he tries to run. His tongue hangs out of the left side of his mouth, he can’t lick easily, and because he has only his rear teeth on each side, he holds bones with his paws and chews at the back of his mouth. He doesn’t want anyone to touch his face.
“The first time I gave him a cookie, he was so excited, he put it between his paws and worked on it,” Minde says. “Some horrible person took his teeth away. If that had happened to a human, it would be, ‘Woe is me; I can’t eat,’ but he went on. He is so forgiving. He’s very excited to meet whoever walks by; he wants to say hello, he doesn’t hold grudges, he’s happy.”
In return, Bonfire boosted Minde out of her post-divorce slump. “I was devastated after losing my dogs in the divorce,” she says. “My horse and my dog pulled me through, because they give me so much love.”
The need for animal love doesn’t stop when the humans involved are homeless: Christine was volunteering at the Coachella Valley Rescue Mission in Indio one Christmas when Jim Lewis, the director, told her that homeless people who have animals were not coming into the local shelters because shelters don’t allow pets.
She charmed a contractor into pouring a concrete slab in the Rescue Mission courtyard, donated four kennels, and wrangled donations of food and veterinary care that animals might need while they are there. Now homeless people and their best friends have indoor shelter for five days or longer, and they are less likely to camp out with their cats and dogs in the tamarisk trees and under the freeway overpasses.
Christine’s Pet Rescue is undoubtedly the smallest of all the valley animal rescuers, but she claims to have a faster turnaround because this is her passion. Not that animals are released casually: she makes all adopters sign a contract, raise their hands, and swear an oath: “I promise to love this dog the rest of my life no matter what.
Re-socializing a puppy at the Pet Rescue Center in Coachella, California.
I promise never to leave the door open. I promise to keep it until the end of its life.”
“They sleep in your bed, they are members of the family, or they don’t go home with you,” says Christine.
She screens prospective new owners on intuition alone. “I’m a tough little wing nut,” she says. “I don’t do in-home checks. I go on my gut. Some people will pull up to the shelter, and I’ll say, ‘Here’s a big no.’”
“If I don’t like you, you are out of here. One day a woman I’ll call Cruella de Ville walked in, and she said, ‘I want that dog,’ and I said, ‘Let’s see if she wants you.’ She said, ‘Don’t you want to get rid of these dogs?’ ‘No, we place pets.’ ‘Well, I want that dog because it matches my decorating motif. I demand you give me that dog right now. Do you know who I am?’” Seconds later, Cruella de Ville walked out, huffy and dogless, threatening legal action.
On another day, a mother and daughter arrived at Christine’s shelter. They told her, “We have an outside dog, and now we want an inside dog.” “WHAT?!” Christine bellowed. “It gets a million degrees here in summer. I wouldn’t give you a Beanie Baby. You better leave now or my talons come out.”
For now, and only for a moment, the fierce protector of the small and hapless settles into the corner of her shelter in what she calls “the cuddling chair,” an old green armchair, with a castaway Chihuahua in her lap. More dog hair rains down on her pedal pushers, but she doesn’t try to brush it away. She strokes the small dog. She is happy; he is happier.
“I think I was a Chihuahua in my last life, I really do. My maiden name was Waugh, you know—Chi-Waugh-Waugh,” she says. And Christine laughs.
18
INSANE ABOUT ANIMALS
THE LADIES OF THE OTHER ELIZABETH AND GRISELDA THE CAT
WHEN JEWELRY DESIGNER Elizabeth Locke lost Marvin, her favorite cat, she put out the word for another gray male. Not too long afterward, a kindhearted friend of Elizabeth’s who was delivering Christmas baskets to the needy drove up to a trailer in the hills of northwestern Virginia. Out came a gray cat followed by its owner.
“That’s a beautiful cat,” said the basket lady.
“Do you want it?” said the owner.
“I guess so!”
The friend left the gift basket, scooped up the cat, sped off, and called Elizabeth.
And with that, Griselda the backwoods stray leaped into the silk upholstered lap of Southern luxury.
Today Griselda wears a leather collar studded with petite emeralds set in gold, a gold insignia dangling from the collar, and she snoozes on a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk in the sunny window of a shop with glowing jewelry displayed beneath crystal chandeliers amid Fortuny velvet table runners.
Griselda revealed her true character immediately. “The day before Christmas, I woke up and couldn’t find her anywhere,” says Elizabeth. “We tore the house apart, and there in the middle of the dining-room table was Griselda, all curled up asleep in a big silver punch bowl as if to say, ‘This is more like it!’”
“She also promptly had a honeymoon with a tiger-striped tomcat in our garage and had seven kittens,” she says. “Griselda’s husband, Walter, now lives in the barn, and their daughter, Walter Jr., lives in the office at the store.”
The store is the Other Elizabeth, a jewelry shop in Boyce, Virginia, that Elizabeth has transformed into a replica Venetian palazzo replete with trompe l’oeil stenciled floors, St. Mark’s lion banners, and a four-poster bed covered in Thai silk. Jeweled collars and leashes for two imaginary cheetahs named Precios and Tesoro hang on the faux-marble walls. And the “other” Elizabeth—Locke’s imaginary twin sister, the Contessa—has strewn silk stockings and a lacy garter belt on the edge of the claw-foot bath tub.
This stage-setting-cum-personal-animal-shelter was conceived of in the mid-1980s, when Elizabeth, then a writer for Town and Country magazine, was sent to Bangkok to write an article on the goldsmiths of Thailand. She did more than write about the craft: today her own jewelry, a fusion of Italian classic design and nineteen-karat gold and gems executed with Thai finesse, is sold in twenty-seven Neiman Marcus stores worldwide and at her store on weekends. Elizabeth buys gems in Germany, the United States, Italy, and India, and she lives two or three months each year at the Peninsula Hotel in Bangkok, where she supervises the creation of her jewelry.
The Other Elizabeth may be the only haute couture jewelry atelier in the world where the owner and her staff share their working quarters with cats and dogs. Griselda is the reigning store cat; she knows when it’s Saturday and parks herself next to the cat carrier at Elizabeth’s home to make the five-minute drive to the store. There she sprawls on computer keyboards, walks across fax machines, swats the computer screens, and preens herself on jewelry display cases, “looking up and down the street in hopes somebody will admire her.
Griselda lives in what may be the only jewelry atelier in the world where the owner and her staff share their working quarters with rescued cats and dogs.
She’s so pleased with herself; life is good,” says Elizabeth.
Griselda is also not above improving the coiffures of lady customers. “Put your head down there, and Griselda will do your hair,” says Susan Mathews, a blonde, buxom southerner who manages the Other Elizabeth. And sure enough, Griselda gently reaches up into my hair and pats, tugs, and rearranges it to her liking.
A former school teacher and self-confessed frustrated actress, Susan is suited for this off-Broadway theater set. And she enjoys sharing the show-room with the diva of Virginia catdom. “She’s an old soul, this kitty,” Susan says, affectionately stroking the gray cat. “She was svelte until she had her kittens, then she spread like bad margarine.”
“She’s nothing but an appetite with eyes,” Susan adds. “I fix cappuccino, and she hears the machine and waits for milk.”
Elizabeth—the real Elizabeth—is tall, model-thin, quick-spoken, and can unleash an enormous smile. She confesses that she was creature-crazy from childhood. “My
mother was afraid to come in my room for the spiders,” she says. “I’d put praying-mantis cases in my underwear drawer and forget them, and they’d hatch in the spring. I had every creature there’s ever been. All my life I’ve had cats, and at the moment we have three in the office, two in the house, four back-porch cats [including a son of Griselda’s], and three barn cats, and one dog named Archibald.”
Elizabeth’s indoor cats sport jeweled collars with gems that Elizabeth chooses based on what she believes looks best with the tone and color of each kitty’s fur: rubies, sapphires, or emeralds. Walter Jr., for example, sports a collar with a canary-yellow diamond.
Elizabeth and her husband, John, a county commissioner, occupy a country estate on the hills above the Shenandoah River that houses guinea fowl, exotic chickens, and horses, relics of a riding phase that she says has passed.
Elizabeth and John have no children. “Children are dog substitutes,” Elizabeth decrees, sounding as if she’s only half kidding.
“I have never purchased a cat; either they were rescued, they walked up the drive and moved in, or I got them from shelters,” she says.
The four ladies of the Other Elizabeth bring four dogs and three cats to work with them. In this species-integrated workplace, the rescued animals include Skitzy, a runt belonging to Elizabeth and John; Marshall, a German-shepherd mix thrown from a truck and now owned by Caroline McKay; and Stoutman Simpson, a sixty-five-pound beagle mix owned by Tricia Simpson.
“Stoutman is the love of my life,” says Tricia, who refers to him as S.M. “We do nothing without each other. His main physical attribute is a muffin butt. So I drew him wearing goggles and a cape to hide his big butt. And Elizabeth had a bright orange cape made with a purple ‘S.M.’ and a jeweled, black stand-up Elvis collar. He loves his cape and will wear it for anyone, but he’s not so crazy about the ‘doggles’—dog goggles.”
Scarlett O’Hara, an American cocker spaniel that Susan purchased, was not rescued, but her cat, Bruisie, came off the side of the road where she had been dumped with two littermates. “She weighed thirty grams on a jewelry scale, and we fed her milk replacement,” says Susan. “She lived in my daughter’s bathrobe pocket.” At work, Susan tucked the kitten into the warm canyon of her décolletage for several hours a day as well.
Gillian Russell brings Duncan, her sprightly West Highland terrier, to work. She also rescued a horse, a Lusitano-Thoroughbred gelding from Portugal, where he was beaten into submission or kept in a stall “until he was unrideably crazy,” she says.
Together, the women of the Other Elizabeth have formed a nattily dressed, beautifully coiffed, bejeweled, and big-hearted rescue posse. “When we hear about an animal in trouble, we’re all in the car with Havahart traps and trying to get them to the vet,” says Tricia. “We are all insane about animals.”
Abandoned dogs Max and Skipper found a home for life with Pat and Bob Reever. Skipper had been hit by a car, left untreated, and was found in a shed when her former owners moved. She weighed only thirty-six pounds and spent four months in a clinic.
Max misbehaved around potential adopters, but once the Reevers decided to keep him, he became a model dog.
19
KINDNESS IN THE BLOOD
PATRICIA AND BOB REEVER AND THEIR DOGS, TURTLES, BIRDS, AND HORSE
“POOR, WEE SOULS,” she calls them in her Scottish brogue, but are they ever lucky dogs. Patricia Reever is referring to Petunia, the black beagle mix; Annie, the one-eyed beagle; and Skipper, the incontinent bluetick hound. She means the bottom of the barrel, the unwanted, the costly, the demanding, worst cases.
Patricia and Bob’s home in a wooded suburb of Washington, D.C., erupts in Scottish romantic femininity—there are floral cushions and sofas; castles, sheep, and border collies on the china; even checked curtains in the tack room of the small stable in the garden (although the mice eat them, Patricia confesses). The two-hundred-year-old kitchen table hails from a Scottish farmhouse, and a painting of a collie and a lamb hangs above the mantel, where a wood-burning stove throws off a Highland warmth that makes the numerous afghans unnecessary but no less charming. Around the split-level rambler, pea-gravel paths wend through a deeply recessed garden blooming with enormous magnolia trees, gardenia bushes, hosta, and azalea.
Pat’s place is the repository of last resort for animals no one wants—or wants to pay for. And Skipper is among the worst. “Nobody will ever take her,” says Pat, none too sadly. “She had been hit by a car, and she needs her bladder expressed two to three times a day. Her pads were abscessed and she had nerve damage. She can’t be indoors. I took her one afternoon and it turned into ten years.”
Skipper now lives in an air-conditioned garden room with skylights, a chandelier, a movable doghouse (built by Bob), a fan, and a cobblestone floor that Pat scrubs and bleaches daily. “Watch out, she’ll pee on you,” she warns as we attempt to pet the eager hound that shimmies up, tail wagging.
Not all the creatures are so social or as mobile, however.
Polly, a tan-and-cream lemon beagle that shakes and staggers as the result of a car accident, mostly ignores people.
“I’ve never heard her bark, and she had very little expression on her face ’til about a year ago,” says Pat, who took Polly in five years ago. “She looks as if she used to drink a bottle of whiskey a day. She never made eye contact for years, did you, Polly darling?”
In the garden are two box turtles—Petunia and Marigold—once starved so badly they had rickets. They bulldoze about under a layer of leaves in a long, low cage.
“Ah, the wee box turtles,” Pat coos as Bob stirs the leaves, prospecting for the turtles. “Technically we are not supposed to have turtles. Technically they are wildlife, but their legs are so twisted they can’t dig below the frost line to hibernate, and crows attacked Petunia and pecked her foot off.”
The turtle foot amputation alone cost Pat three hundred dollars in veterinary fees.
And when it comes to cost, consider Annie, a beagle that had been battered in the face, resulting in a cracked nose, a broken jaw, and a pulped eye. When Pat took her in, she was pregnant with oversized puppies that had to be aborted. Her jaw had healed so that it would only open one inch, and prior to corrective surgery, Annie was fed via a tube through her throat. Annie’s veterinary fees in less than a year came to nine thousand dollars. Now she can eat normally, and although she blinks constantly, she clatters up to guests, cheerful and eager to be petted.Patricia Reever takes in cats and dogs that are unwanted, elderly, or have serious medical needs. Cavalier, an Appaloosa gelding saved from the meat market, became her daughter’s show horse. Now retired, he lives in the Reevers’ yard.
Annie, like many of Pat’s rescues, has forgiven humans. “I’ll never understand it myself. I think that’s why I love them so much,” says Pat, who uses love of animals as a kind of psychological litmus test for the people she meets. “Whenever I meet someone who doesn’t like animals, I wonder, are they a cold person?” she says.
The Reever household also includes Hagar the Horrible, a rescued love bird that mostly loves to bite everyone. He shares a room in the walkout basement with two meek, giggly ring-necked doves named Matthew and Samuel that were abandoned at a clinic by their owner.
Under the towering maples in the backyard is their largest rescued animal: Cavalier, an Appaloosa-Thoroughbred gelding. The Reevers acquired him from a veterinarian who had bought him for a dollar a pound—the “kill price” for horses being sent to slaughter—at an auction where the vet bid against the Cavalier dog food company. Cavalier put in his years as a show horse for the Reevers’ daughter, Janette, and now, at twenty-four, is arthritic but still sassy. Cavalier fixes his shrewd old eyes on Bob and flaps his freckled lips for treats, and Bob capitulates, handing him some bits of carrot.
Not all their animals are hard-luck cases: there is, for example, Max, a small German shepherd mix. “There’s no reason nobody adopted Max, who is perfectly healthy and so dear—he was re
scued from drug dealers,” Patricia explains, and it seems impossible in a world of Pat’s making that there should be such things as drug dealers or unclaimed dogs. “I had fifteen dogs at one time, poor souls. They looked like the walking wounded when they went outside,” she says, laughing.
In Pat’s experience, animals are surrendered or abandoned for many reasons, some solid, all too many specious. “A lot of people call to say they’re moving, they have allergies; most have pathetic reasons,” she says. “They just can’t be bothered, or when we get the dog, it turns out the dog may have cancer. Also, there are some genuine reasons: some people have to go to hospice. And there are battered wives who call, heartbroken, and a woman whose mother has Alzheimer’s and she was worried for the safety of her poodle too.”
How does Pat pay for the acupuncture (“I just take ’em in for a tune-up,” she says), the vet visits, the surgeries, the special meals, the occasional desperate call to a pet psychic? Initially, a friend made a substantial grant to her when Pat became a rescuer. And then there’s Bob.
“My husband’s very good to me,” says Pat, with a twinkling smile at Bob, who is compact and blonde like her, and who looks quietly proud as she talks about their menagerie. Bob manages historic renovation and construction projects in and around Washington, D.C., including the Eisenhower Center, the National Archives Center, and the Supreme Court building. They met in a pub in the western Scottish coastal village of Campbeltown, where he was stationed in the Navy. In Scotland, Pat notes, there may be less awareness of the need for spay-and-neuter programs than in the United States, but dogs are a part of life, allowed on buses and in pubs.
Pat recalls, “As a wee, wee girl, I would cry to see the lorry go to the slaughterhouse, and I couldn’t swallow meat.” She has avoided meat for the past twenty-five years, and even Bob (a former hunter) converted to vegetarianism long ago. “At Christmas dinner now, it’s something tofu,” says Pat. “My husband says anything that breathes, that has life, he’s not eating it.” “And I feel better,” says Bob, referring, it seems, to both his body and his conscience.
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