Saved

by Karin Winegar

  Kindness to creatures runs in the Reever blood: their son, Scott, is a policeman, and their daughter, Janette, is field supervisor and animal humane control officer for the Loudon County animal shelter. Janette met her husband, Brad, a Washington, D.C., policeman, while they were both chasing down a stray pit bull in the city.

  It was Janette who rescued Petunia, the stray beagle, after tracking her for three months through alleys and gardens. The dog had a serious mammary tumor, which Pat and Bob took care of, explains Pat, rubbing Petunia’s “hairy, wee belly.”

  “She looks like a wee, hairy woman who’d be the kind with tattoos, a beer, and a cigarette, and chatting up the men in a bar,” Pat teases.

  Pat and Bob do not wear leather and do not buy cars with leather seats. When Janette scheduled her wedding, says Pat, “It took me four months to find non-leather shoes that looked nice. It took longer for the shoes than anything else.” The Reevers don’t have grandchildren yet. “Janette says, ‘When babies come out with a tail and fur,’ they will have children,” says Pat.

  Each year, their dogs Annie and Max, adorned in a frilly collar and a bow tie, respectively, accompany Pat and Bob to The Bark Ball, a fund-raiser given by the Washington Humane Society. “It’s a formal dance with six hundred people and three hundred dogs,” says Pat. “There’s not a dogfight the whole night. The dogs get along great lying beside each other.”

  In their turn, animals have given Pat a purpose for her life and a network of friends in a new country. “When I was first in the States, I was so lonely,” Pat confesses, as we sip hot tea in her kitchen. “I’m a people person, so I tried working in an office. I couldn’t do it. I tried some of the women’s clubs, but it wasn’t for me. A friend told us about a dog adoption organization, and I became a volunteer. There I felt as if I was doing something worthwhile.”

  Pat and Bob have fostered hundreds of dogs in the decades since then. Some died in their care and some went happily to kind homes. Not all of them came from poor households or drug users. Daisy, a tiny Sheltie, belonged to an attorney with a large, luxurious home, Pat says. When the police arrested him for embezzling, they found a dog “unconscious in a basement that was all feces and urine,” says Pat. “She looked like a wee Frank Purdue chicken—she was seven pounds, all hairless, and so starved and dehydrated they didn’t think she would make it.” Daisy recovered with Bob and Pat, and she weighed sixteen pounds when she was adopted by a Virginia couple.

  The phone rings. Pat answers and then explains to us that she will be adding another member to the Reever family. “A family just dropped their seventeen-year-old Jack Russell off at a shelter because he started with seizures,” she says. “That just makes me sick; it’s a terrible thing to do. The shelter says he’s so sweet.” Pat looks at Bob and he looks back at her. There is no question between them. There is only an answer.

  “It’s exhausting, very emotionally draining, but you see the likes of Daisy and the other dogs get a good home, and that’s the best thing that can ever happen,” says Pat. “To see the dog be happy—that’s it, it really is.”

  “Although humane work is really hard, it is gratifying, and I love what I do,” says Hilleary Bogley. “It is an opportunity to help this world with compassion and empathy that we truly need.”

  20

  CLOSE TO MY HEART

  HILLEARY BOGLEY AND THE MIDDLEBURG HUMANE FOUNDATION

  THE WOMAN ON the phone said she had thirteen or fourteen cats and could the shelter lady come and take them. So Hilleary Bogley asked her for her address.

  “I don’t know,” said the woman. “I never left here.”

  “Okay, what can you see from your house?” Hilleary persisted.

  “The railroad tracks,” said the woman, which was not much help because several train lines run through that part of rural northern Virginia.

  “Go outside and read the number on the house,” said Hilleary. It took more sleuthing than she ordinarily needs to do, but Hilleary managed to locate the woman and rescue her cats.

  As founder and director of the Middleburg Humane Foundation (MHF), Hilleary has a job that requires a certain resourcefulness; she is detective, social worker, athlete, and fund-raiser rolled into one.

  The foundation occupies a corner of Marshall, Virginia, that is rich with the scent of lilacs in the spring, masking it from the nearby auction barn, a stockyard where Hilleary and friends have claimed many a woeful horse from the meat buyers.

  In autumn 1994, with the help of an investment group, she opened the MHF, a four-and-a-half-acre remnant of a farm surrounded by weeping crabs and willows. Her office is a late-eighteenth-century log cabin with additions that house a laundry, kennels, and cat runs. Last year, more than seventy animals from chickens to horses found shelter here or in MHF foster-care homes. On average, most rescued creatures are sheltered here for two months before being adopted by the person Hilleary hopes is the best match for them, but there are permanent residents, including a three-hundred-pound taciturn black pig named Otis. Otis naps in a shady shed, raises his head when she calls to him, flaps his considerable ears, and then turns around and goes back to sleep.

  “He arrived ten years ago from a townhouse in Old Town Alexandria, where he had his own couch and watched TV,” says Hilleary. “He loved Oprah Winfrey, and he’d run up to the TV and lick the screen when she appeared. But neighbors were not happy about Otis, and when his owners lost in court the right to keep him, he found a home at the shelter.”

  “Otis was devastated at the difference, and grumpy at first out here,” says Hilleary. “He was hard to show as an adoptable animal, so he ended up being an opportunity for us to tell people that these pigs are farm animals: unless you can provide an enclosure like this, don’t get yourself a pig.”

  Born to a banker father and a beautiful, jet-setting socialite mother, Hilleary was, she confesses, “a kind of hyperactive only child, a bad kid.” Her father died in a foxhunting accident when she was four. At five, and for many years thereafter, her best friend was Samantha, a German shepherd. Hilleary’s wild behavior got her bounced out of college, but she finally graduated from a veterinary technician program. In addition to her work at the MHF, she serves as humane investigator for Fauquier County and Culpepper County. It’s a job with a degree of danger and the certainty of seeing things that are disgusting and depressing, and one she manages with diplomacy.

  “What I’ve found in many cruelty and neglect cases is that it is a way of life,” she says. “They got a chain dog—a dog on a chain 24/7—because their daddy had a chain dog, and their children are going to have a chain dog. That’s just what they see as normal. At least we got an ordinance passed that the chain has to be three times the length of the dog’s body, including the tail. That was very important, and they have to have shelter, and the area has to be clean so they don’t eat their own feces.”

  “These people never had a dog in their house, and they are outraged at the thought of it being part of their family. When I suggest it, they look blankly at me and say, ‘That dog ain’t coming to my house!’” she adds. “The dogs supposedly serve the purpose of protection, but I find that baffling, because most of the time they are chained in the back, and how much protection can they give on a seven-foot chain?”

  Sometimes the salvation of both the animals and the people attached to them comes in tiny, edible increments. “I try to educate the kids in these places that when I come back, if the dog has fresh water, I’m going to bring cookies,” says Hilleary. “I’m not a kid person, but I know it’s important to teach them empathy.”

  If Hilleary’s shelter deals with a range of animals, it deals with an equally large range of people. There are the just plain misinformed, such as the toothless man in camouflage gear who walked to her shelter with three dogs. He was such a great believer in feeding his animals garlic that one of his dogs nearly died from its blood-thinning effects. He had a unique treatment for parasites too. “My daddy taught me to feed ’em
deer meat and then run ’em real hard and fast, and the worms don’t get no time to latch on,” he told her.

  Sometimes it isn’t ignorance but fear that causes the abuse and neglect that she sees. “People have lost control of their own lives, and the only thing they have control over is an animal. ‘That animal drinks when I let it drink and eats when I let it eat,’” she says, managing not to sound angry. “It took me three years to figure that out. Why would this family in a warm, cozy trailer, each one of them fifty pounds overweight, keep their dog starving and freezing in the yard? It all comes back to control.”

  Many but not all of the problems stem from people who are uneducated and whose lives are impaired by drugs, alcohol, and unemployment. “As a whole, most of the people who are respectful of themselves and their homes are also good with animals, but more often than I like to, I see some very wealthy people who have large horse farms and don’t give a damn about the cats,” she explains. “It really blows me away. There’s a beautiful horse-breeding facility here with literally hundreds of sick cats on the property. We offer to go in and spay and neuter, and the owner doesn’t want us to spay any females; she doesn’t want to spend a penny on the cats.”

  Before she returned to Virginia and started the MHF, Hilleary volunteered at a shelter in Denver, Colorado, euthanizing animals on Tuesdays and Thursdays for two years. “That’s a part of my life I wish I could not remember, an evil necessity of society,” she says. “They were using lethal injections into the abdomen, which was painful and took several minutes. The people doing it were never trained properly, so as a licensed vet tech, I offered to train the staff. I remember crying the entire time, every time I did it. One of the animal holders told me, ‘You need to get over it.’ And I said, ‘The day this doesn’t bother me is the day I want out of the profession. And if it doesn’t bother you, you should move on.’”

  Things are getting better, she adds, noting that the Colorado shelter now operates under a different euthanasia method and policy. “But until there is state legislation that requires mandatory spaying and neutering or some type of licensing for people that choose to have animals to breed, they won’t have to be responsible. And so many other things in this world are higher priorities.”

  As Hilleary walks around the shelter property, a tawny oaf galumphs by her side, the first dog she’s adopted for herself in a dozen years. A genial mix of pit bull and Great Dane, Melvin was one of a litter that Hilleary rescued at a trailer park where she delivers food to needy people as well as to dogs. “Hookworm and freezing and anemia—it was so bad, one of his siblings died on the way home with me,” says Hilleary. She gave the drug dealers twenty dollars for the pups. They wouldn’t sell her the mother. “Sometimes I have to take them back once I fix them up; otherwise, if I piss them off, I can’t get back in. And in two or three months they have a new pup chained out there.”

  “This is our problem-child pen,” she says, introducing a wiggling, barking, and leaping trio of large young dogs: Patrick, Emmett, and Oliver. Oliver’s former owner was slowly slicing off his nose and feeding him sugar water until Hilleary managed to pry him away from her. She doesn’t let such atrocities eat her up any longer. “I can come here and be productive, and then I can go home and eat and watch TV,” she says. “In twenty-one years of humane work, I’ve learned to focus on the good.”

  The shelter’s current horses include a mare named Maria; her yearling son, Bugs; and Julie, a small chestnut filly. Their sleek coats and bright eyes give no sign of their troubled past. “Julie was shot with a pistol,” Hilleary says. “The family bought a horse for the mother who was dying of cancer. She died and they lived with filth, alcohol, and drugs. The dogs were chained, and the three horses were emaciated, kept in wire and garbage and car parts. They never saw a vet or a farrier; they were never de-wormed. Bugs has wounds from being beaten with a chain. For a long time, he was so injured he just leaned against things to stand up. I scheduled his euthanasia three times and cancelled it three times. He finally started to gain weight, and I gave him another ten days. Now he’s one-hundred-percent sound, a beautiful quarter horse, and a woman just adopted him. The people who did that to him were never prosecuted.”

  The office of the shelter has small, sunny open-air runs with climbing ledges for cats, a laundry, and rows of immaculate interior cages with a view of a bird video playing for the indoor cats. The core of the building is the chinked log house—the oldest four-room cabin in Fauquier County, Hilleary says. She lived here for eight years, sharing the bathroom with Jose, the shelter assistant, until she could afford to live elsewhere.

  In the cabin loft, a pure white mother cat nurses a litter of four white kittens and an orphan gray kitten who stretch pink toes and tiny pink bellies luxuriously in the sunlight. We settle down on the floor to watch the kittens cavort. The mother purrs and blinks at us in welcome.

  “See is waisin’ da widdle orphan,” says Hilleary, lapsing into a high baby talk as she strokes the cat. “Oh, I don’t know why I do that,” she laughs. “I speak that way to cows by the side of the road.”

  “Animals are close to my heart; they give me everything,” says Hilleary, her voice thickening with something more than she can articulate. “A house is not a home without a cat, without four-legged creatures. Although humane work is really hard, it is gratifying, and I love what I do. It is an opportunity to help this world with compassion and empathy that we truly need.”

  21

  RICKIE’S HUGS

  KATHY SCHROEDER, HER DOG, RICKIE, AND PETS ON WHEELS

  MOST DOGS SIT up for treats, their paws dangling, their eyes fixed on the snack, their mouths moist in anticipation of a reward for the trick. Rickie sits up as a greeting, a welcome, and a blessing. He rises perfectly vertically, sitting flat on his neatly-trimmed bottom, spreads his front legs wide and invites and enfolds. He presses his face against your chin or chest and hangs on to your shoulders. “He likes to give hugs instead of kisses,” says Kathy Schroeder, Rickie’s owner. “I just have to share this embrace.” So after working hours, Kathy and Rickie visit nursing homes through a program called Pets on Wheels, a one-woman, one-dog mobile hugging team.

  Kathy is a little person, a perfectly proportioned adult measuring four feet seven inches, and she looks exactly in scale arriving at this suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, nursing home in her Morris Mini Cooper. A bright blonde wearing jeans and a spotless white polo shirt, Kathy has powerful forearms from wrangling animals through the suds, combs, and clippers at the pet-grooming service where she works. She opens the car door and out bounds Rickie, a small gray-and-white mix of schnauzer and Lhasa apso with a big white mustache and enormous wet, dark eyes.

  Kathy Schroeder brings her rescued dog, Rickie, to visit residents of a nursing home. “I have a lot of depression. I just lift up when he comes,” says Phyllis Youngblood.

  The petunias at the door of the home are parched by the desert valley wind, and inside the smell of popcorn drifts through largely still, empty halls. Dim, plain hospital rooms, most lit solely with the greenish glow of television, branch off the hallways. In a large interior lounge, a lone rabbit crouches in a cage, a cockatiel sits silently in another small cage, and half a dozen women in wheelchairs silently watch a movie. “I come here because I worked with animals for eighteen years, and I know what effect they can have and how people miss them,” Kathy explains.

  Phyllis Youngblood, a small, dark woman with scarred forearms and face, rolls out to meet Rickie. Phyllis was struck by a car a year ago and has been a resident in this home for a year, nine months of that time with a tracheotomy. She reaches for Rickie, and he puts his paws on her chest and presses his forehead to her chin. There is no licking, no fawning, just an immensely loving presence, no treats needed. “I have a lot of depression. I take things for it, but I just lift up when he comes,” says Phyllis with a wet cough. “He’s a special guy.” Above and below Phyllis’s green medical wristband, crude tattoos are visible on her arm
and hands. A long pale scar travels from the left side of her forehead across her brow and cheek. “He’s just a big lover; he visits me many times,” she says happily.

  “It’s hard for people to understand that you don’t just take any dog and go visiting,” says Kathy. “It has to be the personality of the dog. You really can’t train them to do this, just like you can’t train certain people to want to go and visit. And it develops more over time. It didn’t take him long to pick up differences in leashes to do the visiting or for regular walks. Now he gets really excited for Pets on Wheels, and he grabs the leash.”

  Rickie was in the Maricopa County animal pound in February 1996 when Kathy and her mother arrived. Her mother had persuaded Kathy to look for a dog: two weeks before, her golden retriever, Honey, had died of bone cancer. In the chaos of barking, whining, and leaping dogs, a little dog sat and wagged his tail, not begging but greeting her. “That one,” said her mother, and Kathy paid the sixty-dollar adoption fee and took him home.

  Kathy acquired Rickie before she married. Her husband, Terry, brought to the marriage a seventy-five-pound rottweiler mix named Nesha, and the sixteen-pound mutt and the strapping hound are best playmates. Terry, who works as a hot-dog vendor in Mesa, is petite like his wife, a man born with dwarfism.

  Rickie will not tolerate tension, says Kathy, including marital discord. “If Terry and I are getting into it—not fighting, but if we just raise our voices—he goes into a closet,” she says. “It makes me feel bad.”