Saved

by Karin Winegar

  “All I need of the past, the little girl I was, my mother—I carry them all within me now. They are the ones who seek out the caged birds and nurture them. I am the one who teaches them to fly.”

  Lucy Warner Bruntjen with Beagley, the last dog saved by her late mother, Mary Warner, who exposed a nationwide pattern of pet theft and trafficking in stolen dogs.

  23

  MARY’S LAST RESCUE

  LUCY WARNER BRUNTJEN AND ELLERSLIE FARM

  BEAGLEY IS A small, shy dog that keeps to herself. She learned a lesson about trust long ago, and she lives her lesson daily. Beagley lives on Ellerslie Farm outside Berryville, Virginia, a farm founded in 1869 by immigrant Scots, and stout Black Angus cattle still graze on fields that roll from the low, white country house to the nearby floodplain of the Shenandoah River. Miles of four-rail, white wooden fences converge below the house at a small bridge over Chapel Run, a trout stream running dark as milk chocolate with spring rainwater.

  As our car tires crunch up the long gravel lane of ancient yews and white pines and into the circular driveway, the compact little beagle takes an obligatory sniff of air and beats a retreat through the holly bushes around the guest cottage. In seconds, we see her trotting away into the cow pasture, her paintbrush tail tipped in black, her back legs scissoring through the grass.

  While Beagley flees from us, her buddy, a large Doberman-Shepherd cross named Pup Pup, stalks forward gravely. His black, almond-shaped eyes with no whites give him the somber look of an Egyptian jackal god, and his impassive face is hard to read. Are we going to be bitten, we wonder? But no, he stands while we stroke his head and neck and pat his firm back.

  Beagley is the last surviving dog rescued by Mary Warner, godmother of frontline fighters for pet welfare, who died in May 2000. Her husband, Leon, who owns Pup Pup, lives here now, ailing and in his nineties.

  Lucy Warner Bruntjen, their daughter, opens the Dutch door of the kitchen to meet us and walks us through the kitchen and out to the terrace: frothy yellow forsythia and low, fleshy striped hellebores are blooming. Vast blossoming crab-apple trees and daffodils wave thickly along the low field-stone wall facing the Shenandoah River. We admire the land with Lucy, an artist who is tall with straight silver hair, flushed cheeks, and an ageless kind of innocence and enthusiasm seldom seen in adults.

  The old house smells like cream and black tea, and it is full of animal images: a LeRoy Neiman panther print hangs in the dining room, another Neiman—a hunt scene—hangs in the living room near Mary’s grand piano and surrounded by bright floral sofas.

  “Mom took in every animal she could. The vet or the game warden would call, and if it had been hit in the road, she paid for the surgery or the amputation,” says Lucy. “We had a dozen dogs sometimes and three or four three-legged dogs here at a time, including Boogley, a male beagle. He lost the leg he used to stand on to pee. He never could make the switch to standing on the other back leg, so he did a handstand—he stood on his front paws.”

  Dogs ran free on this farm, and so did the Warner children: Lucy, her sisters, Julia and Mary, and her brother, Lee. “We learned to ride by playing cowboys and Indians and hide-and-seek and having galloping races,” says Lucy.

  When Copper, Mary’s beloved German shepherd-bloodhound cross, vanished in 1968, she began to gather articles, compile statistics, and assemble fliers about missing dogs until she had neat spiral notebooks filled with information from other grieving pet owners. She set up headquarters in the “Dog House,” a converted spare room off the garage. She took calls and logged sightings of strange men with trucks who used chains and bait. Something was happening to pets like her Copper, and she wanted to know what it was.

  Finally, she put an ad in the newspaper inviting those who believed their dogs had been stolen to meet at Ellerslie Farm. That night, her house was filled with bereft, distraught, and enraged pet owners.

  Over time, Mary’s meticulous logs showed a pattern that pointed to extensive, international dog theft. “For the first ten years, no one except the owners believed her,” says Lucy. “She had to work very hard to build up credibility.” It was a situation no one wanted to believe.

  Lucy leads us to the dining room and spreads out the dismal map her mother created on the table. It shows a concentration of dots—reports of missing dogs—up and down Interstate 81 on the East Coast. It is the trail of men with trucks stealing pets and buying animals from pounds and selling them to research laboratories, dogfighting rings, and furriers. The markers cluster densely in the map of surrounding Virginia counties: Tazewell, Giles, Wuthe, Buckingham, Hernci, and Louisa. Then they trickle outward, north to Ontario, Canada, and west all the way to the Simi Valley of California. The trail of markers crosses the Midwest, and I note markers near my hometown, Albert Lea, Minnesota, where our dachshund, Bruni, and other neighbors’ dogs vanished one day in the early 1970s.

  Mary started a group, Action 81, named for the corridor used by many dog thieves or “bunchers.” She produced files containing “fifteen years of human agony, tears, heartache, nervous collapse, anger, nightmares, and the unrelenting question: why doesn’t someone do something?” she wrote.

  We leaf through her thick spiral-bound reports: “1974-1993 Theft of Dogs and Cats in the United States,” “The Dealer Lab Connection,” “Theft of Dogs and Cats Report,” and her newsletter, Voice of the Missing. The newsletter assembled information about “thieves, bunchers, dealers, illicit pound operators, legislative attempts and failures, some successes, USDA ineffectiveness, occasional effort, law enforcement apathy, deliberate turning away.”

  Part detective as well as researcher, Mary pursued information, well, doggedly.

  “Mom sneaked into pens and crawled through dog doors; it was crazy,” says Lucy. As she closed in on the theft rings, Mary received death threats and notes threatening to burn down the Warners’ stable.

  One evening at a gathering where she was speaking, word was delivered to Mary: “There is a bomb in your car.” Mary finished her talk, left the building, and started up her 1974 red Volkswagen Beetle with the bumper sticker: “Lab Animals Never Have a Nice Day” and drove home undaunted.

  She appeared on ABC’s 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Connie Chung’s show, and she presented a paper on her data to the National Academy of Sciences. And she marched up the steps to the state capitol in Richmond and changed Virginia law so that out-of-state trucks couldn’t enter Virginia and pick up dogs from the pounds, so researchers couldn’t go to pounds and buy dogs, and so stolen pets wouldn’t end up dying in laboratories. Within a year of its passage, the 1981 Virginia dognapping law reduced the rate of pet theft by half.

  Cleveland Amory of the Fund for Animals presented Mary with the Polar Bear Award (named for his cat) in honor of her work. It stands on an antique wooden chest in the hall, along with a wooden sculpture of a howling coyote that Mary and Leon bought in Colorado. “Mom said that coyote, with its mouth open crying, represented the suffering of the animals,” says Lucy.

  Even music—Chopin in particular—spoke to Mary about the anguish of abused animals. “Mamie loved his passion and compassion and his minor key,” says Lucy. “When she played Chopin on the piano, she said it was connecting with the suffering of the dogs.”

  The last dog Mary personally saved from suffering was little Beagley, who came to the Warner family a dozen years ago. “The pound called Mom because there was a frightened little dog abandoned on the street, and people had been trying to catch her for two years,” says Lucy. “We don’t know what happened, whether she had been stolen for lab use and escaped, or got lost from the pack of a local hunt. After Mom caught her, she lived in a pen here, and Mom took her for walks, but it took years for her to build Beagley’s trust. She would just sit and quake; she was so afraid of people, of being locked in. Mom would put her on a retractable leash, and she would just fly out to the end of the leash. Now she’s totally free; she’s one of the gang.”

  “Mom was high-strung and ten
se until she had an animal with her, a dog in her hands; then she softened up,” says Lucy.

  If animals gave Mary peace, they also gave her purpose right from the start. As a little girl in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mary Elizabeth Case unhitched the iceman’s horse one day and set him free in the middle of the city. As a middle-schooler, she formed a horse-protection society. The first scrapbook she made consisted entirely of animal images for which she wrote captions.

  “Her life with animals was bigger than with us; they filled a bigger role,” says Lucy, without resentment. “She could never live without animals. She was a worried, anxious person; she lived on adrenalin, and they calmed her, gave her continuity. She needed something to need her.”

  The Warners moved to the Ellerslie Farm full-time in 1966, in part because the whole family liked to ride. Mary in particular loved horse shows, was a great competitor, and filled the stable with Hungarian Thoroughbreds, quarter horses, and ponies. “Mom would jump things other riders would not jump, and she told her grandchildren, ‘If you don’t want to jump, you don’t have to, but if you are going to jump, ride like hell!’” Lucy says. Mary and Leon rode into their eighties, because their philosophy was, “To keep up with the young people, all you need is a young horse.”

  Mary’s life was framed by dogs and horses, and they were her metaphors. When a grandson asked her, “Mamie, what’s the secret to a good marriage?” her answer was, “You’ve gotta have strong legs and soft hands, and you’ll be just fine.”

  For her children, animals were also a medium of confiding. They had a bloodhound named Dennis, and every night, Mary would go from bedroom to bedroom and ask her children about their day. “And we’d talk Dennish tak inna Dennish da Bwoodhound voish sho you didn’t have to weveal too mush,” says Lucy, giggling. “Being the dog was like wearing a mask. And when we’d talk Dennish tak, we’d say, ‘Go shit down’ and then laugh ourselves into hysterics.”

  “My parents were full of energy,” says Lucy. “I know I stayed home too long. I should have rebelled and moved on, but we wanted to do things with them; they were so full of life. And we loved the same things.”

  So Ellerslie Farm was perpetual summer camp with Leon and Mary as the counselors. Mary organized riding, piano lessons, swimming, and conversation and table-manners lessons, and she kept achievement charts and gave awards. And everywhere there were animals—ducks and geese, dogs, cats, and horses.

  “I know I had a different mother than my friends had—she made everything fun,” says Lucy. “At her parties, there’d be all these fancy people here, and they’d go into powder rooms, and Mom had put fake dog poops in there. Or she would ride the ponies into the house and around the dining room. And she could make people crack up and howl.”

  For all the fun, at her core was empathy for animal suffering. Petite, intense, and brainy, Mary never forgot anything, and never got over it, either. Lucy walked into Mary’s bedroom one day not long before cancer took her, and found her mother weeping.

  “Mamie, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking about Aunt Fanny’s dog who got run over by a car,” said Mary, recalling an event of sixty years before.

  Ellerslie Farm is dreamy and remote. Dogs run free here again. And although Mary, the one she trusted most, is gone, Beagley seems happy. The next morning we watch her, bold in her dawn hunt, running over the sloping pastures, nose to the ground, assessing fresh scents: rabbit? deer? Maybe woodchuck! Then Beagley and Pup Pup are gone, over the hill, trotting down by the river, nosing about in the shady banks thick with bluebells.

  24

  FOR THE TAMED

  SUSAN AND BILL HEYWOOD, THEIR DOGS, AND THE SCRATCH & SNIFF FOUNDATION

  WE ARE DRINKING iced tea and hiding from the noon heat at Adobe, a café on the golf course in the plush Paradise Valley corridor of Scottsdale, Arizona. Above our heads, fans stir cool air over the white adobe walls; outside in the shimmering heat, golfers putt on velvety greens, and entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki (author of the best-selling book Rich Dad, Poor Dad) strolls by in golf attire.

  “Well, hi, Robert, how are you doin’? How’s Kim?” says our host, Susan Heywood, with familiar warmth. She knows Robert and his wife, and what’s more, she knows their beloved calico cat, Sweetie.

  Susan is a marketing maven who cofounded the Scratch & Sniff Foundation, one of the most effective and organized animal-benefit groups in the country. And the Kiyosakis are two of the people she’s enlisted in the cause to make life better for Arizona cats and dogs.

  Every day is tough for many animals in this bleached, baked, and cactus-studded stretch of the American Southwest. Maricopa County—the nine thousand square miles surrounding Phoenix and Scottsdale—has often led the nation in euthanizing unwanted cats and dogs. In 2000, for example, the county euthanized approximately 37,000 of the more than 61,000 unwanted pets received by Animal Care and Control. This prompted Susan and her husband, Bill Heywood, to start raising money to benefit pet therapy, shelters, and rescue and adoption organizations. Scratch & Sniff helps these various groups streamline and prevent duplication of services, and the foundation secures funds to get animals off the streets, out of the pound, and in from the desert.

  Susan is flat-out glamorous. With her fine black hair, immaculate tailoring, good-but-not-ostentatious jewelry, and subtly perfect makeup, she looks as if she could be Elizabeth Taylor’s younger sister. Her beauty derives from her Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant father and Cherokee-Irish mother. The languid, sure tempo and very Southern, very female tone of her voice come from a childhood spent in Oklahoma and Texas. Susan’s motto is “Dress British, think Yiddish, talk Southern, and smile,” and the result is an effective, warm intelligence that she employs to good effect and noble purpose.

  In the high-rolling community of Scottsdale, where couture counts and a cosmetic nip-and-tuck is common if not mandatory, Susan wields her unique blend of warmth and polish to tap into something far deeper than the local passion for surface beauty.

  Susan was a successful marketing executive married to one of Arizona’s most beloved radio broadcasters when she made a discovery: there were no city animal shelters in Phoenix-Scottsdale. There was Animal Control—the city pound—where an animal had just seventy-two hours to live unless claimed by its owner or fished out by a rescue group. Nearly sixty thousand dogs and cats go through the pound each year.

  This fired the mental Rolodex of a couple that knows who’s who and how to enlist them in a good cause. In 1997, its first year, the members of the Scratch & Sniff Foundation set out to raise a hundred thousand dollars. Planning took a year, but their black-tie fund-raiser—which managed to attract and entertain a coterie that is thoroughly sick of black tie fund-raisers—brought in double that amount. Susan and Bill and their friends had tapped into something: the desire to help needy animals.

  In animal rescue, there are roughly two groups: the hands-on people who feed the castaway or lost dogs and cats, clean cages at humane societies, and wade into the animal-control facilities or into the weeds beside the highway to fetch out the fortunate few. And then there is the write-the-checks group. Susan knows where her skills and abilities lie.

  “I couldn’t do what those groups do who go into a pound and see sixty dogs (and those are the lucky ones), and then go into the euthanasia area and pick one dog to live,” she says. But Susan has helped raise and distribute more than a million dollars to selected humane groups and put a $90,000 Petmobile on the streets to bring adoptable animals into communities.

  One year, Scratch & Sniff’s board enlisted 550 heavy-hitting animal lovers for the black-tie dinner at the Arizona Biltmore, a Prairie School architectural confection that epitomizes prewar southwestern elegance. Movers and shakers were honored—one was playfully christened “Most in Need of a Leash”—and four valley mayors and their dogs judged a gourmet dog-food contest. For the main entertainment event, the canine connection netted them big-name vocalist Lou Rawls.

  “I had
been pestering this nice gentleman in community relations at Fox 10,” Susan says. “He had met Lou Rawls and his wife, Nina, and Nina’s baby is her Pekingese dog, Millie. He said, ‘I’ll tell him about you,’ and so we went from there.”

  Susan and company know how to throw a party, from the party favors to the auction items, which for this event included a four-course dinner for twenty (it sold instantly for ten thousand dollars) and a lighted miniature carousel (which brought in the same amount). The cohosts were Susan’s friends Carol and Harvey Mackay, the businessman turned best-selling author of Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. Carol and Harvey have a gray tiger cat named Oscar and a golden retriever named Sunny, and they feed a pack of feral cats and a one-legged roadrunner in the yard of their Scottsdale home.

  “There’s a lot of I’ll-go-to-yours-if-you-go-to-mine, a trading dollars thing in this community,” Susan explains. The Scratch & Sniff extravaganza, however, is different. “There’s no payback; they do it from their heart, they come to it out of love. There were a lot of political leaders there, and they were supporting a constituency that can’t attend their black tie fund-raisers and can’t vote for them. It’s a very unselfish act.”

  “Scratch & Sniff did it the first year for the Arizona Humane Society, which was the only rescue group we knew,” Susan explains. “Then we found marvelous little organizations that didn’t know each other or talk or collaborate, and they were duplicating work toward similar goals.”

  Scratch & Sniff is poised to become the United Way of pet services without the bureaucracy. To do so, it has had to limit its focus to dogs and cats. Susan and the board scrupulously interview recipients about their methods, their philosophy, and their efficiency at saving and placing adoptable animals.