Saved

by Karin Winegar

  Modest granite gravestones flush to the grass pay tribute to the dogs that will never leave: “Chloe Chlo-bird 1995-1996: 525,600 Minutes of Love” and “Moonpie 1978-1994: A Legend.”

  Danny, who was out on the field schooling clients’ horses all morning while Ron taught lessons, changes his shirt and joins us. He is a shorter version of Ron, also strikingly tan, blonde and blue-eyed, except his eyes are bloodshot—he’s allergic to cats and dogs. That doesn’t deter Danny from keeping abundant animal company. “I just cough a lot sometimes,” he says.

  He also has a faulty aorta from high blood pressure; not long ago, Danny spent two weeks in the intensive care unit and was prohibited from riding for a year. “So when we were in Florida, I went to the pound once or twice a week and adopted a dog,” he says—perhaps one of the first heart patients to use dog rescue as cardiac rehab therapy.

  Ron and Danny have saved rabbits and a fawn. They’ve gone at night and thrown food over a fence to hungry horses they couldn’t take home. Around and under one house trailer in the woods, they rounded up seventeen starving cats, sneezing and infected with eye herpes and eating out of trash cans. Armed with gloves, towels, and cages, they went for the whole group. Ron got cat-scratch fever and blood poisoning that time, and then in the hospital he reacted violently to antibiotics and had to be slapped into restraints, raving. They placed fifteen of the cats and kept two themselves.

  In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, they hired animal transport to collect rescued dogs from storm areas: eight hundred dogs were fetched from New Orleans and the surrounding areas and taken to their home. From there, Ron and Danny dialed friends around the country to find homes for them.

  “We sent dogs home with folks in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York,” says Ron. “The real traumatized, real scared ones you couldn’t get your hands on; those we took with us to Palm Beach. We ship the dogs to Oregon and upstate New York, and everywhere someone wants one. We have spent more than $15,000 shipping dogs all over the country to new homes. Our accountant says, ‘Are you insane?’”

  “The one we named Neighbor was tied to a tree during the hurricane—he was just a puppy and wasn’t found for four months,” Ron continues. “By then he had to have surgery on his neck because all you could see was the buckle on his collar. It took eighty-eight stitches to get the collar out of his neck and fix him; it was awful. Afterwards, I bought a harness for him. He learned to shake with his right and left hands and to lie down. He’s just so sweet.”

  “We have some horrendous cases, but it’s so rewarding. The beautiful thing is we never have fewer than twenty-five dogs in the house, and we have not had one dogfight, which I think is amazing. They just know they are saved.”

  Ron and Danny never regret the cost in injuries or time or pet chow or veterinary care. “Two years ago, we spent more on canine and feline than equine care,” says Ron, who once asked a customer to leave their stable because she complained, “If they didn’t mess with all those stray animals, the boarding fees here would be lower.”

  And they never stop squeezing in visits to the local shelter between full days of lessons and training horses. We are lucky to be there when they squeeze in one such visit. After morning lessons and lunch, we join Ron and Danny in their mushroom-silver Excursion and head for the Walter Crowe Animal Shelter, a one-storey concrete building on the outskirts of Camden behind a door flanked by luxuriant rosemary bushes.

  “This is what I don’t do well,” says Danny, looking apprehensive and hanging back a bit as Ron strides into the shelter office.

  “Hey, how are you guys today?” asks Heather Williams, a shelter employee. “We’ve got one for you. It was on the [euthanasia] table, and Sharon said, ‘Doesn’t this look like a Danny and Ron dog?’ And so we took him off the table.”

  Danny and Ron are the shelter’s best customers. At sixty dollars a pop, they have fetched out dozens of pairs of dogs (they allow themselves two at a time—usually). And in 1999, when the shelter closed prior to being transferred from Kershaw County jurisdiction to that of a humane society, Ron and Danny learned that all the remaining animals were scheduled to be euthanized. They hitched up their horse trailers, called friends with vans and trucks, and caravanned to the shelter, coming away with all twenty-seven cats and dogs.

  “Here’s the dog Sharon saved for y’all,” says Heather, holding the leash of a medium-sized black-and-white spotted dog that licks its lips and cowers, tail tucked, and looks up at them for cues. The men crouch down and hug and stroke the trembling animal. “Oh, he’s so sweet,” says Ron. “What do you think?” Danny asks, looking at Ron. They are silent, stroking the dog together.

  Leaving the dog with Heather for a moment, we walk deeper into the shelter: cats and kittens are on one side, dogs in another, and puppies in a third area. Like many animal facilities where convenience and economy are bywords, this one has concrete floors with chain-link partitions, except here a lawn sprinkler washes continuously over the roof of the outdoor kennel to cool it.

  Pairs of clean, bright-eyed dogs—tan and gold, black, white and brindle—beg for attention or doze in the shade. A short, sturdy black Lab pokes his paw through the bars toward Danny and Ron, begging to be touched. And two basset hounds, one with pus blurring his eyes, his mate swaybacked with nipples dragging, paddle forward to be petted too. (“She’s been bred half to death,” Heather explains later. “The owners turned the two of them in here; they just didn’t want them anymore.”)

  “I see you, puppies; yes, you are very cute,” says Ron, bending over pens where black puppies and tan puppies knock over their teddy-bear toys, plush ducks, and chewed blue-plastic food dishes in a hurry to get to him.

  “Oh, you look just like Pancake,” says Danny to one of them. “That was a dog we found in the road. We named him that because if we hadn’t picked him up, he was going to die of pancake disease (getting flattened by traffic).”

  “How are you doing?” I ask Danny.

  “I was better before I came in here,” he says, his quicksilver blue eyes moist, his jaws clenching and unclenching.

  Back in the office, Heather takes a look at the shelter records at my request. I want to know the size of the tragedy here and how much people like Ron and Danny are helping.

  “Let’s see: in 2003 we got in 4,929 animals; 1,035 were placed and 3,700 were euthanized,” she says, scanning a report. “This year, by May, we had taken in 1,631 and adopted out 600.”

  “Is the black-and-white dog neutered?” asks Ron.

  “Neutered, chipped, and vaccinated,” she answers.

  “How about the Jack Russell that’s in with the puppies? He looks kind of rough. How old is he?” asks Ron.

  “He’s only two, but he is a sexual beast. He was jumping over the wall and bothering the puppies—he needs to be neutered,” says Heather.

  I suggest that since the shelter is always packed, more animals could be kept longer for placement if there were a campaign to enlarge the building and add runs. “No, we don’t want more space—that would mean we’d get more animals, more cost, more employees, more euthanasia, and that’s not what we need,” says Leslie Bruce, the shelter office manager. “We need a really good spay-and-neuter program. We already do a low-income spay and neuter for people that qualify, but there’s the macho thing: a lot of men won’t allow the family jewels to be touched. And a lot more say, ‘They are just animals; who cares? Another one will come along.’”

  “And they think it’s good for the kids to enjoy the wonders of nature, to see the cat have kittens,” Ron adds. “They are country people; they don’t go for neutering. They say, ‘Oh, my daughter-in-law will take one’ . . .”

  “. . . and then they leave ’em all running loose,” says Danny.

  “It breaks your heart, I tell you,” says Ron.

  The concept of responsibility for life, so powerful in Danny and Ron, is widely underdeveloped in rural areas such as Kershaw County. “We found a litter
of kittens in a plastic bag knotted shut,” says Heather, “and then someone brought in puppies, and we asked where they are from, and the man said, ‘Oh, the mama dog is mine, but the puppies are strays.’”

  What about free spay and neuter provided by a mobile truck? I suggest. “That’s why we are waiting for the lottery, Ron’s parents and me; that’s going to be it,” says Danny. “Our goal and dream is that—and to open a shelter where animals can live out their lives no matter what.”

  Camden is not the only place Ron and Danny ride to the rescue: in Florida, where greyhound racing thrives, they pull their rig over at racing kennels and inquire if any greyhounds are available. Here the adoption cost is nothing, but the choice is horrendous.

  “So they turn loose a hundred or a hundred and fifty in a pen and say, ‘Help yourself,’” says Ron.

  “The longest time greyhounds make it at the track is about a year and a half,” says Ron. “They are a commodity, and when they can’t run fast, they are over with. We have passed mounds of dead greyhounds taller than Danny’s head; they were shot at the end of the season. At the cheaper kennels, they don’t even shoot them; they throw them to the alligators in the deep canals. And greyhounds make the best pets . . .”

  When they are looking at one hundred greyhounds, how do they choose which ones will go home with them, I wonder. “It’s a sense, a look in the eye; they put their muzzle into your hand,” says Danny. “Like with horses.”

  The guys agree to think over the selection of dogs, say good-bye to Heather, and we head back to their neat brick rambler, a five-minute drive from their stable. It is landscaped with holly, barrels of luxuriant kalanchoe, and flower pots shaped like rabbits and pigs. A live oak sprouting with mistletoe is hung with bird feeders. The front pastures are full of retired horses, injured horses, and three handsome, leggy Thoroughbred yearlings.

  From the kitchen a high voice flutes out, “Helllloooo!” Gabby, their yellow nape Amazon parrot, clambers in a large sunny cage, competing with operatic arias followed by the soundtracks of Big River and Showboat playing on the stereo. A pink fairy floats from the kitchen chandelier; cans and bags of dog food cover the counter. Under our feet, a large, confident gray tabby named Watch Kitty mingles with the pack of exuberant small dogs that race back and forth from one end of the house to the other.

  Ron’s other love is African wildlife, and the spacious rooms are decorated with ceramics and paintings of giraffes, zebras, and lions. There are turtle candleholders, ostrich prints, and framed photographs of Ron and Danny’s dogs, their families, and their friends. The paint has been clawed off the base of the French doors leading to the dining room, where handsome portraits of their dogs are on display.

  Ron comes by this love of creatures genetically. “My parents are in their late seventies, and they still go to shelters where they live in Barrington, Illinois, and adopt dogs,” he says. “They adopt the geriatric cases. It’s painful for them because the dogs only have a few years, but they feel older dogs will never be adopted.”

  Similarly, Danny’s love of creatures dates back to childhood, when his mother was his co-conspirator in collecting animals. “My mother and I couldn’t let it die on the road,” he says. “Whatever it was, birds, turtles, anything, we were always bringing it home.”

  Their mercy extends to creatures small as well as great. One winter, Ron caught a mouse in their kitchen (in a live trap, of course) and was heading off to release it in the barn. “Do you know it’s fourteen degrees out there?!” said Danny indignantly. He then pared down Dixie cups to make bowls for the mouse, grated Parmesan cheese, ground up pecans, and served the mouse nutritious meals until it could be released in warmer weather. “And every time we leave our Florida house, I spend twenty minutes making sure no lizards are locked in the porch,” he admits.

  They have been known to intercede on behalf of pet owners who need their help. They once saw an elderly man with an old rusty bike sitting on the lawn outside the Camden vet office. He was weeping, holding a bloody dog in his arms. “We asked him what’s wrong,” says Danny. “And he said, ‘I got no money to get the vet to treat my dog.’”

  So Ron marched in and told the vet clinic worker to take care of the dog and put it on his bill. The woman objected, saying, “You guys spend thousands of dollars a month here. You don’t have to go taking care of other people’s bills too.” Then Ron, all six feet eight inches of him, threatened to sit at the clinic door until the vet attended to the dog. The vet did, Ron and Danny paid, and the dog survived.

  Their frolicsome mixed-breed named Bus Stop Bobby was a gift from another man in need. “We saw a man walking outside the bus stop, and he had a little dog all matted and dirty, and we said, ‘That’s a cute dog,’” says Ron. “And he said, ‘You want my dog?’ He’d been a subcontracted laborer here, he told us, and his truck was totaled. He had to go home to Florida on the bus, which wouldn’t accept his dog.”

  “‘He a good dog, he don’t shit in the house, he got his shots,’ he told us,” says Danny. “We offered to take the dog temporarily and arrange to get him home to Florida for the man, but he said, ‘If I gotta leave him, it’s only gonna be the one time.’”

  So now Bobby, his short silver coat shining, romps the yard and stable, watches Ron and Danny teach lessons, and rides in their laps on the eight-hour drive between their Camden and Palm Beach homes.

  There was no rescue for one of their own: Ron was teaching a class one day in Ridgeway, South Carolina, while Sunny, his Jack Russell terrier, scampered around the field. A truck pulled over and a man grabbed the friendly little dog. “I ran out of the ring, but he was gone,” says Ron. “I placed an ad in the Columbia state paper with a picture, but nobody called. Finally, the truck was stopped in North Carolina by police. They found the guy had taken over forty small dogs and had sold all of them for pit-bull bait.”

  To comfort themselves, they recall several successes: Bessie the Bassett, Mona the Mutt, Lucky to Be Alive, and Jack the Tree Trimmer, an albino pointer who ran circles under the trees and nipped all the branches within reach. And Dottie, the bluetick hound that was so miserably sick but recovered to jubilantly eat a couch, playfully puncture every hose on the farm, and munch up three seven-hundred-dollar custom-made bridles. “But she was a sweetheart!” says Ron.

  Pain, cost, and loss are worth it all, they agree. “It’s what completes our hearts,” says Ron. “Animals never stop giving, and without them, I’d never be entertained,” says Danny.

  And what about those dogs we saw at the Camden shelter? I ask. “If you step in there, you owe it to one animal at least,” says Danny. “And we both stepped in there.”

  “We talked; we’re going to go back and get the black Lab and the black-and-white one,” says Ron.

  “It’s love: they are loving no matter how tired, dirty, exhausted, and sweaty we are,” says Danny. “And we make such a small dent in the millions.”

  “We give back to life what we can,” says Ron. “We don’t drive by and assume somebody else will do it.”

  26

  A JOY TO RAISE

  PHIL MCINTYRE, HIS DOG, PRINCE, AND THEIR STAG, LI’L BUCK

  “TELL ME, DO ya like fresh vegetables?” Phil McIntyre feeds wild creatures and tame creatures, and he’s about to feed us. His thickly-planted garden on his lot in tiny Biscoe, North Carolina, is erupting with produce when we visit in late summer. We are here to see his orphan fawn, but first, in keeping with Southern tradition, we must be fed. “That garden ’bout worked me to death,” Phil says, arranging freshly washed tomatoes and hot peppers on a tea towel in the kitchen of his small, one-storey home just beyond the freeway.

  Phil’s left cheek is distended by a plum-sized chew of tobacco, and he sports a gray-white goatee and neatly trimmed black hair going silver, a flat-link gold necklace and two bracelets against his deeply tanned skin, nylon shorts, deck shoes, and a T-shirt. Phil is known around Biscoe and neighboring Troy as the man who has the fawn, now a f
ourteen-month-old stag he named Little Buck.

  “That’s the dog that raised Li’l Buck,” says Phil, introducing a young black Pomeranian named Prince, a lively two-year-old with long, well-groomed glossy hair and startlingly white teeth. His little domed forehead and limpid dark eyes make him look like a baby fur seal. “Pomeranians ain’t usually black, and he’s bigger ’n usual—they supposed to weigh between eight and ten pounds, but he’s twenty-six pounds,” Phil explains.

  Li’l Buck and a target deer meet nose to nose at Phil McIntyre’s camp.

  Phil’s living room holds a tiny woodstove, a TV, and two videos (Python and Road Rage), and the wood-paneled walls are hung with a stuffed wood duck, a striped bass, and trophy heads of four of the dozens of white-tail bucks he’s shot. “That’s my old deer there,” says Phil, referring to his trophy mounts. “I got my other deer in the [storage] container at my other place.”

  As the pots steam and bubble, Phil opens kitchen cupboard doors to reveal sparkling quarts of canned beans and sauerkraut made from his vegetable garden. Phil spends the day in his tiny four-room Biscoe house “doin’ my cannin’ and my freezin’ and whatever I have to do” with Prince at his feet. He and Prince spend every night in the woods at his other property, sleeping with the buck—all in the same bed until the tiny fawn became a stag, and the stag could no longer fit safely into the bed in his camper trailer.

  Phil pulls a steaming pork butt out of the roaster to cool and, while pots of vegetables simmer, sets his digital camera on the narrow kitchen counter for us, proud as a parent with home movies of his only child. It’s the short and happy life of Little Buck: as a speckled fawn; nursing from a bottle, Prince slurping along with his paws balanced on the fawn’s neck; dog and fawn racing across the meadow in long games of tag; Little Buck splay-legged in the first snow of his life, bucking and hopping with a young creature’s joy. “He fell twice while ice skatin’,” says Phil.