Putting dogs together with people is great fun.
Animal rescue is a task that never ends, but everyone involved wishes it would. I saved a tiger once and that was really hard, but most of my involvement has been tagging along behind my wife Tracy at the easy end: dogs. The fun part is that your customers are always grateful, but it carries the downside that you can’t save them all.
I guess if you have enough money or can raise it, then you can make serious inroads on the problem. In Utah, there’s an animal refuge called Best Friends Animal Society. I try to send them a little donation every year based on having visited and seen how many different kinds of creatures they are saving, one at a time. Their motto is:
Save them all!
I ran across Best Friends following up on the welfare of the fighting dogs confiscated from Michael Vick. Best Friends was one of ten rescue groups that stood up to take on socializing Vick’s fighting dogs. While I have always believed that dogs have to be trained to be mean, I thought semi-pro dog fighters would have attended to that training and the pit bull terriers that were veterans of the ring would be goners.
I know of only one that had to be euthanized; the vast majority lived out their lives as family pets. Those not considered well enough to be adopted out lived out their lives at Best Friends.
My fondest memory of my visit to Best Friends — other than the rescued donkeys — was going into one of the “cat houses” and seeing a list of tasks on the wall for volunteers. One of those tasks was,
Read to the cats.
When we were being shown around, I raised my hand and said, “I’ve got to ask. What do you read to the cats?”
When the volunteer quit laughing, she said that she was a student and she usually read the cats her homework. They found that hearing human voices was important to the socialization of feral cats. It did not matter what the human voices were saying.
Best Friends is the big time of animal rescue. My wife and I still acquired lots of tails, er, tales from our dinky efforts to save dogs.
One day Tracy asked me to drive on a rescue dog transport to Indianapolis. She thought she might need me to help load or unload the dog. From that description, I expected the dog to be in a crate. He was not.
The dog was all skin and bones and was not strong enough to jump into our truck, so he needed a lift. Our assignment was to drive to where the highway to Bloomington intersected with the loop around Indianapolis and meet a representative of Ohio Bloodhound Rescue, the organization that had agreed to take on trying to nurse Tommy back to health. One look at the poor dog and I was just hoping he would not die on us on the way from the shelter to rescue.
Tracy laid it on me that he looked much better than he had looked when animal control brought him in two weeks prior. I had trouble picturing that. She said the shelter had been trying to slowly accustom the dog to food again. When I saw that bag of bones, he had been eating for two weeks.
We had the back seat folded flat and the shelter people helped get Tommy up on the tailgate. He was all the way in the back and, as I drove, I kept stealing peeks in the rearview mirror.
About halfway to Indianapolis, I looked in the mirror and could not see the dog. The mystery was solved quickly when his big old brown furry head came to rest on my shoulder and he began licking my right ear. I called that to Tracy’s attention and she was greatly amused. He licked my ear all the way to Indianapolis.
The rendezvous point was a McDonald’s parking lot. It was not long after I found a parking place that a pickup truck pulled up next to us. He had no problem identifying a “shock blue” Nissan. I opened the back of our truck and called Tommy, who wobbled toward me.
Before we got Tommy out so he could pee, the guy from Ohio excused himself to “get something to eat.” I assumed he meant for himself. He came back with a bag of quarter-pounders with cheese, unwrapped one, and offered it to Tommy, who inhaled it. Tracy suggested that he be careful because the dog was just becoming accustomed to eating again.
He said he would and walked Tommy over to a light pole to take a leak. He told us we could leave. He was confident he could load the dog into his passenger side.
The next day, I asked Tracy if Tommy had made it to Ohio Bloodhound Rescue. When she said no, I felt awful just briefly, for the few seconds it took her to explain that the volunteer who did the transport decided to adopt Tommy. Apparently, he fed the dog all the way across Ohio, because that bag of bones had a new name:
Tommy Cheeseburger.
I’m fond of the happy endings, and Tommy Cheeseburger was touch and go — but he certainly was fond of human beings, and that helped his odds.
Sometime after Tommy Cheeseburger took up residence in Ohio, Tracy got a call from our vet. When she got off the phone we had another canine hard luck story.
It seems a fellow had brought a good looking, healthy adult German Shepard by the name of Gus to our vet and said he wanted the dog euthanized. The vet was horrified. As she put it, she had not gone to vet school to kill healthy dogs. She convinced the owner to sign Gus over to her and then called Tracy to find a rescue.
The story behind Gus was curious. The owner, his wife and three kids were traveling across the U.S. in a recreational vehicle. They had started in Alaska, the state where they were living when the man of the house was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. The tour of the country covered the places on his bucket list.
He got to Indiana and decided Gus was too big to travel that far in that vehicle. What I don’t understand is that he knew what kind of dog he had when he bought the RV.
Tracy got on the telephone and found a woman associated with German Shepard Rescue in a small town about 70 miles away. She invited us to come over and let her make some calls, but she did not personally have room for another German Shepard. They are big dogs, she mentioned.
“Right,” Tracy replied. “And that’s what was about to get Gus killed.”
We picked up Gus from the vet and headed out across the Indiana boondocks. When we found the address, it turned out to be a farm.
The woman came out and met Gus.
“So the owner wanted this dog killed?”
“Yep.”
“Is he aggressive?”
“Not that we can tell.”
Gus was moving his head under her hand, inviting her to pet him. When she did, we knew Gus was going to be OK.
She said he could stay with her until somebody wanted to adopt him.
It’s amazing how many rescue dogs find their own homes. I won’t say dog rescue is easy, but it has its rewards and the only downside is that we can’t save them all.
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Previously published on medium
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