Little Boy Blue (14 page)

My first instinct was to go to the dogs and play with them, but Turner quickly dissuaded me of that notion. Some, she said, I could pet. Others, she told me, would bite. One dog, who had white fur with the potential to be gorgeous, had so much brown gunk running down from her eyes that I wanted to get a tissue and clean her up myself.

“Now, Blue would never have been out here,” Turner told me. She noticed the way I was looking at the white dog, and then she rubbed at the dog’s eyes with her own thumb before continuing. “He was way too little and sick. He had the ringworm—oh, did he have the ringworm somethin’ fierce—so I had to keep him away from the other dogs. He stayed crated in the house. I have some dogs inside in crates now. I can show you in the house how it would have been.”

As we made our way back up the driveway toward her home, I felt incredibly uneasy. This was not at all what I’d imagined when she told me by telephone that Blue had lived on a farm. This is not what I’d had in mind when she said he played with lots of other dogs, so much so that at least one really missed him. Those claims, to me, suddenly sounded the way the packaging does on “free-range” chicken that comes from places where the birds aren’t technically in cages, but never actually see the light of day.

I thought carefully how to ask my next question. I wasn’t sure how she would react, and I didn’t want to be rude.

“Is there a point,” I said slowly and deliberately, “at which the county or the state says you have too many dogs to take care of by yourself? Might they, for instance, want to qualify you as a kennel? Or maybe, I guess, are there laws about hoarding?”

She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t seem upset, but she answered in a snap. “Oh I looked into that,” she said. “I made a call. You aren’t a hoarder unless they can find sixty dogs. Believe me, honey, I’m under the limit.

“Now,” she continued as we stepped out of the golf cart and onto her front porch, “housekeeping is not my specialty.” I nodded and smiled politely, thinking that it’s not exactly my specialty, either. I figured I’d see dust on the tables, an unmade bed, and maybe some dishes that needed washing in the sink as I followed her inside the house to learn more about how Blue had lived.

I’d barely made it three feet inside when I stopped to get my bearings. As with all of the dogs outside in the pens, I was now seeing something inside that I’d never before encountered. This wasn’t a messy house the way I understand that phrase. This was a house where a path had been cleared across the floor to get to the various rooms and then back outside.

We entered through the front door and were immediately in what appeared to be the living room—which I say because I saw parts of two black sofas. They were covered in so much debris that there was barely anyplace to sit. To my left, where some people might have placed a coatrack, huge bags of dog food were stacked about waist high. Junk seemed to be littering most of the floor on the right side of the room, as well. I couldn’t make out exactly what was in the short and tall piles all around, but I’m pretty sure I saw various combinations of old newspapers, boxes, clothes, and the like. The table between the sofas was covered with what looked like bits of packing Styrofoam peanuts, which someone had strangely organized into color-coded piles of pink and green.

We walked into what I took for a spare bedroom, and Turner flipped on the lights. I counted seven crates. Only one was empty. The dogs barked crazily, like the ones who don’t get walked down at the shelter. As with the dogs outside, Turner left all but one in the crates and didn’t even acknowledge their presence. One of them was a big, brown boy who could barely stand up straight, his crate was so small. The crates looked clean to me, but I noticed the floor peeling up in sections beneath them.

“Are all of these dogs currently available for adoption?” I asked.

“Well, most of them are,” she said. “Some of them are mine. Some of them aren’t ready yet. The ones that can’t find homes, now, this is going to sound terrible, but they have to live with me forever.”

She smiled as she said it, like she was telling a joke.

Then she flipped off the lights, led me back past the crates of barking dogs, and shut the door unceremoniously behind us.

Next came the kitchen, where I heard more barking than in the spare bedroom. The door to the kitchen had a glass pane in the center that was covered long-ways by a beach towel so that nobody could see inside. “Let me just go through there, and you can see them from outside,” Turner said, leaving me alone in the living room. She walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind her, as if there were something inside that she needed to rearrange before I could see it. I waited a few seconds and then pulled the towel over with one finger to sneak a peek. I counted at least a half dozen small dogs, maybe more. A lot of them appeared to be Chihuahuas. Then I quickly let the towel snap back, feeling guilty to have looked at all.

Once we were both back outside, she let me look through a glass door not only into the kitchen, but also at the adjoining room’s windows, which had been painted black. They looked like the windows at strip clubs, completely slathered in darkness to ensure that nobody sees what’s happening inside. She told me that was her post-op room and that more dogs were inside, healing from whatever ailed them. The phrase “post-op” startled me. I immediately wondered who, precisely, was doing what kind of operating.

I also wondered, as I stood there, how many of the dogs hidden behind those blackened windows had been “treated” with bleach just like Blue. I wondered what else was being done to them. I wondered how many of them would eventually get to leave, if ever.

Unsure of what else to say or do, I thanked Turner again for having helped to get Blue out of the shelter. I told her that I appreciated all she had done to help save his life. I got into my car and turned the key. I prepared to head from Turner’s house back down the road that leads to the local shelter, and then to my hotel.

I drove in stunned silence, wondering how my boy had ever made it out of Person County alive.

A Cool Breeze in Hell

The next morning, after a night of precious little and entirely disturbed sleep, I got an early start and drove about three hours south of Person County. My destination was Robeson County, whose animal-control facility has received a lot more publicity in recent years than the one where Blue was found. While Person County Animal Control has quietly plodded along in something of a public-awareness vacuum, Robeson County Animal Shelter has been like a murder suspect sitting in a police station with bright lights shined directly into his eyes. Advocates told me that things there had been even worse than the situation that Blue faced, and that somehow, under the glare of harsh public outcry, the shelter had found a way to turn things around.

I wanted to know what Robeson County had done to bring change, since it certainly didn’t involve throwing money at the problem. The median household income is $28,202. Nearly 30 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. Robeson holds the unfortunate distinction of being the absolute poorest county in the entire state of North Carolina.

I drove into the town of St. Pauls by way of NC-20, a two-lane road that seems at least one lane too big for anything that might even remotely be considered rush-hour traffic. Mine was one of the only cars in motion along the flat, paved stretch, which cut through swaths of tall, proud trees climbing from beneath blankets of healthy, green grass. The scenery that nature had created here looked as soft and welcoming as any state park under a crisp blue sky. Where it had been cleared for structures built by man, though, things looked hard gained and worse kept, even in the morning’s best and brightest light.

The names of the side streets are a lot like the people I would soon meet in Robeson County: They tell it like it is, in plain language that everybody can understand. Two of the streets I passed were called Grassy Road and Bumpy Road. A bit farther up the main road, a little ways beyond the vacant storefronts and across from Bo’s Food Store, was the only place I saw with a full parking lot and any kind of hustle. A good number of people walked through the front door, right under the white banner with big red letters announcing that a “Summer Sale” was on at the Family Dollar.

Somewhere in this vicinity is where the county’s animal shelter used to be, according to Timothy Mason, who has been with the program for the past eighteen years. As recently as about 2000, he told me, the shelter was housed in the old office of a veterinarian. I heard him debate with a coworker whether the old office had a dirt floor, or a floor so dirty that it could no longer be cleaned, but either way, the place was scary nasty. It’s where he used to go to work every day.

Today, Mason walks with the kind of wise elder’s gait that tells you there’s no reason to be in a hurry, because in life, change isn’t coming anytime soon, anyway. As he told me the story of his job as it used to be, he shifted uneasily on both of his feet. He moved around the room a little, too, as if his own words made him feel uncomfortable in whatever space he chose to stand.

“They’d bring the dogs in,” he recalls. “There were always so many dogs, but we only had ten pens. We couldn’t tell what was what, there were so many dogs in each cage. Once a week, the city would send a dump truck. Now, this wasn’t a pickup truck. This was a big, tall dump truck. We’d get each dog with a catch pole and give it a heart stick
⁴
to kill it. I didn’t want to do it that way, but they were going to take my job away if I didn’t.”

He stopped for a moment and rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand.

“Now my shoulder is bad because after we did the heart sticks, we’d have to hurl the dogs up into that dump truck. We’d just throw the dead dogs up in there, and everybody in town would see, because we were right there on the main road. We all felt so ashamed. And it wasn’t very long ago.”

As he finished his story, everyone in the room went silent. It was the first time he’d ever shared that memory with the current staff.

I cleared my throat and asked, in an almost reverent tone, “What happened that finally brought change?”

The answer I received from a new employee, while just three words, might as well have been louder than a bomb.

“Faith Walker happened.”

Actually, as Faith Walker herself later told me by telephone, the changes in Robeson County started with a dog named Fannie Mae. Walker had just moved back to be near her family in North Carolina after living out West, where her husband was a professor at the University of Southern California. She learned about the deplorable conditions at the old Robeson County shelter, and she went over to adopt a dog. She figured she could save at least one.

Walker thought Fannie Mae was just beautiful, with a mostly black coat and a black streak on her tongue, maybe a Chow Chow mixed with a Cocker Spaniel. Walker wanted to give her a good home, so she asked the shelter director to let Fannie Mae out of her cage.

“The shelter director told me that I couldn’t adopt her because she was scheduled to be put down in fifteen minutes,” Walker recalls. “I said that I wanted her, and he said,‘You heard me, that dog is going down in fifteen minutes. You can’t have her.’ Well, I threw my purse down on the ground, right then and there. I’m five foot one and I weigh ninety-seven pounds. I put up my fists and said to that man, ‘You try to take me if you can, because you’re going to have to take me first.’”

That was in 1997. Fannie Mae has been dutifully by Walker’s side ever since, through more than a decade’s worth of time that Walker has spent lobbying tirelessly for change. At first, she says, she used proper channels and made requests to the county officials in charge of the shelter. When she realized she was getting nowhere, she enlisted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, some lawyers, and a television news station’s hidden camera. Walker quickly earned a reputation among county officials and shelter workers alike as an out-and-out gadfly with intentions of neither shutting up nor backing down. She’s the kind of person people on the inside of any system tend to describe while rolling their eyes, just as people on the outside of that system are clapping wildly in applause.

By 2001, Walker had grown so frustrated that she sued Robeson County on allegations of animal cruelty. Evidence in the case included a videotape that reporters from WRAL in Raleigh shot with a hidden camera that PETA provided. It showed animals in the shelter being slapped, kicked, and held by their necks in midair on restraint poles, Walker says. WRAL reporters interviewed a veterinarian who had no connection to the case and asked him to explain what the tape showed in terms of the heart sticks. He told them, “It’s terrible. There’s no attempt to look for the heart. They are just sticking at the chest. They’ll die eventually because it will go into the lungs and from the lungs it will filter back to the heart. It is not a quick and humane death. Watching this, I don’t have the sense that they care to do it properly. It’s just an assembly line.”

Walker’s lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, but the surge of publicity that came with it got the county’s attention. Staff were certified and trained in the legal ways to work with and euthanize animals, and the current incarnation of the animal shelter that I’d driven to visit was built.