Little Boy Blue (20 page)

I found a man named Eric Kleman and a foster dog named Hope.

Kleman’s first foster experience was with a dog who, in most animal-control facilities, would never stand a chance. As he told me by telephone, Kleman is a Pennsylvania native who moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, a few years ago, long after he realized that helping shelter dogs was as much a part of him as having toenails and eyelashes. When he was a college student in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he would spend his weekends at the local humane society making sure the dogs there knew that somebody cared about them. He realized that he wasn’t supposed to feed them, but he couldn’t help bringing a box of bones along with him during every visit. By the time he left each weekend, the box would be empty and his soul would feel a little fuller.

He’d already bought his first chocolate Labrador from a store by that time, and though he loved her, he quickly learned enough to know that he would never buy another dog from a store again. His next three Labradors were all rescues, and he kept his eye on the Internet for postings about Labradors who had been found by rescue organizations.

On December 7, 2010, he saw a posting from Lulu’s Rescue on Facebook. The title was “Hope: A Christmas Miracle.” The photo showed a yellow Labrador mix, obviously still very much a puppy, with what looked like a white cast around her front left leg.

Below the photograph, Lulu’s had written: “This beautiful, sweet girl was discovered when a good Samaritan called the police to say a trash bag was moving on the side of the road. Hope was double-bagged and thrown out of a moving car, sustaining multiple injuries including a leg broken in two places, a dislocated hip, both jaws broken in three places, and broken teeth. The vet has found that many of her injuries, including one of the jaw breaks, are not recent and this girl has been enduring pain and suffering before she was thrown out of the car. Despite all of this trauma in her short ten months of life, everyone who meets her is astounded by her sweetness and her ability to be open and trusting. Hope’s recovery will be extensive and costly: She needs surgery on her jaws to realign them, teeth removed, and bones set. Will you help Lulu’s Rescue show this sweet girl that many do care about her, love her, and want to help her on the journey to a new life? We can’t think of a better gift than that of a loving forever home and family providing her unconditional love and affection. Do you believe in miracles?”

The Christmas spirit had nothing to do with Kleman’s reaction. It might as well have been Memorial Day. He would have felt the same.

“I had an instant belief that I had to help that dog,” Kleman told me. “I sent that story to everybody I know, and I donated to the chip-in fund, which raised more than $2,000 in forty-eight hours. Then I wrote to Lulu’s and asked how I could do more to help.”

Kleman would soon learn that Hope’s injuries were even more extensive than the Facebook post indicated. She had burn marks the size and shape of cigarettes on her face and body. X-rays showed further, unmistakable signs of previous abuse, including that her jaw had once been broken completely. For the handful of months that she had been alive, when she weighed no more than twenty or thirty pounds, the puppy had been beaten and tortured mercilessly, and nearly to death.

Given the extent of Hope’s injuries, the shelter had deemed her unadoptable and put her on the list to be killed within a few days. This, despite the fact that the puppy, so brutally treated by humans, still showed nothing but love and affection toward the ones she now met.

“The initial vet who treated her said he’d never met another dog like her in his entire career,” Kleman told me. “She was obviously in a tremendous amount of pain. Her broken leg was literally hanging off her body. She allowed him to set her leg. She just stared at him and let it happen. He said it was like she knew that he was helping her. Her pain threshold was unbelievable. You would expect a dog who had been through all that to cower in fear, but she never did. Not once. She was really unique.”

Kleman lives in a condominium with his fiancée and three-year-old chocolate Labrador, Hudson. After talking it over, Kleman and his fiancée decided to bring Hope home to recover with Hudson by her side. Like me, they’d never fostered before, but Hudson was like Blue and got along well with other dogs, and something about Hope’s story made them feel that they were just plain meant to become a part of it.

“Everybody I knew all said the same thing—we wanted five minutes in a room with whoever had done this to her,” Kleman recalls. “But then we got to know Hope, and the anger went away. She had the saddest looking eyes. Her jaw was broken in three places. But on her very first day with us, she started to eat hard food again. She just started eating Hudson’s food. The veterinarians decided not to reconstruct her jaw at all because she wasn’t experiencing pain, and she was healing fine on her own. She was just amazing.”

Hope ended up staying with Kleman for nearly three months—far longer than Izzy and Summer would live with Blue and me. She got stronger and stronger each week, and she refused to deny her own spirited puppy instincts, once even leaping from a bed and snapping her leg splint so badly that Kleman had to get her a new one. Each night, Hope slept in bed between Kleman and his fiancée. She was almost always in the same position, curled tightly into a ball.

By March 2011, Kleman knew that Hope was well enough to be adopted into a permanent home. But by then, he and his fiancée had fallen desperately in love with her.

It’s one of the biggest problems that rescue groups face with new foster parents. A lot of them end up wanting to keep the dogs, making fewer foster homes available overall. It happened to me, actually, with Summer. She was so skittish and loving like Blue, I instinctively wanted to protect her myself for the rest of her life instead of trusting her care to somebody else.

Kleman and his fiancée talked about keeping Hope, but they ultimately decided she would be better off with another family. While Hudson likes to exercise by swimming in the lake near Kleman’s condominium, Hope seemed to need a backyard. “When she finally got the cast off and we took her to the local parks, we saw that she loves to run,” he says. “She is a dog that is born to run.”

Kleman wrote what he calls “a novel” about Hope for Lulu’s Rescue, which posted her story and photo on its website. In just one day, a family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, applied to bring Hope home. They had previously adopted a black Labrador mix through Lulu’s, and they and their sons liked that dog so much that they decided to bring home another. Their house, it turns out, is about twenty minutes away from Kleman’s parents. He appreciated the fact that they invited him to visit Hope whenever he was up North visiting his own family.

Kleman then found himself bringing Hope to a northbound transport in North Carolina, just like the one that had carried Blue to me.

“It was just me, Hope, and Hudson,” he recalls. “My fiancée couldn’t go with me, she was so upset. It takes a lot for me to cry, but when we left her with the transport, man, I bawled like a baby. I tried not to cry in front of all the people there, but I just couldn’t stop, and then I kept crying half the way home.”

Hope’s new family met her in Trenton, New Jersey, some six hundred miles later. They had driven an hour and a half from their Pennsylvania home to collect her. When she came off the truck, she was barking, happy, and—much to their surprise— fully house-trained. They thought her slightly crooked jaw was absolutely adorable, and they were impressed that she exhibited no fear of cars, even despite having been thrown out of a moving one and left for dead.

Kleman says he can’t imagine a better outcome for a dog who was once called unadoptable and scheduled for immediate death.

“I think Hudson is happy to have us back to himself, but I do think that he misses Hope,” Kleman says. “We’re definitely going to take in more rescues and foster again. It was an absolutely amazing experience.”

I found the same thing to be true while fostering Izzy and Summer. I also realized that as Blue’s adopter, the idea of the foster system had made a huge difference to me, too. Fostering solves the problem that so many people who buy puppies from breeders or pet stores believe exists with shelter dogs—that you just don’t know what you’re getting. When a foster person is honest about what she sees in a dog’s behavior, it is easy to tell an adopter exactly what kind of a dog he is getting. A dog living in a foster home is being evaluated in real-life conditions, not in a cage. He’s getting a chance to display his true personality so that rescue groups can match him to the best possible adopter.

In foster homes like mine, shelter dogs also receive basic training. I treated Izzy and Summer the same way that I treat Blue, so by the time they were ready to leave, they both knew how to sit on command. They were as housetrained as any puppy can be. They understood that there would be regular feeding times. They knew that if they asked me to snuggle, they would receive plenty of hugs and love.

I couldn’t help but think, as I learned more about fostering and the many ways it is done, that what Blue had experienced at Annie Turner’s house really was outside the norm. He didn’t arrive at my house looking or acting anything like Izzy and Summer did after staying with me and settling down from their previous experiences. He arrived with scabs from a rash and incomplete medical records and a serious fear of cars, one that seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I’d been dutifully putting him in the car every day and driving him to places like the park and the pet store, hoping he would learn that getting into the car meant going someplace fun where he would get treats. Blue always had a great time wherever we went—he even learned to love arriving at the bank’s drive-through window, where my deposit receipt regularly arrived with a treat from the smiling teller inside— but the car rides that got us to these places, Blue didn’t like at all. The mere thought of getting into the car seemed to put his stomach into a state of tumult, one that forced me to travel everywhere with a fresh roll of paper towels and disinfectant.

As I learned more about fostering and the way the rescue system works when it’s at its best, I became increasingly concerned about the dogs I’d seen at Turner’s property in North Carolina. I thought about how she’d put bleach on Blue’s rash, and how she’d described it to me repeatedly as if she did it to lots of dogs, all the time. I thought about the big brown dog who seemed to be in a cage far too small for his body, and about the little white dog who had rivers of gunk running from her eyes. I thought about the room that Turner called “post-op” with the blackedout windows, and I wondered what, precisely, was being done to the dogs I’d heard inside. I wondered why there had been some dogs Turner told me not to pet at her house, because they’d bite. I wondered how dogs who bite people could have anything to do with rescue at all. Everything that before had seemed strange to me now suddenly seemed almost eerie compared with the fostering experiences of Izzy, Summer, the dogs at my sister’s veterinarian, and the incredible puppy named Hope.

I kept my concerns to myself while waiting for Izzy and Summer’s adoption applications to be processed, and I focused on learning more about the big picture of rescue efforts to save dogs like them. It was hard to understand how little oversight was involved, how people like Turner, Dr. Thomas, and myself for that matter could really do just about anything we felt was right. There were big, national rescue groups like the ASPCA and the Humane Society out there in the world, but they didn’t seem to have much to do with smaller rescue outfits like Lulu’s or Rhonda Beach, which were actually moving quite a lot of dogs. Individual people involved with rescue seemed to be doing things however they decided was best, without any licensing or seal of approval that a regular dog lover like me could find and check.

In fact, the more I looked into things, the less rescuers seemed like an orchestrated army and the more they appeared to be a loosely banded gang of mercenaries—ones who, I’d next learn, were taking the fight to save dogs like Blue to levels all across America that I could not even imagine.

The War Across America

When I wasn’t driving hundreds of miles to find answers, helping Izzy and Summer to get adopted, or playing with my sweet puppy Blue, I spent time during summer 2011 trying to figure out how many animal-control centers are like the one I’d seen in Person County. It seemed impossible to me that more than a handful could exist in modern-day America.

Surely
, I thought,
facilities like the ones I’d seen were aberrations
from the everyday norm. What was going on in North Carolina
couldn’t possibly be going on anywhere else, at least not on the same
scale
.

I started by asking advocacy groups for their information on a state-by-state basis. I learned that killing shelter dogs in gas chambers is illegal in twenty-two states: Alabama,
⁶
Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana,
⁷
Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming. That doesn’t mean that healthy, adoptable dogs and puppies are safe from other forms of killing such as lethal injection. It also doesn’t mean that gas chambers are being used in states where no laws are on the books. But it does leave twenty-eight states that still legally allow the asphyxiation of healthy, adoptable dogs like Blue. My search for answers about my own puppy had led me to a specific part of North Carolina, but I soon learned that similar scenes were playing out in taxpayer-funded animal-control facilities in many parts of America.