Little Boy Blue (6 page)

The more and more I got to know Blue, the more and more I began to obsess about the things that Annie Turner had told me on the telephone. Such disconcerting information didn’t match up against the winning personality that this dog was showing me. Not even a little bit. I didn’t think about the things she’d said once in a while. I became preoccupied, and even a little bit haunted, by what seemed to be a few more bread crumbs on a trail that begged to be followed into Blue’s past.

I did some research and learned that bleach and Monistat are a common, inexpensive home remedy for ringworm. The medicine my veterinarian had prescribed cost just less than forty dollars. I didn’t think much of that expense in the context of bringing a new puppy home, but a drugstore website told me that a three-day supply of Monistat plus bleach cost about half as much. Multiply that extra twenty bucks by, say, two hundred dogs with rashes, and the remedy would save four thousand dollars. By my math, from the day I met Blue at the RV, the money saved was enough to transport at least another forty puppies just like him to safety.

That Turner had felt so desperate to save that money, that she had felt the need to use bleach that can burn instead of shampoo that soothes, that she is the head of a countywide rescue group and she made that decision—all of it seemed beyond strange. I talked about it with my husband in the context of our new puppy, and it gave us both pause.

A great deal of pause, actually, and an insatiable desire to learn more.

A Journey Awaits

Michele Armstrong looks nothing like the image that I had of her in my mind. On the day that Blue and I met her in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for breakfast at a dog-friendly restaurant with outdoor tables, I was expecting a cherub-faced, later-in-life woman who had maybe raised a few kids and was now applying the full bore of her maternal instincts to saving dogs. I’m not sure how I conjured this mental picture, given that Armstrong’s cofounder at Lulu’s Rescue, Jane Zeolla, had looked youthful and polished when she’d come to inspect my home. I guess it was something about the name Lulu’s Rescue, plus the fact that the group is based in a town called Point Pleasant. The names just sound so gosh darn quaint that I’d formed a mental impression of Armstrong as being, shall we say, a hair shy of cosmopolitan.

Instead, Blue and I were greeted by a woman who is about my age (forty is the new twenty, right?) and who looked nearly as fit and focused as any member of the U.S. Olympic swimming team. Armstrong wore no makeup, had her blonde locks effortlessly pulled back from her face, and was clad in faded jeans and a T-shirt that appeared custom-made to fit her like a runway model. To see her walking down the street in farm country along the Delaware River, I’d never have guessed that she’d lived a previous, professional life in New York City. And unless I’d talked with her, I’d have missed out on her absolute aura of intelligence. I’ve only experienced it before with journalists working to expose truths from war zones, and in volunteers working to save lives in the aftermath of natural disasters. Armstrong is the kind of person who needs precious little primping or adornment. Her honesty and beauty seem to emanate directly from her soul, brightened even more by the obvious smarts and sincerity that accompany her every word about the dogs whose lives she is trying to save.

She and Zeolla, who together have more than thirty years of experience saving dogs, started Lulu’s Rescue in January 2010. That was just a few months before I applied to the group through Petfinder to adopt Blue, making him one of their first successful adoptions during their initial year of operation. The mission at Lulu’s Rescue is to get great dogs like Blue out of high-kill shelters and into permanent homes. Like many rescues, Lulu’s doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar facility, but instead uses a network of foster homes to keep each dog safe until a permanent home can be found.

Armstrong and I casually grabbed an outdoor table at a restaurant whose owner is a Lulu’s Rescue supporter. We each ordered an omelet as Blue rested at our feet, happily chewing on a bone and enjoying a morning out of the house. It was the first day that Armstrong was meeting Blue, even though she’d been instrumental in saving his life. At Lulu’s, Armstrong focuses on tasks like vetting potential adopters, organizing major fundraisers, and helping shelters win grants that ultimately bring down their kill rates. Zeolla, meanwhile, has the unenviable job of sifting through the countless descriptions of dogs in need. It’s Zeolla who first spots the dogs who will be lucky enough to get a spot in the Lulu’s Rescue program. She is the one who saw Blue’s face in the photograph that Annie Turner’s group had put online, and she is the one who chose to promote him through the Lulu’s page that I saw on
Petfinder.com
.

“He’s just so beautiful here in person,” Armstrong told me as the waitress brought our orders to the table. Armstrong sounded happy and hopeful, but her exuberance lasted only for a moment. “You know, I’ve tried to look at all of the photos of dogs like him on the computer, and I just can’t do it. I get physically sick. To see all those dogs and know that so many of them aren’t going to make it …”

Her voice trailed off. She pushed her omelet around the plate with her fork. With her other hand, she reached down and gently rubbed Blue behind his ears.

Our breakfast was supposed to be a casual conversation that I thought might help me learn more about Blue’s past, but I was brimming with so many questions that I feared they were going to blast out of my mouth like machine-gun ammo. I didn’t want to seem like a CIA interrogator, but I also wanted desperately to know how Blue had ended up in his predicament down South.

“I’m having a hard time understanding how a dog like Blue finds himself headed for a gas chamber,” I told Armstrong, with my own omelet now getting cold, too. “I mean, look at him just sitting there politely, not even begging for a bite of food. If somebody had told me where he’d come from, I would have thought something was wrong with him. But this is a great puppy. This is not a problem dog. It’s keeping me awake at night. I’ve never even heard of anything like this, and I’ve loved dogs all my life.”

Armstrong reacted like a Gold Glove catcher, anticipating my pitch before I’d even finished my windup.

“It’s because it’s not legal up here,” she said, the words from my last sentence still dangling between us in the air. She’d obviously answered questions like mine a thousand times. “We don’t have dogs being thrown in gas chambers in the Northeast, so people don’t know it’s happening. People can’t even imagine that it could even possibly be happening, it sounds so crazy. But down in the South, those gas chambers are still used in a lot of places. The dogs are killed on a regular schedule, at 8:00
A.M.
and 4:30
P.M.
We get a list every morning of the dogs who are scheduled to die that day, we get lots and lots of pictures, and we get as many of them out as we can.”

She paused a moment and sighed, thinking about the puppies and dogs she’s had to leave behind.

“It destroys us knowing that the ones we can’t get out are just as great as Blue,” she said. “They almost always aren’t going to make it.”

I nodded my head as if I understood, but she could see in my eyes that I didn’t. It’s kind of like being told there’s a mass murder taking place in Africa as a single, dominant tribe gains control of the freshwater supply. Cognitively, I could comprehend the words that I was hearing. Intellectually, I could understand it was a situation worthy of the world’s rapt attention. But emotionally, it was tough to relate. The last time I’d heard about gas chambers was a couple of decades ago in a high-school history textbook, in the chapter about Adolf Hitler. Gas chambers seemed about as contemporary to what I knew of modern American society as, well, bobby socks and zoot suits.

“Would you like to see exactly what I’m talking about?” Armstrong asked.

It was evident to me that she continually agonizes over whatever it is that she has seen, so I took a few moments to consider the question. I looked down at what was left of my omelet, broke off a small piece to give to Blue, and swallowed hard before answering, “Yes, I think I would.”

Now, I’m not what most people would describe as a bleeding heart. I vote for Republicans as often as Democrats, and I care as much about budget deficits and tax burdens as I do about the environment and helping the mentally ill. Nor do I fit the description of an animal activist. I’m an everyday person who loves dogs and is willing to consider other animal-welfare causes when they’re brought to my attention. For instance, I am a lover of all foods who hosts summer barbecues full of slow-roasted short ribs and pulled-pork sliders, but every recipe that I make features meat that I have purchased only after seeing the animals themselves being treated humanely on the farm where they were raised. After reading a few books
¹
about the nature of the U.S. meat supply, I wasn’t ready to go vegetarian, but I was ready to vote with my pocketbook to put factory farms and their particular brand of animal cruelty out of business. I thus drive about an hour once each year to the small, family-owned Plaid Piper Farm in Sussex County, New Jersey, where I purchase all of my beef, pork, and chicken from a farmer who treats his animals with respect instead of like commodities. I keep my farm-produced steaks, chops, and cutlets in a large freezer in my garage, eliminating the need to purchase meat anywhere else. I haven’t given a single nickel to any fast-food hamburger chains in about ten years, and when I order meat at restaurants, I know enough to look for “grass-finished beef” and “antibiotic-free chicken.” Having been educated about the issue, I now avoid supporting operations that treat animals with unnecessary cruelty by cramming them into tiny cages and then stuffing them full of corn and drugs to fatten them for slaughter.

In other words, I’m not a die-hard-vegan-do-gooder when it comes to animals, but I’m also not completely ignorant about the bigger picture when it comes to their treatment. Perhaps that’s why I felt I was relatively prepared later that same afternoon, when I used Armstrong’s password to log on to the Lulu’s Rescue page on Facebook. I figured I had at least a basic handle on animal-welfare issues in America. I’d seen pictures of crippled cows heading for slaughterhouses. How much worse could the situation with dogs be?

The fact that Lulu’s does so much communicating via Facebook, too, gave me a false sense of security. My own Facebook page, like many people’s, contains smiling photographs of family, smack talk from friends whose scores outrank mine on the game Bejeweled Blitz, and the occasionally idiotic comment from somebody I haven’t seen in person since the seventh grade. The Lulu’s Rescue page on Facebook, though, struck me from first glance as downright somber. It felt sad, if not ominous, like it should have its own theme song to warn viewers to steel themselves against what they’re about to see. After a few minutes of scrolling through the posts, I felt like a person clinging to a palm tree as a tsunami washed over me. Soon enough, I felt like that same wave could wipe away everything I knew to be good about the world.

The stream of photographs was endless. Dog after dog after dog after dog after dog. They had been posted at all hours, like a twenty-four-hour-a-day Animal Planet channel full of death instead of life. When I clicked on one photograph, I was immediately taken to dozens upon dozens more. “Going to be killed at 9
P.M.
,” one headline read, followed by photographs of about two dozen dogs. “Death row dogs need out by tomorrow,” another stated, again with pictures of the helpless dogs’ faces.

I zoomed in to get a closer look at some of the photographs, wondering if there was something I was missing. But to my eye, these dogs didn’t look sick. There was no indication that they were vicious. Some of them looked nervous and scared, but I think I would be, too, if I were in a cage a couple dozen feet away from a gas chamber while somebody with a camera flashed a bright light directly into my eyeballs and told me to smile. I saw highly desirable breeds such as Terriers, Hounds, and Labradors, with faces so cute that I couldn’t believe nobody wanted them. Some of the dogs were puppies who, I surmised, hadn’t even had a chance to learn basic commands.

After reading the descriptions of about a hundred dogs whose information flowed through the Lulu’s Rescue page on just that one day, I stopped counting and turned off the computer. I didn’t feel physically ill the way Armstrong says that she does, but I did feel absolutely sick, in the sense of spiritual debilitation. Pressing the power button and watching my monitor fade to black felt at once like a personal relief and a moral abandonment. It was difficult to comprehend just how many of these dogs and puppies there were. I couldn’t help but note the hour and realize that a lot of the ones I’d just seen would not be breathing at this time tomorrow.

Later that night in my kitchen, I thought again about my telephone call with Annie Turner. I had a new appreciation for why she got so defensive when I started peppering her with questions about the way she had treated Blue’s rash. No wonder she chose to save those forty dollars on highfalutin dog shampoo. No wonder she’d thought the remnants of a noncontagious rash were not even worth mentioning in the bigger picture of saving Blue’s life. If just looking at the photographs of these dogs online had left me feeling so shell-shocked, imagine how she must feel when she has to walk into the shelter, see the actual dogs in the cages, and decide which ones to leave behind. Imagine how many of their faces she sees when she closes her eyes each night and tries to go to sleep.