My Gentle Barn (32 page)

“They assured me,” he said.

“Please just call and double-check.”

When he got off the phone, he showed me the name and number of the woman handling the situation. “It’s covered,” he said.

I asked him to please make another call, to touch base with the woman and see how things were going. “I just have a bad feeling about it.”

It turned out the woman was completely overwhelmed. She didn’t have the resources or space to handle that many dogs. She ended up begging Jay to step in and take over.

“We don’t have the resources either,” Jay said to me. “There are two hundred dogs out there.”

So we set about trying to find a larger, more established rescue operation to take it on—an organization that was more well-known and more well funded than we were. We called every rescue we could think of in the Los Angeles area—at least fifteen organizations. And one by one, every rescue declined. Most said it was just too big a case for them to handle. One said they’d stepped in once before with this guy; he was a habitual hoarder and very unstable, and they weren’t interested in going back.

“We have to do it,” I told Jay.

“Are you crazy? We don’t have the staff for this. We don’t have the funding for this. We don’t have experience doing this.”

I had been a dog rescuer most of my life, long before I’d ever handled farm animals. It was at the core of who I was. I may not have pulled two hundred dogs at once, but I knew my way around dog rescue as well as I knew my own heart. “We have two choices,” I said. “We take it on, or we go to sleep tonight and pretend it never happened and let those dogs starve to death or kill each other off.”

With everything we had just been through in the fire and everything that was happening in its wake, I knew for certain—at the very center of my being—that if we took this on we would be provided for along the way. “I am called to do this,” I told Jay. “I feel it in my body; I feel it in my mind. I want us to go in there fearless, and I want you to trust me.” With this I won him over.

I was torn apart knowing I would not be able to be present until the ugliest part of it was over; I was the one with the background in dog rescue, but I couldn’t take a two-year-old into the trenches of a hoarding situation. I was also clear that I wasn’t going to leave Cheyanne with other people in order to take care of animals, as I had done with Jesse. My commitment to being a consistent presence for my daughter had deepened as I’d learned more and more about the parent-child
bond. It was critical that the primary caregiver be present for a child day in and day out until she was at least three; the longer I could keep Cheyanne home with me, the healthier she would be emotionally.

So Jay would be the one taking the lead in this rescue, even though he didn’t have experience rescuing dogs. He’d be the one flying this thing, and I would have to stay behind, like a pilot on the ground guiding him through it.

The night before Jay headed back to the hoarder’s site to begin the dog rescue was also the night before my fortieth birthday. Jay, the master of elegant, well-planned celebration, looked worried. “What are we going to do about your birthday? This is an important one. I should be throwing you a big party or taking you out of town.”

“The only thing I want for my birthday,” I said, “is for you to go rescue those dogs.”

It was going to be a lengthy process, and it would start with stabilizing the situation. With Jay at the site doing the hands-on work, I coordinated from home, rounding up help and getting supplies donated. When they learned we had taken the lead, some of the rescue operations that had declined to take this on lent a hand by putting out a call for volunteers in their own communities. Within four days of Jay first spotting the sea of kennels, a hundred volunteers were helping him clean up the waste and dead animals. Mobile vets signed on to treat the sick and wounded dogs on site and locate safe houses for the sickest dogs. We sent truckloads of dog food, blankets, and doghouses, and some broken-down doghouses on site were repaired. A doghouse was provided for each and every dog, and each house was filled with warm blankets. With the help of the other rescues, we got more volunteers to sign on to take shifts so there was supervision 24/7 to keep the kennels clean and the water bowls filled, and to make sure the dogs weren’t fighting. If there were fights, Jay and the volunteers shifted dogs around until everyone was getting along. I carried my cell phone around with me all day, and Jay and I stayed in constant touch
about what was going on. He would call to update me about a fight he had stopped without getting bitten, or he’d let me know he had just done an interview with a news station or trained some volunteers to clean up properly. One time he called to say there was a dog whose face was so swollen that she couldn’t lift her head off the ground; she looked like she’d been brutalized by other dogs. After taking her to the nearest animal emergency hospital, where she was stitched up, her eye was removed, and she was loaded up on antibiotics, Jay brought her home to me so I could nurse her back to health.

As the dogs began healing physically and understood that regular meals were going to keep arriving, the situation started to stabilize. I kept all the other rescues updated; as the dogs recovered, I asked them to step in and take whatever dogs they could. The breed rescues took the purebreds. The small-dog rescues took the small dogs. A collection of mutt rescues took the pregnant dogs. Before long, we were left with 130 large mutts out of the original 200.

Before I got to see the dogs, a new complication was thrown into the works. The hoarder, who had been banned from the property, snuck back in and was caught trying to poison the well with arsenic. We called the police out and brought in a security team, but the hoarder kept finding ways in and attempting to poison his dogs. Rather than sitting on a target and hoping not to get hit, we decided to move the dogs to a safer location. We found a boarding facility near the Gentle Barn and began raising the funds to cover the cost.

It was now three months in. With the 130 remaining dogs at the boarding facility, the situation was truly stabilized, so I felt comfortable taking Cheyanne with me to visit for my first encounter with the animals. There was every imaginable mutt mix, and all of them were filthy. Shortly after the dogs arrived at the boarding facility, a handful of groomers volunteered their time, and they began the process of bathing and grooming the dogs; it took weeks to get to all of them. As the groomers cleaned the dogs up, I began working with them emotionally.
With Cheyanne on my hip or playing nearby, I identified who was aggressive, who looked scared, who needed rehabilitation, who needed to be spayed or neutered, and who was ready to be adopted. The process of rehabilitating and placing the dogs took months, and all along the way my heart ached for these lonely, terrified animals.

“I promise we’ll find you a home soon,” I would tell the dogs every time I left them, their sad eyes following me from behind the bars of their kennels. I wanted to take home every last one of them and put them in my bed, but there wasn’t room in my house—let alone my bed—for more than a hundred dogs.

After several months of dog adoption days, applications, phone calls, and home checks, we were down to about fifteen dogs who clearly had been born on the hoarder’s property and had never known kindness. You could tell because even with all the work I’d done with them, they still didn’t know how to receive a human touch or even wag their tails. This was the type of dog who needed years of rehabilitation for hours every day. Although this was exactly what I was best at, I was the mother of young children; it just wasn’t the kind of project I could take on.

Finally, after much searching, we found a couple of organizations to come and take these feral dogs. These were agencies with lots of land, lots of staff, and plenty of time to allow the dogs to heal at their own pace. When the last of these dogs were picked up, I exhaled for the first time in a very long while. After ten months, the Lancaster rescue had finally come to completion. We had taken on what looked like an impossible task, but we had pulled it off. Every last dog was safe and sound.

As difficult as it had been for me to take a backseat and let Jay take charge in the first three months of this rescue, it also helped both Jay and me grow in unexpected ways. Throughout my life, I had operated under the belief that if I wanted something done, I had to do it myself. I just didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. But Jay had proved me wrong and given me more trust in my fellow human beings. He had thrown
himself into this rescue, body and soul, and had done an amazing job. My absence on site for the first stage had allowed him to step more fully into a leadership role and to shine. His heroism proved once and for all—most important, to himself—that he was not just the errand boy for my dream. From this, a new system of teamwork began to take shape; Jay would go in and liberate the animals from a horrific situation while I coordinated from home. Then I would step in to heal and rehabilitate the animals. He the warrior, me the nurturer. This was the new balance of our work at the Gentle Barn for all rescues to come.

That Thanksgiving, Jay and I had more to be grateful for than usual. We had just finished saving and placing two hundred dogs in loving homes. We finally had a new, watertight roof over our heads, and new green shoots were pushing up through the ashen land surrounding our house, bringing our year of recovery from the fire to a close. And, now that we were on the map in the wider animal-loving community, the Gentle Barn was finally getting a financial foothold.

“Do you want to do an event to celebrate?” Jay asked. We had not held a Thanksgiving celebration yet on our new land. We’d been too busy building, then having a baby, then recovering from a fire.

We thought about it, but then both decided we needed a break. Some downtime with the family over the holidays.

“Let’s at least rescue some turkeys,” I said. “We can celebrate that way.”

Jay called around to find a local place that sold live turkeys and found one in Canyon Country, just a few miles from the Gentle Barn. When he contacted them, they said they had four live turkeys left.

“Let’s get all four,” I said.

Jay headed out there, and an hour later he called me on his drive home. I could hear in his voice that he was shaken.

“It was the worst thing I have ever seen,” he said. “If you had been there, you would have gone postal. I can’t even begin to describe it.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there with you, Jay. I’m sorry you had to go through that alone.”

When he got back with the four rescued turkeys, who were filthier than any I’d ever seen, Jay was quiet and withdrawn. It took him a couple of hours before he started to talk about it, blurting out bits and pieces of the story as though trying to cleanse his soul of what he had witnessed. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, Jay showed me pictures he’d taken with his phone of some of the animals and filled the story in, bit by bit.

He had driven the last couple of miles on a rutted dirt road. The place was tucked into a hillside, and the pens were fenced with scraps of wood, barbed wire, and old doors, strung haphazardly together. Less than five minutes into his visit, he was standing on a mound next to one of the makeshift barriers, and the guy called to him from the hillside below, where he was rounding up the turkeys. The guy was waving his arms and yelling. Finally, Jay made out the man’s words, “You need to move. You’re standing on top of Betsy.” Jay looked down, his feet sinking slowly, and he stepped back, off the spongy earth, and realized that a very large animal was buried just inches under the dirt. Paying a lot more attention, he began walking around the place, making mental notes of what he saw. In the pens were cows, goats, pigs, turkeys, and chickens, all in dismal shape. The cows were emaciated, their ribs sticking out, even the ones who looked pregnant. He didn’t see any hay on the property, not even the remnants that commonly cover the ground after a feeding; neither was there any other type of feed visible. The animals’ waste hadn’t been cleaned up in weeks or months, and there were dead and dying animals alongside the live ones. In the area where the guy did the slaughtering, there were filthy serrated knives and chain saws. A vat behind that area was filled with water, hides, and other remnants of the slaughters, and Jay said the smell throughout the place was atrocious.

Clearly he had more than a simple turkey rescue on his hands.
This was no ordinary backyard butcher—which in itself was an illegal operation. Something awful was going on, and Jay realized he had to “befriend” the guy so he could learn as much as possible about all that went on there.

So when the man, Manuel, boasted about his “show pigeons” and directed Jay to a shed to view them, Jay played along and went into the shed.

“The energy in there was terrifying,” he told me. “It stank like death and it was dark and dusty, with a little light coming in between the slats in the roof—just like in a murder mystery. I don’t know, Ellie, I just felt like I’d walked into the place where I was going to die.”