Little Boy Blue (21 page)

The American Humane Association launched a campaign in 2009 to try to extend gas-chamber bans across the country. So far, that campaign’s success is still a hope, not a certainty. One of the biggest challenges is simply getting information about what is happening inside some taxpayer-funded animal facilities— something I learned in my own research, too. When I asked national and state organizations for statistics about the county shelter where Blue was found, the statistics almost always differed from the ones that I got from the shelter itself. And at least I could verify that a gas chamber was being used there. Sometimes, major advocacy groups can’t even get that far.

Tracy Coppola of the American Humane Association explained it to me this way: “In most states, there isn’t a government agency that keeps records about which shelters are using gas chambers and which are not. If there even is any record keeping, it’s done at the county level, and a lot of these places are really rural. So it’s hard to know what’s actually going on. You’re sometimes dealing with things like shelters that have gas chambers but that are not using them right now because of public pressure. But the chamber is still there and ready to go. Is that a gas chamber shelter? It’s hard to quantify.”

I was able to verify, working county-by-county, that more than forty animal-control centers in the United States still have gas chambers. North Carolina, where Blue was found, far and away has the most, with twenty-two. Michigan is next, with seven or eight. Activists believe that Pennsylvania has at least five, and that Ohio, Louisiana, and Alabama each have a handful still in operation.

In some of these states, people who believe in rescue are working to create change at the local level. They’re no longer waiting for state lawmakers to enact a ban. One of my favorite examples of this is in Fayette County, Ohio, where Sheriff Vernon Stanforth fought for several years to get control of the county dog pound. He watched with disgust while warden after warden killed far more dogs than were saved, and he agreed with advocacy groups like Ohio’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that said conditions at the gas-chamber facility were disgusting. Finally, on October 18, 2010, a day that was about 50 degrees with partly sunny skies, Stanforth took over day-to-day command. He showed up not only with his badge and his gun, but also with a nice-sized backhoe. Its giant yellow arm crashed into the gas chamber as Stanforth told the local paper that from now on, dogs in the pound would be treated the same way that he treats his own. He promised to use lethal injection, and only when absolutely necessary. The pound’s new policy would be to work with rescue groups to encourage as many adoptions as possible.

“It’s really not all too complicated,” he told me a few months later by telephone. “As the saying goes, there is a new sheriff in town. We are now doing things the way that I believe they should be done.”

In other states where gas chambers remain legal, and where local advocates don’t have the benefit of being a modern-day Wyatt Earp, the fight to ban asphyxiation is waged in the halls of state legislatures. If the directors at the county facilities won’t change, advocates figure, then state laws must be passed and imposed on the county directors.

This is what has been going on in North Carolina for a number of years, in a fight that has raged since well before Blue was ever born. The advocates, so far, have been unsuccessful. They have instead learned that the legislature is a battlefield mined with so many other explosive animal-welfare issues that it is hard to even guess where the next bomb might get dropped.

It’s a little-reported fact, but many of the states where gas chambers are most prevalent are also the same states where big agribusiness and big pharmaceutical interests reign. The same lobbyists fighting to protect factory farms that keep cows, pigs, and chickens caged for their entire life spans, and the same lobbyists who work for pharmaceutical companies that use animals for medical experiments,
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are often the same lobbyists who work behind the scenes to defeat legislation that could help save dogs like Blue from gas chambers.

Advocates in North Carolina didn’t realize this when they set out to ban the gas chambers statewide in 2009, a year before Blue was born. They heralded the introduction of Davie’s Law—nicknamed for the whimpering puppy found in a trash bag at the dump after a failed gas-chamber session at Davie County Animal Shelter. Davie’s Law called for the dismantling, destruction, and removal of all gas chambers from animal shelters in the state. It would have required shelter dogs to be killed only by sodium pentobarbital, which is the drug that “puts dogs to sleep” without pain in veterinarian offices across America every day.

I learned about the attempt to pass Davie’s Law from the perspective of Michele King, a Board member of the North Carolina Coalition for Humane Euthanasia.

“I didn’t realize how many enemies these dogs had until that bill went up in 2009,” she told me by telephone. “All of these state agencies opposed it. The Farm Bureau, the state Association of County Commissioners—they all fought against it because they don’t want control over animals taken out of their hands. At one of the hearings, I walked in and saw at least two hundred people in this small committee room, all of them wearing Farm Bureau tags. I thought I was in the wrong place. I asked one of them, ‘Why are y’all here?’ I didn’t get the relationship between the Farm Bureau and shelter dogs. At another hearing, one of the House representatives who co-sponsored the bill told me that in order to pass it, the volunteers trying to help shelter dogs would have to neutralize the entire Farm Bureau and the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, that they were the two biggest blocks. Now how the heck are we supposed to do that? These are huge, powerful groups. It’s a completely lopsided fight with these groups that have been around forever and that aren’t even thinking about the dogs.”

What people like King view as enemies of dogs like Blue are actually the well-funded, well-connected lobby for influential business interests. Well more than half of the beef, pork, and chicken consumed in America comes from factory farms controlled by fewer than a half dozen corporations. North Carolina has more factory farms than most other states—so many, actually, that in 1997, because of pollution and other concerns, a moratorium was placed on any more being built. Lobbyists for the companies that control factory farms don’t have any specific interest in the treatment of shelter dogs, since the dogs aren’t turned into hamburgers or chicken nuggets after they’re killed. However, big agribusiness does have an intense interest in any law that might affect the way animals can be legally confined and killed. The introduction of Davie’s Law, which was intended only to eliminate gas chambers like the one in the shelter where Blue was found, created shock waves of fear that lobbyists spread throughout the North Carolina farming community and well beyond. Everyday farmers even heard about Davie’s Law in states like Michigan that are hundreds of miles away. Fears were irrationally spread that all animals, not just homeless dogs, would have to be killed by lethal injection.

“In addition to the Farm Bureau, we also came up against a bunch of groups that are friendly with the American Kennel Club,” King told me, sounding downright exasperated. “It was just so shocking. All of these hunting and breeding groups, all of them have banded together to lobby against any type of animal welfare ordinance. They see it as a slippery slope, too. Hunters want to be able to breed their hunting dogs, and they don’t want to be told what to do with their animals when they’re done using them. Breeders don’t want to have to pay any kinds of fees or have any laws telling them what to do with their dogs, which they see as property instead of as living creatures. You see the names of these groups, and you think they would be on the side of the dogs, but they were not. The whole situation made my head spin.”

Davie’s Law died in committee. It was never voted upon by the full general assembly despite the fact that it had forty-five cosponsoring lawmakers, which is more than a quarter of North Carolina’s House and Senate combined.

As I heard the behind-the-scenes story about what happened in North Carolina, I realized that it sounded an awful lot like what I’d heard about in Connecticut, where the law was passed making it harder for rescue transports to enter the state—the law with a blatant exemption for pet stores. Forces seemed to be at work in back rooms, where people appeared to be cutting deals for industries that had more pull than rescue advocates. I found something similar happening in Pennsylvania, too. The state’s lawmakers also recently considered a law that would have banned gas chambers. It also ended up stalled in committee— by lobbyists for the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association. The PVMA wanted to maintain the legal ability to gas dogs who were violently out of control or difficult to inject, which, to me, seems like an awful lot of leeway for shelter directors who describe scared, submissive pups like Blue as potentially aggressive. I also couldn’t help but note that the PVMA wanted exemptions for “normal agricultural operations.” It might as well have been language right out of the playbook that outmaneuvered Davie’s Law from passing in North Carolina.

Then there is the money. Wherever lawmakers and lobbyists and activists are milling about, there is certainly going to be a trail of cash just waiting to be wallowed in and handed out and ultimately traced in the aftermath of a grand scandal. It’s the same trail almost every time. It usually ends with a big pile of tax dollars paying for things that hardworking citizens have no idea they are buying.

The issue of animal shelter gas chambers is no different. Places like the one where Blue was found are funded by taxpayer dollars. Records must be kept on how those dollars are spent. It seemed natural to me, after all I’d learned about the swirling politics, to get copies of the actual financial records from the more than forty counties where I had learned about gas chambers still being used.

I printed out my Freedom of Information Act letters from my home computer during the hours when Blue, Izzy, and Summer took their naps. I addressed all the envelopes at the same desk where I send out my annual Christmas cards. Then I carried my pile of mail in a shoe box over to the local post office. The middle-aged postman behind the counter dutifully scanned each of my letters and saw address after address of various animal shelters. After about the twenty-fifth letter, he looked up and caught my eye.

“Are you trying to find a dog?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I’m writing a book about my dog. He came from a kill shelter with a gas chamber. These letters are for other shelters that kill dogs in gas chambers, so I can make what they’re doing public, too.”

He took a moment to make sure he’d heard me correctly, nodded as if to say my cause was admirable, and then quipped, “I wish I could give you a discount on the postage.”

It took a few months to receive all of the responses. The final answer came only after I went a few rounds with a lawyer who represented a nonprofit group that a bunch of towns created to deal with homeless dogs in Colbert County, Alabama. Even though the nonprofit was funded by taxpayer dollars, the lawyer insisted that it wasn’t legally required to give me its annual budget. I had to send yet more Freedom of Information Act requests to the individual towns that funded the organization. I’m sure the local clerks in Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia, and Sheffield really appreciated that when my certified letters landed on their desks.

What I found when I added up all of the county budgets is that Americans are spending just shy of $15 million local tax dollars each year to fund animal-control facilities with gas chambers. That’s not chump change. It’s the kind of money that can boost entire industries. It’s what New York State gave farmers after Hurricane Irene washed away crops. It’s what a transit company paid to build a thirty-four-acre train terminal in Louisville, Kentucky. And it’s money that I have to believe most taxpayers— especially the dog lovers—have no idea is being spent in such a way.

I always thought of my tax dollars going to support local shelters that keep the majority of puppies and dogs safe until homes can be found. I knew that not every dog survived, but it never occurred to me that tax dollars would go to shelters like the one where Blue was found, that have a long record of killing nineteen of every twenty dogs in their care. It is anathema to me that anyone’s hard-earned money is financing a facility whose primary contribution to dogs like Blue is killing them as quickly as possible, especially in gas chambers that can cause them pain and fear. Yes, animal-control facilities have a broader mandate that includes public safety and many other things, and I understand that sometimes, finding homes for dogs has to take a backseat to other priorities. But when a facility’s kill rate is 95 percent year after year after year, it seems to me that taxpayers have a right to ask when, if ever, the adoption of dogs into homes is being given the attention it deserves.

And while I may have been naïve in my thinking, I most certainly am not alone. All across America, when I asked everyday people what happens to dogs and puppies inside of their local shelters, they told me the workers try to find the dogs good homes. I’m sure that is true in some communities, but in all of the same places where waitresses and gas-station attendants told me they thought their shelter was doing the right thing, rescue advocates told a different story.

“It’s not just North Carolina,” a marketing executive named Danielle Dunfee told me while I was with her in the Bahamas for a travel-writing assignment. “I work with a Labrador rescue group in South Florida. There is an owner surrender at one of the local shelters in Miami today, and when the owner surrenders the dog, they don’t have to wait to euthanize. They can kill it that day. I have to drive over to that shelter and get that dog out. It only has a few hours left, and it sounds like a really great dog.”
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Other rescue advocates told me that they receive the same responses from the general public in places that they know to be among the worst when it comes to high-kill rates.