Post by CampWhippet on May 21, 2006 19:52:24 GMT -5
Each day's a trying one for animal-control staff
Euthanasia remains a frequent last resort when homeless animals outnumber the available beds
By Laura Giovanelli, Danielle Deaver and Brian Louis
JOURNAL REPORTERS
First of two parts
Late on a gray Saturday afternoon in early April, Matt Smith, the manager of the Forsyth County Animal Shelter, suddenly remembers one last thing he needs to do.
The skinny stray in kennel No. 11 on the left side. She had come in Monday morning in the back of an animal-control officer's truck. She has been at the shelter for the mandatory five-day wait, and now Smith needs to think about the possibility of more animals coming in. Quickly.
The dog's time is up.
"Go get her," Smith tells shelter worker Crystal Tilley. She grabs a leash and goes through the heavy metal door of the shelter's tech room. It latches behind her.
Click.
Tilley returns with a small chocolate-and-white dog that dances across the linoleum floor, her tail whipping happily. A syringe filled with liquid, clear and light blue, waits on the exam table.
The dog is too thin to be put up for adoption. Her vertebrae poke through her coat like the knuckles of a man's clenched fist. And she is a pit bull.
The kennels at the shelter are crowded with pit bulls. This one needs time that the shelter doesn't have today.
There are too many other animals, healthy animals, looking for homes.
Tilley hooks the dog's leash to a metal clip anchored in the wall. She drops a dog biscuit on the floor and the pit bull gobbles it down.
"Thank you, baby," Tilley says, scratching behind the dog's ears. She then sits, Indian-style, on a low metal scale and takes the pit bull in her arms. The dog licks Tilley's face as Smith searches for a vein on the left front paw.
"Hey, peanut head," Smith sings to her.
Found it. He slips a needle under the dog's skin, pushing it in, then out, then in. "Hey, little girl."
"She's so skinny," Tilley says, cradling the dog.
Within seconds, the pit bull's legs slip to the floor, followed by her head. Her tongue flops out of her mouth. Her eyes stay open, but by now she is unconscious. Tilley lays her down gently and gets another syringe, this one empty. She sticks it into the dog's heart, a process to let them know for certain that the animal is gone. The syringe twitches in time to the beat of the dog's fading heart.
Until it stops.
Tilley and Smith wait another few seconds and then ease the dog's body into a silvery black plastic bag and put it into a large garbage can outside the tech-room door.
It's over in about a minute, the last death of a long six days in a typical week at Forsyth County Animal Control.
The unnamed pit bull is the 84th animal to be euthanized this week at the shelter, a place where animals and the decisions about what to do with them, at best, come in as a steady stream and, at worst, as a flood.
Behind the animals is a small crew of workers and volunteers who hold on tight to being human and humane, fighting to keep their sanity in such a current of life-and-death choices.
It goes on every day.
The center of the universe
The small, well-worn square that the shelter staff calls the tech room is the center of the animal-control staff's universe.
There are shelves full of vitamins, syringes, boxes of sponges and bottles of rubbing alcohol. Sodium pentobarbital - the shelter's chemical of choice for euthanasia - and tranquilizers are locked in a small safe on the wall, the size of a medicine cabinet. Across the room sits a giant plastic box of dog biscuits.
Vaccines and the staff's stock of canned Diet Coke are stored in the small refrigerator near the front door.
Another door on the opposite wall leads to a dimly lighted back hall stacked with stainless-steel cat cages. Beyond the hall is a back door, where animal-control officers unload their cargo when they return from picking up strays, confiscated and abandoned animals.
The 15-by-15 foot room smells like a sharp mixture of urine and disinfectant, hope, worry and anxiety, animal and human.
In this room, dogs and puppies, kittens and cats are coaxed into posing for adoption photos. Vanilla-flavored rabies vaccines are squirted into their mouths. They are given names and shots. They are petted, prodded and poked. This is also where most animals euthanized at the shelter come to die.
In this room, time, life and death tick by, fast.
The sound of the door latch in the tech room is insistent. Another dog. Another cat. Another stray. Another dilemma.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Staffers have attempted to cheer things up. They pose adoptable animals for digital pictures on a plastic white chair covered with flowered sheets, draping cats with silk flower leis and coaxing perked ears out of scared dogs. They have brushed over the institutional green cement walls and cabinets with coats of cream and lavender paint.
Smith heard somewhere that those colors are supposed to be calming.
More than anyone else at the shelter, Smith, 36, bears the burden of deciding which animals will live and which will die.
Two years ago, the shelter was weathering attacks by local animal activists, who complained about a euthanasia rate of 86 percent. New staff, a new director and a push for more adoptions have reduced that rate to 77 percent.
That's the statistic. A number. For Smith and the shelter staff, the relentlessness of making and working those life-or-death decisions can be mind-numbing.
A box of kittens
It's Monday, midmorning. Paul Rushford carries a cardboard box to the shelter's front counter. It once held bottles of transmission fluid. Now it holds three kittens, two black and one gray, barely a week old, tiny and screaming.
Rushford tows junk cars for a living. The previous Friday, he was getting ready to move a rusted out car from a lot on Old Lexington Road when he heard crying inside. He found the kittens crawling around on the floorboard. He nursed them with a syringe and whole milk over the weekend, but now he needs to get them off his hands.
A few shelter workers circle around him as he explains his story. Each of them is cradling a kitten.
Someone gets Smith. He comes to the front and takes in the cooing women holding the tiny cats. The kittens' legs splay out helplessly, their tiny claws catching on the workers polo shirts like the finest of needles. They need their mother.
"We can give you a trap," Smith tells Rushford. "You can take them back and use them as bait to catch the mother cat."
Rushford shrugs. "I was just trying to keep them alive until today. I'm never home."
The box of kittens is taken into the tech room.
Click.
Smith, tall, lanky and intense, rubs his forehead. He's thinking.
He has managed the shelter for almost two years. He never finished college - couldn't handle the algebra - but he took some courses at Guilford Technical Community College.
His dark brown, nearly black hair is perpetually tousled, but his button-down shirts are always tucked neatly into his pants. His workday diet is Diet Coke and Winston Lights. He rarely seems to find the time to finish a smoke, stuffing half-burned butts into the ashtray balanced on top of an overturned dog crate in an outside corner the shelter staff use as a makeshift break room.
He doesn't enjoy the taste of Diet Coke, not exactly. It wakes him up the way black coffee does - bracing. It seems to fortify him for each decision.
Smith used to manage a nonprofit greyhound shelter in Guilford County. The willowy, graceful dogs there usually got adopted. They certainly were never euthanized for lack of space.
Here, Smith doesn't have that luxury.
Every day, the man who couldn't tackle variables juggles a complex equation with no absolute answer. The shelter has a fixed number of kennels and cages and an endless stream of unwanted cats and dogs. "Don't get too attached," he warns people at the shelter, but then, sometimes, he does.
"The thing is," he says, "where would you want to be when the world has given up on this animal?
Common sense tells him to euthanize the kittens today. They won't be able to be put up for adoption until they weigh 2 pounds, and that could be two months. They are vulnerable in every sense of the word - to diseases and to stress caused by the constant chant of dogs barking around them.
The women behind the front desk have already gotten attached to this batch, and Smith lets his heart get in the way.
For now, he puts the kittens in a cage.
Muffin is getting old
Ann Merritt comes through the shelter's front door about 11:15 a.m., her mind made up.
Merritt's husband died about a year ago. Their gold-and-black tabby was more his than hers, and as the months went by the 15-year-old cat kept her up at night crying. She began peeing on the carpet in Merritt's rented apartment carpet and in her bed. Merritt knew that Muffin was getting old and, she thought, sick.
She had gone through that with her dogs, watching them die on a vet's table after she decided to have them put down. She didn't want to do it again with Muffin, so she brought her to the shelter.
Merritt reaches the front desk and picks up a form.
Filling out this questionnaire does not guarantee that your pet will be placed into our adoption program. Due to space and time restraints this is not always possible.
Muffin goes through the door.
Click.
Smith knows that there probably aren't many adoptive parents for an aging feline, but this Monday morning there happens to be some room among the eight cat cages by the front door. He decides that Muffin will get a chance.
She is set on the cold, shiny metal exam table for shots. A shelter worker snaps a photo with the digital camera and hits the print button on a computer. Muffin now belongs to Forsyth County. She is carried off to her new home, No. 4, on the end of a top row of cat cages, with an information sheet clipped to the metal bars.
It is right by the front door. People browsing the cats up for adoption can't miss her.
Preparing for a heartworm test
Click.
The little golden dachshund mix with the wrinkled, worried face is thin, too thin, and terrified. She scratches a shelter worker as she is given vaccinations, wiggling mightily. She twists and turns as she is set on the exam table and, finally, she is knocked out with a quick jab of a syringe so she can be given a heartworm test.
She had been brought in a little earlier by a woman who said that she was a stray. She is named Danielle, and when she wakes up, she'll be put up for adoption.
Click.
A beagle mix is led into the tech room. The little dog, white splashed with black and tan, strains and dances on the end of a blue leash, searching for attention.
She has been there for five days after being dropped off as a stray. No one has claimed her. Today, because the shelter has more room and she seems friendly, she'll be put up for adoption, too.
She pulls back on her leash as far as she can, then stands up on her back legs, balancing on them like a circus animal and peering into cages. The dachshund is in one of them, sleeping off the tranquilizer.
Two shelter workers look down at the beagle and smile.
They add "Dancin'" to the name she had just been given, Della, and stop to scratch behind her small brown ears.
For this one quiet moment in the tech room, Dancin' Della stands perfectly still, determined to do nothing to cause the shelter workers to stop scratching her.
'They miss their mother'
It's nearly closing time, and the mewling gets louder, so shrill that it can be heard over the chant of cats crying in a back hall.
Smith takes an eyedropper and walks down the hall of cages until he reaches the next to last one, the cage with the newborn kittens in it. They crawl over each other and around the cage, into a small dish of formula and around the newspaper.
Smith dips the dropper into the bowl of formula. He coos to the kittens, then sighs. "It's just cruel. They miss their mother. They can't eat."
Giving up for the moment, he walks back to the tech room and starts searching shelves for a formula that might tempt them to eat. "Being able to try is really important to us because of everything else that goes on here," he says.
There's one other hope - find a mother cat, even if it's not their own mother, that will want to nurse the kittens. Smith is waiting on a call one of the shelter workers put out to a woman who may have one.
First the shelter must test the kittens for feline AIDS and feline leukemia, two incurable cat diseases. If the kittens have either, there is no point in trying to save them.
Tilley lays a gray kitten on the exam table.
She and Smith take turns trying to find a vein on the kitten's tiny leg. It is like trying to find a black cat in the dark.
The kitten shrieks as the two workers try to calm her. The tiny veins keep moving out of reach of the needle. The seconds stretch on. There. Three drops of blood, red as rubies, suspended in a syringe.
Inside the tech room, the kitten's test comes back negative. The kittens may be skinny and hungry, but they're healthy. They can leave as soon as the shelter finds someone to take them.
If it can.
Waiting for tomorrow
At 5 p.m., the front door is locked. Most of the animal-control officers' trucks are in for the night, parked behind a tall metal gate. The staff heads for the time clock, leaving the tech room for the last time today.
Click.
Inside, the kittens continue to wail. Muffin curls up in her cage.
Danielle lies sleeping in the dark tech room, and Dancin' Della rests in the main kennel, waiting for tomorrow with the other dogs up for adoption. They've made it this far.
Coming Monday: Circumstances help dictate life or death for two dogs, a cat and three kittens.
www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137836223359&path=&s=
Euthanasia remains a frequent last resort when homeless animals outnumber the available beds
By Laura Giovanelli, Danielle Deaver and Brian Louis
JOURNAL REPORTERS
First of two parts
Late on a gray Saturday afternoon in early April, Matt Smith, the manager of the Forsyth County Animal Shelter, suddenly remembers one last thing he needs to do.
The skinny stray in kennel No. 11 on the left side. She had come in Monday morning in the back of an animal-control officer's truck. She has been at the shelter for the mandatory five-day wait, and now Smith needs to think about the possibility of more animals coming in. Quickly.
The dog's time is up.
"Go get her," Smith tells shelter worker Crystal Tilley. She grabs a leash and goes through the heavy metal door of the shelter's tech room. It latches behind her.
Click.
Tilley returns with a small chocolate-and-white dog that dances across the linoleum floor, her tail whipping happily. A syringe filled with liquid, clear and light blue, waits on the exam table.
The dog is too thin to be put up for adoption. Her vertebrae poke through her coat like the knuckles of a man's clenched fist. And she is a pit bull.
The kennels at the shelter are crowded with pit bulls. This one needs time that the shelter doesn't have today.
There are too many other animals, healthy animals, looking for homes.
Tilley hooks the dog's leash to a metal clip anchored in the wall. She drops a dog biscuit on the floor and the pit bull gobbles it down.
"Thank you, baby," Tilley says, scratching behind the dog's ears. She then sits, Indian-style, on a low metal scale and takes the pit bull in her arms. The dog licks Tilley's face as Smith searches for a vein on the left front paw.
"Hey, peanut head," Smith sings to her.
Found it. He slips a needle under the dog's skin, pushing it in, then out, then in. "Hey, little girl."
"She's so skinny," Tilley says, cradling the dog.
Within seconds, the pit bull's legs slip to the floor, followed by her head. Her tongue flops out of her mouth. Her eyes stay open, but by now she is unconscious. Tilley lays her down gently and gets another syringe, this one empty. She sticks it into the dog's heart, a process to let them know for certain that the animal is gone. The syringe twitches in time to the beat of the dog's fading heart.
Until it stops.
Tilley and Smith wait another few seconds and then ease the dog's body into a silvery black plastic bag and put it into a large garbage can outside the tech-room door.
It's over in about a minute, the last death of a long six days in a typical week at Forsyth County Animal Control.
The unnamed pit bull is the 84th animal to be euthanized this week at the shelter, a place where animals and the decisions about what to do with them, at best, come in as a steady stream and, at worst, as a flood.
Behind the animals is a small crew of workers and volunteers who hold on tight to being human and humane, fighting to keep their sanity in such a current of life-and-death choices.
It goes on every day.
The center of the universe
The small, well-worn square that the shelter staff calls the tech room is the center of the animal-control staff's universe.
There are shelves full of vitamins, syringes, boxes of sponges and bottles of rubbing alcohol. Sodium pentobarbital - the shelter's chemical of choice for euthanasia - and tranquilizers are locked in a small safe on the wall, the size of a medicine cabinet. Across the room sits a giant plastic box of dog biscuits.
Vaccines and the staff's stock of canned Diet Coke are stored in the small refrigerator near the front door.
Another door on the opposite wall leads to a dimly lighted back hall stacked with stainless-steel cat cages. Beyond the hall is a back door, where animal-control officers unload their cargo when they return from picking up strays, confiscated and abandoned animals.
The 15-by-15 foot room smells like a sharp mixture of urine and disinfectant, hope, worry and anxiety, animal and human.
In this room, dogs and puppies, kittens and cats are coaxed into posing for adoption photos. Vanilla-flavored rabies vaccines are squirted into their mouths. They are given names and shots. They are petted, prodded and poked. This is also where most animals euthanized at the shelter come to die.
In this room, time, life and death tick by, fast.
The sound of the door latch in the tech room is insistent. Another dog. Another cat. Another stray. Another dilemma.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
Staffers have attempted to cheer things up. They pose adoptable animals for digital pictures on a plastic white chair covered with flowered sheets, draping cats with silk flower leis and coaxing perked ears out of scared dogs. They have brushed over the institutional green cement walls and cabinets with coats of cream and lavender paint.
Smith heard somewhere that those colors are supposed to be calming.
More than anyone else at the shelter, Smith, 36, bears the burden of deciding which animals will live and which will die.
Two years ago, the shelter was weathering attacks by local animal activists, who complained about a euthanasia rate of 86 percent. New staff, a new director and a push for more adoptions have reduced that rate to 77 percent.
That's the statistic. A number. For Smith and the shelter staff, the relentlessness of making and working those life-or-death decisions can be mind-numbing.
A box of kittens
It's Monday, midmorning. Paul Rushford carries a cardboard box to the shelter's front counter. It once held bottles of transmission fluid. Now it holds three kittens, two black and one gray, barely a week old, tiny and screaming.
Rushford tows junk cars for a living. The previous Friday, he was getting ready to move a rusted out car from a lot on Old Lexington Road when he heard crying inside. He found the kittens crawling around on the floorboard. He nursed them with a syringe and whole milk over the weekend, but now he needs to get them off his hands.
A few shelter workers circle around him as he explains his story. Each of them is cradling a kitten.
Someone gets Smith. He comes to the front and takes in the cooing women holding the tiny cats. The kittens' legs splay out helplessly, their tiny claws catching on the workers polo shirts like the finest of needles. They need their mother.
"We can give you a trap," Smith tells Rushford. "You can take them back and use them as bait to catch the mother cat."
Rushford shrugs. "I was just trying to keep them alive until today. I'm never home."
The box of kittens is taken into the tech room.
Click.
Smith, tall, lanky and intense, rubs his forehead. He's thinking.
He has managed the shelter for almost two years. He never finished college - couldn't handle the algebra - but he took some courses at Guilford Technical Community College.
His dark brown, nearly black hair is perpetually tousled, but his button-down shirts are always tucked neatly into his pants. His workday diet is Diet Coke and Winston Lights. He rarely seems to find the time to finish a smoke, stuffing half-burned butts into the ashtray balanced on top of an overturned dog crate in an outside corner the shelter staff use as a makeshift break room.
He doesn't enjoy the taste of Diet Coke, not exactly. It wakes him up the way black coffee does - bracing. It seems to fortify him for each decision.
Smith used to manage a nonprofit greyhound shelter in Guilford County. The willowy, graceful dogs there usually got adopted. They certainly were never euthanized for lack of space.
Here, Smith doesn't have that luxury.
Every day, the man who couldn't tackle variables juggles a complex equation with no absolute answer. The shelter has a fixed number of kennels and cages and an endless stream of unwanted cats and dogs. "Don't get too attached," he warns people at the shelter, but then, sometimes, he does.
"The thing is," he says, "where would you want to be when the world has given up on this animal?
Common sense tells him to euthanize the kittens today. They won't be able to be put up for adoption until they weigh 2 pounds, and that could be two months. They are vulnerable in every sense of the word - to diseases and to stress caused by the constant chant of dogs barking around them.
The women behind the front desk have already gotten attached to this batch, and Smith lets his heart get in the way.
For now, he puts the kittens in a cage.
Muffin is getting old
Ann Merritt comes through the shelter's front door about 11:15 a.m., her mind made up.
Merritt's husband died about a year ago. Their gold-and-black tabby was more his than hers, and as the months went by the 15-year-old cat kept her up at night crying. She began peeing on the carpet in Merritt's rented apartment carpet and in her bed. Merritt knew that Muffin was getting old and, she thought, sick.
She had gone through that with her dogs, watching them die on a vet's table after she decided to have them put down. She didn't want to do it again with Muffin, so she brought her to the shelter.
Merritt reaches the front desk and picks up a form.
Filling out this questionnaire does not guarantee that your pet will be placed into our adoption program. Due to space and time restraints this is not always possible.
Muffin goes through the door.
Click.
Smith knows that there probably aren't many adoptive parents for an aging feline, but this Monday morning there happens to be some room among the eight cat cages by the front door. He decides that Muffin will get a chance.
She is set on the cold, shiny metal exam table for shots. A shelter worker snaps a photo with the digital camera and hits the print button on a computer. Muffin now belongs to Forsyth County. She is carried off to her new home, No. 4, on the end of a top row of cat cages, with an information sheet clipped to the metal bars.
It is right by the front door. People browsing the cats up for adoption can't miss her.
Preparing for a heartworm test
Click.
The little golden dachshund mix with the wrinkled, worried face is thin, too thin, and terrified. She scratches a shelter worker as she is given vaccinations, wiggling mightily. She twists and turns as she is set on the exam table and, finally, she is knocked out with a quick jab of a syringe so she can be given a heartworm test.
She had been brought in a little earlier by a woman who said that she was a stray. She is named Danielle, and when she wakes up, she'll be put up for adoption.
Click.
A beagle mix is led into the tech room. The little dog, white splashed with black and tan, strains and dances on the end of a blue leash, searching for attention.
She has been there for five days after being dropped off as a stray. No one has claimed her. Today, because the shelter has more room and she seems friendly, she'll be put up for adoption, too.
She pulls back on her leash as far as she can, then stands up on her back legs, balancing on them like a circus animal and peering into cages. The dachshund is in one of them, sleeping off the tranquilizer.
Two shelter workers look down at the beagle and smile.
They add "Dancin'" to the name she had just been given, Della, and stop to scratch behind her small brown ears.
For this one quiet moment in the tech room, Dancin' Della stands perfectly still, determined to do nothing to cause the shelter workers to stop scratching her.
'They miss their mother'
It's nearly closing time, and the mewling gets louder, so shrill that it can be heard over the chant of cats crying in a back hall.
Smith takes an eyedropper and walks down the hall of cages until he reaches the next to last one, the cage with the newborn kittens in it. They crawl over each other and around the cage, into a small dish of formula and around the newspaper.
Smith dips the dropper into the bowl of formula. He coos to the kittens, then sighs. "It's just cruel. They miss their mother. They can't eat."
Giving up for the moment, he walks back to the tech room and starts searching shelves for a formula that might tempt them to eat. "Being able to try is really important to us because of everything else that goes on here," he says.
There's one other hope - find a mother cat, even if it's not their own mother, that will want to nurse the kittens. Smith is waiting on a call one of the shelter workers put out to a woman who may have one.
First the shelter must test the kittens for feline AIDS and feline leukemia, two incurable cat diseases. If the kittens have either, there is no point in trying to save them.
Tilley lays a gray kitten on the exam table.
She and Smith take turns trying to find a vein on the kitten's tiny leg. It is like trying to find a black cat in the dark.
The kitten shrieks as the two workers try to calm her. The tiny veins keep moving out of reach of the needle. The seconds stretch on. There. Three drops of blood, red as rubies, suspended in a syringe.
Inside the tech room, the kitten's test comes back negative. The kittens may be skinny and hungry, but they're healthy. They can leave as soon as the shelter finds someone to take them.
If it can.
Waiting for tomorrow
At 5 p.m., the front door is locked. Most of the animal-control officers' trucks are in for the night, parked behind a tall metal gate. The staff heads for the time clock, leaving the tech room for the last time today.
Click.
Inside, the kittens continue to wail. Muffin curls up in her cage.
Danielle lies sleeping in the dark tech room, and Dancin' Della rests in the main kennel, waiting for tomorrow with the other dogs up for adoption. They've made it this far.
Coming Monday: Circumstances help dictate life or death for two dogs, a cat and three kittens.
www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137836223359&path=&s=
