‘They know what you’ve done for them’

A MAN SEATED next to me on a crosstown bus told me that when he started feeling really sorry for himself, he’d walk himself straight to the emergency room of the nearest hospital and just sit there, observing, until shame overtook the clammy grip of self-pity, and compassion overtook the punch-in-the-gut of shame.

I remembered that conversation with that New Yorker when, last August, I went too far inward and decided all was woe. Then the more useful thought occurred to me: Get outside yourself, you tedious ninny. So I packed a bag and drove 10 hours to Angel Canyon in Utah.

That’s where the country’s largest sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals is located, about 1,800 of them at any given time, dogs and cats and birds and horses and goats and rabbits who’ve been saved from circumstances that were often so appalling, the details were too wrenching for me to hear about.

For several days I was a dust-coated volunteer with big globs of sweat on my shirt, massaging the aching muscles of elderly dogs and taking lonely canine newcomers home with me at night to my motel room.

By the time I got back to L.A., I was a tolerable human being again, rescued from the vulgarity of self-indulgence by animals who themselves had been rescued from the far more profound abyss of cruelty and indifference.

Six years ago I was doing volunteer work for the Heart and Soul Animal Sanctuary in New Mexico, raising money to keep the place going.

Two weeks before Christmas we had a silent auction. About seven or eight young dogs had been brought in by a local shelter, and one looked so depressed, and so beleaguered by the others pouncing her, that I scooped her up and let her sleep on my chest for the rest of the evening. Chooch had severely bowed legs from lack of nutrition, and so I fostered her to try to get her healthy again so she would be adoptable. Her legs eventually straightened and she was eventually adopted -- by me.

I would keep on adopting if I could; I wouldn’t even count the number. I’ve never had a pet who wasn’t someone else’s castoff, and I’ve never been more appreciative that they were thrown my way, however heartlessly. But my appreciation for them seems a limp and pallid thing compared to that of any of my pets for me.

Adopted animals “are eternally grateful. They know what you’ve done for them,” one of my vets told me when I asked why Callie, another of my foundlings, practically sang arias in my presence and gave me misty-eyed looks that put me in mind of Nancy Reagan gazing at Ronnie.

And we know what they’ve done for us, all of us who live with them. Beyond this, anything I might say now by way of further explication would taste like a bowl of sugared mush, so I’ll take leave of the sentiment by saying only this: They open up the world of emotion to you, expand its boundaries, make it possible for you to make a fool of yourself and not care a whit.

Once you’ve lived with animals, there’s no going back. They’re members of the immediate family, and life feels bereft without them. A huge number of pets move into our homes during the holidays, more than at any other time of the year, as Chooch moved into mine.

On Monday, I heard, for the first time, about a huge international adoption drive, Home 4 the Holidays, that began four years ago in Southern California and has since spread with startling effectiveness and speed to 1,300 shelters in 20 countries.

Its creator is Michael Arms, president of the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, and its celebrity spokeswoman is Diane Keaton.

Arms had a mission: He wanted the animals going into new homes around Christmas to be “the orphaned ones, those in shelters, rather than those from puppy mills and backyard breeders. I wanted to really bring attention to all the wonderful animals who are looking for homes, who don’t want to keep waking up behind bars.”

So far, more than 300,000 animals have been adopted worldwide as part of the Home 4 the Holidays drive -- which runs from early November to just after New Year’s -- and Arms has a goal this year of adding 225,000 more to that figure. Only 2% of animals adopted from the program have been returned, a much smaller percentage, says Arms, than the throwaways who have been purchased from pet stores or breeders “often on impulse, because they’re cute,” and later dumped or delivered to shelters.

Keaton signed on three years ago to fundraise during the annual telethon after visiting the animal center and recognizing, she says, that “it was the model for how to run a shelter. For a big operation, this is the best I’ve seen. They have these large animal hospitals, and outreach programs like Animeals -- can you believe that? Animeals! -- where they take pet food to homebound people, and a therapeutic riding center for the disabled. I’d once had an inflated view that my sister and I would be able to create an animal sanctuary here in L.A., if we could just raise the money. Well, of course we couldn’t. So I went to Helen Woodward and got involved there.”

That makes me like Diane Keaton even more than I already did, the way I more than like Betty White, Doris Day and Tippi Hedren and the handful of other movie stars who put their fame to work for something other than self-promotion and get out there to promote animal welfare.

If ever I were in their presence, I imagine I would trill arias to them and follow them around with moist, adoring brown eyes, just like my dog Callie.

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Barbara King is the editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com.