Teams of Rescuers Prove to Be Dogs’ Best Friends : Pets: Each volunteer group is devoted to saving a specific breed. The animals are cleaned and cared for, then new homes are found for them.

Janelle Rosen wanted a dog. Her children, Nathan, 8, and Sarah, 6--and even her husband, Robert--had been badgering her about getting one since they moved a year ago to an Agoura Hills house with a big back yard. Rosen read about the Akita, a large husky Japanese breed known as the “yuppie puppy” that has become a trendy family pet and costs as much as $900.

During her research on Akitas, she found a brochure for a volunteer team of local people who generally go out to “save” expensive purebred dogs and find good homes for them, although some rescuers save even mutts. She called Barbara Bouyet, founder and full-time volunteer director of the Akita Rescue Society of America in Thousand Oaks.

“They asked us to come in to be interviewed; it was like adopting a child,” Rosen said. “We had to be trained how to raise Akitas.”

The family passed scrutiny and adopted an Akita with a brown face and white body named Diamond, who had been beaten by its previous owner. The Rosens got the dog--cleaned, neutered, licensed and physically fit--for $150.

More than 300 volunteers in Southern California have formed the loosely knit, Fillmore-based Humane Animal Rescue Team, or H.A.R.T. People who favor a specific kind of dog will comb classified ads, search animal shelters and even pick up injured animals on freeways and find good homes for them. This network of dog rescuers--with a 75,000-name mailing list, a computer help line and a good working relationship with animal shelters--serves as a model for similar groups cropping up throughout the country.

So far, groups have been formed to save 128 different breeds, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, from basset hounds to keeshonds, miniature poodles to komondors--and yes, even mutts.

The rescuers save old, crippled, abused, abandoned, lost and vicious animals. But most of the dogs that they find are young, healthy purebreds slated to be put to sleep at animal shelters because of severe crowding. And the cost for a purebred obtained from a rescue team is often cheaper than a purebred from a shelter, whose charge includes medical fees.

The San Fernando Valley and Ventura County are home to a majority of the volunteers who make up teams interested in 96 different breeds, said Suzanne Kane, H.A.R.T. founder.

The rescuers say they save hundreds of dogs a month, but more than 18 million dogs are killed by shelters every year. Many major breeds such as Afghans, cocker spaniels and chows, as well as most breeds of cats, have no special team involved in saving them.

“It’s often frustrating, agonizing and costly to us, but when we place one happy dog in a good home, it’s worth it,” said Bouyet, whose Akita group is the only national breed rescue team, with chapters in eight states and Canada. Since last fall, her group collected $15,000 from fund-raisers and donations to place 47 dogs throughout the country after Kansas authorities closed down a puppy mill where dogs were bred in tiny cages stacked on top of each other. Homes have been found for 44 of the Akitas; three others are being kept in a Simi Valley kennel until they can be nursed back to health.

“We won’t let anyone adopt Maggie until she stops shaking when people approach. Look at her eyes, her tail. She is very depressed,” said Bouyet, giving a tour of the Simi Valley kennels where the Akitas are housed. “And over here is Tootsie. Look at her paw. It was caught in a wire fence and she almost chewed it off to get it out. She needs skin grafts.”

Rescue teams not only help find good homes for the animals; they’ll take dogs back if it doesn’t work out for any reason. Rescue teams were swamped in recent months with dogs left by troops sent to the Persian Gulf War.

Knowing his Army reserve unit was about to go overseas, Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Bentley worried about what to do with Shawnee, the loyal brindle-colored Akita that he got from the rescue team a year ago. He said his parents live in a small home in Chatsworth and are too old to take care of the large animal, kennel fees are far too expensive and his friends--however well-meaning--are unaware of an Akita’s difficult, independent personality.

“It was such a relief to know that the rescue team would have taken care of her until I got back,” said Bentley, a field artillery officer. “The last thing I needed to hear was that she escaped from a friend’s house and got hit by a car trying to go home.”

Luckily, the war ended before Bentley was called, but every couple of months he brings Shawnee back to the kennels where the rescue team first matched him up with the dog. Shawnee was found at an animal shelter weighing a scrawny 30 pounds instead of a normal 90, and the Akita group paid for intravenous feeding to help the dog recover.

“We had Shawnee for months and she wouldn’t go to anyone until she met Doug and the two really took to each other,” said Bouyet, who promised to take Shawnee on visits to Bentley’s parents and take the dog out for fast-food hamburgers if Bentley was sent to the Gulf. “We all pitch in no matter what the cost. The well-being of the dog is our first priority.”

To find dog lovers such as Bentley, Akita owner Mark Sferas, who owns Master Graphics printing in Encino, donates the $700 in printing costs for Bouyet’s bimonthly Akita newsletter.

Another dog lover who takes her hobby to work, receptionist Bonnie Crystal of Sunland, uses her spare time to circle classified ads placed by people who have lost or found malamutes, large dogs that resemble wolves. She owns three--the most a Los Angeles resident can keep legally--and after suffering emotional burnout as an animal control worker, she devotes all her free time locating good homes for malamutes. Some animal shelter employees call her to bail out an animal before it’s destroyed.

Such last-minute tactics saved a lovable, pregnant malamute named Bear, now living in Burbank with Annamarie Maricle.

“She’s a goofy-looking, cute dog who loves children,” Maricle said. And when the puppies were born, Crystal helped with the births to assure that all nine survived. She nursed Bear back to health with goat’s milk and vitamins.

Although most rescue team members are merely dog lovers, Tina Dunn is also a kennel owner and malamute breeder in Simi Valley. The dogs collected by her team are never used in breeding because the animals are spayed or neutered before they are placed in new homes. She boards, cleans and feeds them without compensation until a home is found.

“The public has no idea how many nice breed dogs go to shelters and are destroyed every day,” Dunn said, picking dog hairs from her clothes as she grooms a blond Malamute named Shadow. “Most people see a cute dog in the window and decide to get it without ever knowing how to properly care for that type of dog. Every breed is different.”

To avoid impulse buying, Dunn first tries to talk the prospective malamute owner out of taking it. Recently, she spent three hours talking to Joe Tuttobene of Mission Viejo about care and feeding. He visited her kennels and fell in love with Shadow, a previously abused dog.

The rescue team previously had erred by placing Shadow with an owner who ended up mistreating the dog. When the team took the dog back, Shadow was 41 pounds instead of a healthy 90.

“I was seething inside. We obviously misjudged that family, but at least we got the dog back,” said Dunn, who wouldn’t give up Shadow again until the dog regained weight. So, for five weeks, Tuttobene called to see how Shadow was doing and drove three hours round-trip a few times to visit.

“I could’ve gone to a shelter but I’d never have someone who cared so much as these rescue people do,” said Tuttobene, who got Dunn’s name from friends involved on the Doberman rescue team.

For a family looking for a dog, Dunn recommends going to dog shows and asking about various breeds. She said animal shelters have beautiful dogs, but the animals are not kept very long before being destroyed. Breed rescuers keep dogs until they learn about odd quirks in their characters and then screen possible owners to find the best homes. A list of rescue teams can be found at most veterinarians’ offices in the Muttmatchers Messenger.

A H.A.R.T newsletter listing adoptable animals, the Muttmatchers Messenger is the clearinghouse for all rescue teams. H.A.R.T.-Muttmatchers also runs a 24-hour hot line that gets about 50 calls a day, said editor Suzanne Kane of Fillmore, a former parole agent.

Kane said rescuers are dedicated, but “we can’t scream and cry every time we miss saving a dog by a few minutes; we just go on to the next one. It’s such a waste of life, and they don’t know what’s going on,” said Kane, whose special interest is collies, Labrador retrievers, coonhounds and mutts.

Kane said H.A.R.T. also gives temporary housing to pets belonging to battered women or hospitalized senior citizens and provides food or medical care to pets of the homeless. The team has a budget of $50,000. It receives a $12,000 grant from United Way and the rest is collected by donations.

Kane devotes 14 hours every day to the rescue effort. On a recent typical day, she drove to the West Valley Animal Shelter to pick up a collie that suffered a leg injury when hit by a car. Kane took the dog to a veterinarian who treated the leg for gangrene and discovered that the dog was deaf, which Kane suspected. Then Kane left the dog with a rescue team member until a permanent home is found.

Sometimes rescues are dangerous. An Akita attacked one rescuer, who required 100 stitches.

“The rescue team volunteers are incredible people,” said Dunn, who also sends her five-person kennel staff to save animals from being put to sleep at shelters. “Sometimes the stories end very nicely.”

On a recent Saturday, Dunn handed over a tail-wagging Diamond to Janelle Rosen and her family. Nathan buried his face in the fur and told the dog about the doghouse he had built. Sarah said she couldn’t wait for Diamond to meet their two cats, Tigger and Tony. Dunn smiled as Diamond licked her face one last time.

“I heard in Japan that mothers trust these dogs so much they leave their children home alone and the dog takes care of them,” Rosen told her husband as they walked to the car.

Nathan piped up: “Does that mean we won’t have to have a baby-sitter anymore?”

The H.A.R.T.-Muttmatchers phones for breed rescue are staffed between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays at (805) 524-4542 or (805) 527-4774.)