Alley Animals Have Friend in Baltimore : Strays: She works while most people sleep, dodging drug dealers and carjackers to feed and rescue cats and dogs. About 100 are in foster care, awaiting adoption.

It’s shortly after midnight and Alice Arnold is making her rounds in still another trash-strewn alley, an angel of mercy in sometimes dangerous territory.

Spotting a pair of glowing eyes lurking under a partially open garage door, she stops her car. Dressed in sweat pants and sneakers, the slight little woman fills a saucepan with pet food, utters a quick high-pitched call to the stray cat, and tosses the food under the door.

Alice Arnold sleeps by day and prowls some of Baltimore’s darkest alleys by night, feeding and rescuing abandoned or injured dogs and cats.

Ten years ago she organized a group called Alley Animals and now devotes full time to her cause, with the help of a half-dozen volunteers. Her food, clothing and lodging are provided by donations.

Pam Ristau, one of the volunteers, recalls that someone once gave Arnold a coat after hearing about her work, and she gave it to a homeless person she thought needed it more.

“She won’t buy things,” Ristau said. “Everything goes to the animals.”

Arnold’s working hours are from midnight until dawn, her workplace the city’s 280 alleys, some of them no place for a woman after dark.

She has been shot at by drug dealers, beaten up by a would-be carjacker and threatened by junkies.

“The violence just gets worse and worse,” Arnold said. “In the summertime, it’s typical to hear gunfire all over the place. You get fairly used to it.

“I usually keep a very low profile. I slip in and slip out.”

The tires on Arnold’s beat-up 1979 Toyota usually have to be replaced every few months because of the broken glass and other debris littering the alleys. Flashlights, canisters of tear gas and cans of cat food line the dashboard. Pet carriers, cages and old towels are piled in the hatchback.

Ristau became a volunteer after her husband, Mark, heard about Alley Animals on the radio.

“It only takes one alley run to see what the animals endure down there and make you want to do it again,” she said.

Ristau, who lives in Abingdon, Md., said she has experienced her share of encounters with drug addicts loitering in the alleys late at night.

“We’ve gone to a feeding site, and they use our headlights to shoot in their veins,” she said. “They want to shock you, make you afraid of them.”

Humans pose the greatest risk to abandoned animals, both women say. Children sometimes shoot them with pellet guns, and others train their dogs to savage stray cats.

“The cruelty still surprises me,” Arnold said. “I don’t understand where it comes from, how they can enjoy doing something to an innocent animal.”

About half of the animals rescued have to be put to sleep because they are too ill or savage. But the group tries to find homes for as many animals as possible. About 100 cats and dogs are in foster care waiting to be adopted.

“There are not enough good homes out there for these animals,” Ristau said. “Rather than see them out on the streets suffering, I’d rather they be euthanized.”

Other well-meaning but misinformed groups spay or neuter stray animals, said Nicholas Gilman, field representative with the Humane Society of the United States in Washington. But without sufficient space, he said, they often end up releasing them back on the streets.

“It makes sure that the animal does not reproduce, but it does not end the suffering of that animal,” he said. “The animals they care for temporarily will be released on the street where they will be deprived of food and shelter.”

Arnold agrees that euthanasia is often the kindest way to help an abandoned animal.

“If you need to give up your animals, don’t open up a back door and abandon them,” she said. “Take them to a humane shelter. A humane death is better than starvation and suffering in the alleys.”