Couple Work Miracles, Save Abandoned Dogs : Rescue: Utah couple has found homes for 1,800 sick, blind and old golden retrievers since program started six years ago.

Every so often, Bill and Mickie Britton get a card in the mail with a little pocket change taped to the back. The cards are from a blind girl trying to say thanks for a miracle.

The Brittons say their lives--and backyard--are full of such wonders. The only problem is cleaning up after them.

The Brittons run the Companion Golden Retriever Rescue Program, a nonprofit business operating on a shoestring and lots of good will with only one goal: finding homes for abandoned dogs.

“Dogs are very big medicine,” said Britton, a 64-year-old retired government worker and disabled veteran, a dog at either hand. “The therapy of having a dog in your life is just out of this world.”

Britton has found homes for sick dogs, blind dogs and old dogs--1,800 in all, and not just retrievers, since the rescue program was started in his home six years ago. He can prove it, too--half a dozen photo albums stuffed with Polaroids of his canine charges crowd a corner of the mantel.

A medical bill collection manager during the day, Mickie Britton spends her nights arranging for dogs or making pickups. Friends consider her the backbone of the organization, while Bill is seen as an idea-a-minute man with a knack for getting things done.

Witness the 2,000 tennis balls (something for the retrievers to, well, retrieve) donated by Pepsi Cola, or the hundreds of old Primary Children’s hospital blankets lining the four kennels in the basement.

Bill long ago gave up trying to grow a lawn. His backyard is covered with hay--donated, of course--to make daily cleanup a little easier. Dog runs were donated. Ditto the truck in the driveway.

The $2,500 needed to register as a nonprofit corporation? Provided by a local gynecologist and golden retriever owner. And Bill skirted ordinances requiring a kennel license by finagling a noncompliance permit.

Every day, he said, the mail brings a letter “from one of my dogs,” and a check or two. Dog food is bought below wholesale, and vets give them discount rates.

Britton is a walking conundrum with a gruff, Texas drawl. A combat soldier in World War II and Korea, he’s seen people do horrible things to one another. So he’s placed his faith in canines.

“There’s people I’d like to kill ‘cause of their cruelty to animals. But a dog loves you whether you’ve got money in the bank or not,” he said, his eyes misting.

“If you had no home and had to sleep in the gully, that dog would lie down beside you and be just as happy.”

Britton has no shortage of stories of man’s inhumanity to beast. But he also can reel off dozens of tales with happy endings.

A certified animal behaviorist, he has placed a number of dogs with disabled veterans and other handicapped individuals--including Remington, a companion retriever to 32-year-old Barbara DeMent of Kearns.

DeMent was barely able to get around the house after radical surgery five years ago. Often alone, she lost her will to live.

Her family, in desperation, got her Remington--an abandoned dog trained by Britton--who helps her negotiate stairs, brings her the phone and answers the door.

“I don’t know what I’d do without him,” DeMent said. “If I need help getting up and down the stairs, I can call him over and he’ll let me hold onto his collar and pull me up.”

Another dog went to the little blind girl, who was 5 years old when her family asked for a dog for her two years ago, Britton said. He gave her an old dog that had “outlived its master” because the family could not afford to pay for it. Since then, he says, the girl has sent several notes each year, all taped with change.

Any visit with Britton is interrupted by phone calls--some from people looking for dogs, others from area animal shelters. Virtually every shelter in Utah--and dozens in surrounding states--know whom to call when they’ve got a stray golden, and all of them list him as a last resort.

Britton readily admits he can’t save all the dogs, but his philosophy is simple: The ones he does save make a difference in people’s lives.