They’re Soft, They’re Lovable and They’re Doomed
The recent arrival of spring means just one thing in my house.
“Mommy, can we get a puppy? Pleeeeeeeeeease.”
Long ago, in a time far away, I made what ranks near the top of the list of stupid parent mistakes.
We were spending a rainy day at the Northridge mall, ogling puppies in pet-shop cages, when my children asked for the umpteenth time why we couldn’t, please, please, please, get a puppy.
“Maybe,” I answered wearily, desperate to shut them up. “Maybe . . . but not until spring.”
What was I thinking, that spring would never come? Well sure enough, March 20 rolled around and was duly noted by my three children, who are now engaged in a relentless, tag-team assault on my willpower and common sense.
It’s not that I’ve got anything against puppies. It’s just that we’ve already had puppies . . . and now we have dogs. Two big dogs, who keep us constantly entertained with all manner of cute tricks, like breaking through a plate-glass picture window to chase a cat, shredding the cushions on our patio furniture and stealing roast turkey from a dinner table set for company.
They’re quite a lovable pair--a Dalmatian with a weak bladder and delicate kidneys whose medical bills and special diet cost more than I spend on my children’s health care. And a dumb, but very sweet, 85-pound Rottweiler mix, who thinks she’s still a puppy and will clamber onto any available bed, couch or lap to be cuddled and stroked.
Yet my children want a puppy--something little and soft that they can carry around and dote on. And I must admit, I’m beginning to feel that maternal urge kicking in.
How could I forget those puddles on the carpet, the chewed-up slippers, the hours spent shivering on the lawn in the middle of the night, waiting for Puppy to do his business?
I’m in a fight for my life here, and I’m desperate for ammunition.
*
In my search for an ally, I’m clearly barking up the wrong tree.
I’m on the phone with Kathy Helmkamp of Animal Rescue Volunteers. “It’s crazy to think we could handle three dogs, right?” I ask. “That’s a recipe for disaster, right?”
She hems and haws. . . . Helmkamp, it seems, owns seven dogs--all foundlings that she couldn’t bear to give up.
There’s Sasha, retrieved from the pound with her litter of nine. Helmkamp “helped her raise her babies,” then found homes for them.
And Gypsy, the feral dog she spent months trying to capture in the Chatsworth hills, “who absolutely adores me, but is scared of everyone else.”
And Yoda, the stray who’d been so badly abused, he needed plastic surgery to survive.
And there’s Hannah, Animal Rescue Volunteers’ “poster child.” The yellow Lab had been hit by a car and was near death when Helmkamp spotted her at the pound. Her group found a vet to fix the dog’s shattered pelvis, wire her broken jaw and implant a pacemaker to keep her heart beating. “She was a real project,” Helmkamp recalls. “But she was worth it.”
More than 50,000 dogs and cats--two-thirds of those who pass through the city’s animal shelters--are killed each year because they do not find homes.
Via lethal injection they are euthanized, put down, put to sleep. . . . Their bodies are carted out “by the barrelsful,” Helmkamp says.
Some are ill or injured, strays picked up after accidents or fights. Others are just unloved, abandoned by owners who’ve decided, for whatever reasons, that their pet doesn’t fit their lifestyle anymore.
“Sometimes they’re moving and they can’t take their pet with them,” said Peter Persic of the city’s Animal Services Department, which operates six shelters, including two in the Valley. “But we’ve also had people come in and say, ‘I’ve redecorated my house and the color of the dog doesn’t work with my new living room.’ ”
The overcrowded shelters can only promise each animal eight days to find a new home.
“We do everything that’s humanly possible to place these animals,” Persic said. “But the fact of the matter is there’s an avalanche of unwanted animals because people are not spaying or neutering their pets. . . . We could triple the size of our kennels and they would still be filled.”
That’s where animal rescue groups like Helmkamp’s come in. Some are called by shelter workers to save specific dogs; others canvass the shelters themselves, looking for animals that are not likely to make it out.
“Some of the groups are breed-specific,” Helmkamp said. “Some take the young, the beautiful, the highly adoptable. We take the sick, the injured, the old. . . . We take everything.”
Her group has almost 100 animals in its care right now, including a horse found wandering the streets of Sunland-Tujunga, emaciated and abused. They board their charges at the homes of volunteers and offer them for adoption each week at pet-supply stores in Northridge and Simi Valley.
More than 1,300 dogs and cats have found homes through Animal Rescue Volunteers in its two years, Helmkamp said. And every animal has been spayed or neutered first.
*
This is among the busiest times of year for rescue groups, because the animal birthrate explodes in the spring. “We call it ‘puppy season,’ ” a shelter worker says, because so many are abandoned on shelter steps each day.
“We’re talking baskets and baskets of puppies and kittens,” said the city’s chief veterinarian, Dr. Dena Mangiamele. “It’s not uncommon to have 40 puppies come in on one day . . . and that’s to a shelter that’s already filled to capacity.”
Those puppies crowd out older dogs, giving them less time to find new homes before facing death.
So, will one of those puppies go home with me? I’m standing firm for now, though it wouldn’t take much to weaken my resolve. A tiny pooch I saw cavorting last week at the East Valley shelter almost won me over, until I realized she was part-Saint Bernard.
And the dogs that go home with Animal Rescue volunteers this spring will wind up sharing space with another set of unwanted pets: Those cute, little bunnies and chicks that are showing up in Easter baskets today.
Columnist Scott Harris is on vacation. Times staff writer Sandy Banks will write occasional columns during his absence.
