‘Canine Air’ Flies Unwanted Puppies to New Homes Back East

On a sunny morning the Espanola Animal Shelter is bursting at the seams.

Two squirming, squealing litters of five puppies each--one dumped at a landfill, the other in a frontyard--have taken the last available cages.

The newest arrival, freshly bathed, de-ticked and wrapped in a towel, is being cradled by a staffer.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with you, puppy,” says shelter director Diana Wells with a sigh.

It’s an all-too-familiar problem for which the northern New Mexico shelter has an unusual solution: flying puppies to a city 2,000 miles away for adoption.

The black, brown and blond fur balls of indeterminate heritage will become prized family pets in an area north of Boston that has a shortage of newborn mutts.

Since the end of 1994, the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Mass., has been flying in 8- to 14-week-old mixed-breed puppies from shelters in New Mexico, Nebraska and Virginia.

“We’re going to the airport sometimes as often as three times a week,” says Cindi Shapiro, president of the Salem shelter and the program’s founder.

About 1,500 of the 4,000 animals the shelter adopts out annually are part of what it calls the “Puppies Across America Rescue Program.”

According to the Humane Society of the United States, the Salem shelter is the only one that imports puppies by air on such a massive scale.

Other shelters may occasionally put puppies on planes in emergencies, and a rescue group in Puerto Rico flies adult dogs to several U.S. shelters, including Salem. The other major puppy importer, the North Shore Animal League in Port Washington, N.Y., uses vans to bring puppies from Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina.

In Massachusetts, aggressive spay-and-neuter programs, along with lifestyle changes--more condominium- and apartment-living, for example--have dramatically decreased the number of unwanted puppies left at shelters in the last decade.

“It’s one of those things. You brush your teeth in the morning, you send your child to school, you get your dog spayed,” Shapiro says.

Many families want mixed-breed dogs because they’re healthier and more even-tempered--and less expensive--than their purebred counterparts.

And Shapiro says many families insist on having puppies, not older dogs.

It’s not only sensible to import them, “it’s morally irresponsible for us to be doing anything else, because we have the resources,” Shapiro says.

The Salem shelter pays the costs of shipping--about $30 per puppy--and charges adoption fees of $100 to $125, which includes spaying or neutering. Shapiro says that by the time the shelter’s other expenses are figured in, the program breaks even.

If the Espanola shelter didn’t export the puppies, it would have to kill many of them.

Located on the outskirts of this city of 10,000 about 25 miles north of Santa Fe, the small, city-owned shelter draws from a huge, largely rural area. It takes in about 2,500 dogs a year. About one-third are adopted out; nearly all the rest are destroyed.

“Pets are so disposable because there’s such an overpopulation,” Wells says.

She says low-cost spay-and-neuter clinics such as those offered at the Espanola shelter have made some inroads, and “we aren’t seeing so many return litters from the same people.”

And, like the other shelters that feed the Salem program, the Espanola operation tries to make sure mama is spayed--if she’s known--before the puppies are exported.

Still, the problem remains enormous. And since June 1996, more than 200 Espanola puppies--in batches of a dozen or more--have caught Boston-bound midnight flights out of Albuquerque.

The puppies first spend at least two weeks in Espanola-area foster homes to ensure they’re healthy.

However, the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington, wonders whether flying puppies cross-country simply shifts a problem from one area to another.

“My concern is . . . is it a shell game to some extent?” says Martha Armstrong, the organization’s vice president for companion animals.

While there may be a shortage of mixed-breed puppies, Massachusetts shelters have plenty of slightly older dogs--6 months and up--that might be adopted if puppies weren’t available, she says.

And she suggests that such importation programs might reward irresponsible behavior by pet owners and remove incentive for local governments to enact--and enforce--tough animal-control laws.

The Massachusetts shelter began its puppy-import program with the Midwest Animal Shelter in Auburn, Neb., a town of about 3,500. The no-kill shelter--meaning it keeps unadopted animals, rather than euthanize them--draws animals from neighboring Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

“People will call and say they hear we take puppies,” says Carol Wheeler, who operates the shelter on a 40-acre farm with her husband.

It was their daughter, a lawyer in Philadelphia, who first hooked up the Salem shelter with her parents’ operation. Since then, they have sent more than 2,000 puppies to Boston.

“We have a great deal of problem placing dogs locally,” Wheeler says. “This is a sparsely populated area, and way too many dogs.”

The same is true in Meherrin, Va., about 65 miles southwest of Richmond, where Sandy Wyatt is president of a no-kill shelter that gets lots of castoff hunting dogs.

“We do very few adoptions out here. We probably averaged six last year--it’s so rural,” she says.

The little shelter has an aggressive adoption program, targeting Richmond, as well as shipping puppies to Massachusetts--200 so far this year.

“It’s the only thing that’s saved us. I would have to turn down litters and litters of puppies,” she says.