Volunteers hit the road to save animals

Do you have any such organizations in your area? Maybe this is something I could do to help save pet lives. ---BBB

Friday, June 19, 2009
Volunteers hit the road to save animals
By Isabel Sanchez Of the Albuquerque Journal

The passengers: two black Labs whose owners in Santa Fe lost their home to foreclosure, a mixed breed found in a Hobbs ditch, filthy and covered with ticks, and maybe 100,000 other dogs across the country, from Connecticut to California.

Their rides: volunteers from coast to coast who give up their weekends, and often more, to transport dogs and the occasional cat from near death, such as their scheduled euthanization, to a good life.

Their tickets: the Internet, news groups, e-mail and the old standby, the telephone.

“This sweet precious girl is out of time,” writes a rescue volunteer whose post appears on an animal welfare news group, NMpetrescue. The dog, a border collie mix, is in Oklahoma.

Where she goes, and with whom, could be left to chance, in hopes someone somewhere reads the post and offers to give the dog a home. But volunteers whose mission is to save pets, even one at a time, have developed a system.

That system is a series of one- or two-hour legs between towns, in which driver and passengers go to city A, meet another volunteer who drives the animals to city B, and so on. Organizing such transports is also the work of coordinators like Kelly Gibson, a San Diego accountant who saves lives by never leaving her desk. The transport system could not exist without the Internet.

Out there, in the real world, are thousands and thousands of dogs and cats marked for death, for no other reason than they've been abandoned in one way or another. Some people literally leave them behind. Others let them go.

Also out there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people determined to ensure the dogs and cats get to good homes. Many belong to rescue groups, some concentrating on certain breeds, that patrol the shelters for pets about to be put down. Many operate independently, finding homes for the dogs or cats they foster. All are connected by the Internet: news groups like NMpetrescue, e-mail, Web sites.

“These three were thrown away and now they face dying very, very soon,” says a post (“Yes, I am still begging for someone to help save …”) by Terry Lynn Fisher, a rescuer in Burns Flat, Okla., who fosters more dogs than she can keep. “They were picked up in an abandoned house … along with 11 other dogs” that were later taken in by rescue groups.

In short, what saves the dogs is what the Internet so instantly provides: information.

Fisher's plea to save the three dogs was answered, she says " after three years of salvaging dogs that others gave up, “I've not lost one yet.” She says she's saved 800 or so dogs in the three years she's been involved with transports.

Gibson spends about 100 hours a week, she figures, creating routes and coordinating volunteers. A recent transport of two beagles in Georgia that were to go to homes in Phoenix, and a “puggle,” or pug-beagle mix, in Tulsa, Okla., that was to go to San Diego, took 22 legs. The run sheet Gibson posted, with a request for volunteers for legs from Amarillo to Tucumcari, has 22 entries that look like this:

LEG 16: Tucumcari, NM to Albuquerque, NM
2 beagles & puggle girl
176 miles; 2 hrs 30 min
3:30 PM - 6 PM MDT
Filled " thank you Charlie!!

The run sheet contains more " “passenger information,” about shots, temperament, crate size " and contact numbers and e-mail addresses for the receivers, who might be rescue groups, a no-kill shelter with room for more animals, a foster home or potential adopter.

Gibson coordinates at least one transport a weekend, sometimes two or three or four. That's “thousands” of animals over the past three years, she says. “That's just me alone. With everybody combined, and there's about 40 coordinators that I know of, it's hundreds of thousands.”

The numbers of volunteers who do the driving is unknown " the system is efficient but informal.

“It's organized chaos,” says Dave Sarver of Tijeras. “Kelly Gibson is an absolute master at this.”

Sarver was just back from a trip to Clovis and back, thinking he'd pick up two dogs that were to be euthanized at a shelter there, but wound up with four dogs and three kittens. He left Albuquerque at 5:30 a.m. and returned at 8:30 p.m. to meet the next driver on the transport. Sarver's trip is not typical " although Gibson at first scheduled six-hour legs and now limits them to an hour or two.

Susan Renick, meanwhile, takes her family along. Renick, of the Sandoval County-based Second Chance Animal Rescue, also fosters dogs before they find permanent homes.

There's a great need for more people in New Mexico to volunteer, she says, and when you combine a transport with a family outing, it's fun.

“A lot of people, once they do it the first time, they get hooked,” Sarver says.

“It's so, so easy. It's the absolute easiest way to save a life.”