RESCUE

Home at last. First night out of the shelter and on the couch.

March 7, 2012

The shelter in Greenville opens at noon and it will take us two and a half hours to get there. We decide we want to arrive as close as possible to opening. But we have a lot of work to do on the farm, and we want to take the other dogs for a good walk. And we woke up late. We don't leave the farm until close to noon, and we have a quick errand to do on the way. We get to Greenville at about 3:00.

The shelter in Greenville is huge and has several different departments, including an education center, an adoption center, a veterinary clinic and a lost and found. We are not certain where to go. So we park near the door that says Adoptions and walk in.

The adoption center is clean and modern and looks like a pet store, with all kinds of dog toys and dog beds and collars and leashes for sale. The lighting is rather dim, and the carpet is a deep grey. There is a lady behind a desk who is talking quietly to a couple with a young child. They appear to be contemplating adopting a dog. There is a crate in the middle of the room with a beautiful and friendly young Catahoula in it. It's a lovely dog and a great advertisement. Gary immediately kneels down and starts talking to him.

"I love this dog," he says. "I want him."

The lady behind the desk is still talking to the young couple, and there doesn't seem to be anyone very interested in paying attention to me. So we wander into a room lined with kennels of adoptable dogs. Each kennel has a little dish on the outside filled with kibble so that visitors can give the dogs treats. Gary gets into this room before me and has already given just about every dog a treat by the time I get there. The dogs are generally young and good-looking. I don't see little Joanne anywhere.

We return to the main room, where Gary goes back to talking to the Catahoula, and I go back to waiting for the lady behind the desk to finish with the young couple.

"He'll be on the adoption floor until he's adopted," the lady is telling the couple. "But if you don't come back right away, he could be adopted by someone else."

Presently, the couple leaves, and the lady behind the desk looks at me.

"I'm here to pick up the little Pointer, Joanne," I say.

"Oh, is that a rescue?" she asks. I tell her yes, and she says, "You'll have to go to Lost and Found. That's where we have the rescues."

So we say goodbye to the Catahoula and walk back outside, down a hill and up another one and go into the Lost and Found department.

Lost and Found has a very different feeling from Adoptions. It smells bad - a faint mix of urine, feces and disinfectant. There is a desk in the center of the room, and a few offices off the main room. There is a window into one of them, where we can see a box filled with sleeping tiny puppies. There is a large black lady behind the desk in the middle of the room. She has a deep sweet Southern voice.

We aren't the first people in line here either. There is a middle aged black man with a large wire carrier that has two very handsome, well-fed and large cats in it. One of them, a tiger cat, is meowing uncertainly. There is also a scrawny white kid of about 20 with a baggy shirt and jeans ten sizes too big. He has a tan mixed-breed puppy that looks like it might be about 6 months old.

The man with the cats says he picked them up near his house and he wants to turn them in because he is afraid they will get hit by a car, or that his dogs will hurt them. "I just want to do the right thing," he says. "I don't want them to get hurt."

I look at the cats and try not to think about the fact that they will probably never leave the Lost and Found. Animal shelters are even worse places for cats than for dogs. I have an impulse to tell the man we will take the cats. But I squash it. We already have four cats, and one of them (number two) has still not gotten over the acquisition of number four over a year ago. Besides, we are here for Joanne.

The lady calls someone to come take the cats, and a man in scrubs, who looks like he might be on work release, arrives from behind a set of doors behind the desk and takes the carrier. Goodbye cats, I think as the doors close behind him. They don't look like feral cats. They look like they belong on the windowsill.

"So what's with this dog," the lady now says to the kid. "What's the story here?"

"I gotta give him up," the kid replies.

"What kind of dog is it?"

"It's just a mongoloid dog," the kid says. Gary looks at me knowingly, as if expecting me to correct him. I don't.

"Why you giving him up?"

"It's my homeboy's dog and I can't take care of him no more."

"Your homeboy? Where's he at?"

"He's incarcerated."

"Okay, well you gotta fill out this form. You got your driver's license?"

The kid steps forward. He doesn't have a driver's license, but shows a state ID and signs something. Then he leads the puppy through the doors. Goodbye puppy, I think. I wonder if I will see him on the Urgent Dogs list on Facebook later in the week.

Now it's my turn.

"I'm here for the Pointer, Joanne," I say.

"The rescue?"

 I nod.

"You with Pointer Rescue?"

"Well, I'm pulling as an individual," I say. I don't bother explaining that I am not actually affiliated with Pointer Rescue. The lady calls someone and tells them to go get Joanne, while I give her my driver's license and sign some documents.

While I am paying my money, a worker in blue scrubs comes back through the door with a small dog on a leash. The dog is wagging its tail like crazy and crouching down in a submissive posture. It takes me a minute to realize that this is Joanne, because I was expecting a purebred Pointer, and this is definitely not one. This dog is considerably smaller than our Pointers, although her coloring and markings are very similar. Her face looks like a Pointer's, but her head is much smaller. Her wagging tail has a fishhook curve at its end.

I bend down and say hello and she wags and wags, wiggling her whole body. She is wearing a plastic strip around her neck as a collar. It has a label on it that says "Pointer Rescue."

I have brought a collar and a leash with me, but the collar is a full-sized one for a Pointer, not a medium sized one for a little dog like this. Joanne pulls back when I go to buckle the collar, but I soothe her. It is way too big, so I loop the leash around her neck. Then I give her to Gary, who puts her on his lap while I finish the paperwork.

Joanne has been spayed, and she has a microchip. She also had some other vaccinations, and she comes with a free 30-days worth of health insurance from ShelterCare. The lady explains to me that I have to activate the ShelterCare coverage by email within two days of taking my new dog home. It all seems like a pretty good deal. We say thank you, and we leave.

Joanne is not great on the leash, but she does come with us. We try to encourage her to relieve herself before we get into the car, but she isn't interested. She seems a little shell-shocked.

"And she stinks," says Gary.

We get her into the car and we head back out to the highway. She is restless in the back seat, so I allow her to come up front and sit in my lap. She really does stink. Her paws are stained with yellow blotches and there are a few on her back. She smells like she has been dipped in pee and poop. Her abdomen has been shaved for her surgery, and she has a small scar. I wonder out loud why they didn't give her a bath before they spayed her, since our paperwork says we are not supposed to let her get wet for two weeks.

"They barely wanted not to kill her," says Gary. "That's why."

Stinky or not, she is very sweet. She looks at me, she looks at Gary and she looks out the window. Sometimes she curls up and seems like she is going to go to sleep. She puts her chin on my shoulder. She tries to get into Gary's lap as he is driving. She is restless and anxious. She doesn't know what's going to happen next. We decide that she is not a Pointer at all.

"She's a grandma dog, the kind of dog your grandmother would have, getting into all kinds of trouble," says Gary.

We finally get home. We decide that I will take her for a walk in front of the house, while Gary lets the other dogs out the back door so that they won't come flying out at her and scare her. When we get out of the car, she walks around with me on the leash, sniffing. The other dogs come around the corner and sniff her. There is a little posturing, but everyone seems to accept her reasonably well. Ruby, our 8-month old retriever mix, is a little stand-offish. But there are no fights and little growling.

So now, we take the leash off and go for a walk around the farm with all six dogs. All of a sudden Joanne gets excited. She can't believe where she is. She starts bouncing, all four feet off the ground. All we can do is laugh. If we hold our arms out, she jumps into them. We don't want her to do too much jumping because she was just spayed, but it's hard not to be thrilled by her exuberance. She looks so happy.

"She's not a Pointer," I say. "She's a Jack Russell Terrier. Or maybe a mix, a Jack Russell Pointer."

We can't give her a bath, but Gary does get a few damp towels moistened with dog shampoo to rub her down. This improves her color, but she still smells awful. When her fur is a little bit wet, it smells like poop. When she dries, she smells a little better, but not much.

When it is time for dinner, we feed her separately, and she is ravenous, eating like she expects us to take the food away. That night, she sits with us on the couch. The name Joanne doesn't suit her, and it isn't her real name - she doesn't know it. We don't know what to call her yet. Maybe Skeeter, since she scoots around so much, like a skeeter bug.

While she's lying on the couch, I take her picture with my cell phone and post it on Facebook. I am wondering if the people who were cursing me when they thought I had abandoned her will see it.

I had told Gary before we got her that I expected her to sleep in the crate we have in the bedroom, at least for the first night. That was when I thought she was a full-sized, timid lady Pointer. Well, no way. She comes up and sleeps on the bed between us, with her head on the pillow. Nic, Wally and Trouble are there too, making four dogs on the bed. I have to be sure to point my nose away from her so that I can't smell her. But this definitely isn't the first time she has slept on the bed. This was once someone's beloved little dog.

I go to sleep, disturbed by the thought that a sweet little dog like this, with nothing wrong with her, was almost killed, just because her family's house burned down. She survived the fire, but was almost killed by the government. Something is very wrong with this picture.