The Sullivan County, Tenn., Animal Shelter’s executioners
www2.tricities.com - A Sullivan County inmate prepares to clean one of the dog cages at the Sullivan County Animal Shelter.
By Claire Galofaro | Police Beat Reporter - Bristol Herald Courier
BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – It is 9 a.m. Wednesday, and in the next hour, one man must pick out a dozen dogs that won’t live until lunchtime.
Later this morning, veterinarian Dr. Basil A. Jones will fill a syringe 34 times with liquid the color of strawberry lemonade. He will plunge it into their hearts, and moments later those hearts will stop beating. But for now, Phil Lane, supervisor of Sullivan County Animal Control, slowly starts his circuit of 60 pens with a black Sharpie in one hand and an index card in the other – the Sharpie to mark the condemned and the card to tally the number of dog pens their deaths will make available.
The stench of dirty dogs and urine is overwhelming. But it’s easy to get used to.
The first dog Lane comes upon is Magnet – a black mutt, probably 60 pounds with a loud bark and a dangerously happy tail.
“He’s just as sweet as he can be,” pleads Robert, a Sullivan County Jail inmate who, along with three others in orange, striped jumpsuits, works at the shelter nine hours a day, seven days a week.
“But nobody’s looked at him,” Lane responds. “He’s got that bark that scares them off.”
“No, no, people have looked at him; a couple was just here yesterday,” Robert says. “He’s a good dog.”
Lane nods, moving on to the next cage. “We’ll pass on him for now.”
Magnet jumps up onto his chain-link gate and shoves his nose through one diamond as far as it will go, his tail wagging so hard it shakes his whole body. Robert leans in and whispers: “You’re OK, buddy.”
The Sullivan County Animal Shelter is closed to visitors Wednesdays because Lane, his assistant, four inmates and a veterinarian must clear out enough cages to house next week’s deliveries.
“The picking part is the hard part,” Lane says. “And today isn’t bad, all things considered.”
He’s starting with four empty cages, and adds two more for dogs that rescue shelters have promised to come back for – a total of six slashes on his tally card. He needs 18 dogs and just as many cats.
The sick, old and dangerous dogs go first. But those are few.Lane bases the rest on a loose mathematical adoptability equation that factors in character and looks, color and size. He believes the dogs know what he’s doing every Wednesday.
“People think animals are stupid,” he says. “But they see them come out of the cage and leave. And they don’t see them come back. They know.They’re not dumb.”
As he makes his way down the aisles, he passes Gypsy and Bandit and a black dog named Blue.
He stops at Rocky, a hound dog so skinny his ribs jut out. In Rocky’s 23 days at the shelter, no one showed any interest. Lane draws a single, vertical line down the sheet clipped to Rocky’s gate. It’s the only record of their existence: a half-page chart that lists a name if they have one, a rough estimate of breed, approximate age and how and when they came to be at the animal shelter.Next door, a 13-year-old Lhasa apso sleeping in the corner gets the marker, too.
“Nobody’s going to get a 13-year-old dog,” Lane justifies.
A 2-year-old shepherd mix named T.P. has a bad case of kennel cough and as Lane draws a line down his chart, he counts the tally marks on his card.
"Now we’ve come to the point that the job gets really hard,” he says. “I’m at the end of the line, and I still have nine cages to open. Now I have to say, ‘I’m sorry, I just need your cage to get through the next week.’ ”
In 2008, the Sullivan County Animal Shelter took in 2,326 dogs and an equal number of cats. Of the dogs, 927, or 40 percent, were “put down”– shelter speak for euthanized. Cats had a more wretched fate – 1,655, or 71 percent, were euthanized. In 10 years, 29,940 animals have died at the Sullivan County Animal Shelter alone. By regional standards, those percentages aren’t high. According to records filed with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, some Southwest Virginia shelters euthanize nearly every animal that comes through their doors. In Dickenson County, 89 percent of dogs and 98 percent of cats were put down in 2008. Wise County killed 72 percent of dogs and 84 percent of cats, while Scott County averaged 80 percent.
Nationally, between 6 million and 8 million dogs and cats enter shelters every year. Between 3 million and 4 million never leave, according to the Humane Society of the United States. It’s particularly bad in the rural South, says Cory A. Smith, director of the Humane Society’s humane communities program.
Local advocacy groups say at least 100 animals are put down each week in regional shelters. And they suspect that’s a conservative figure.
“Until the public takes a hold of this problem, it is not going to change,” Lane says. “Think back to our parents, our grandparents – they took responsibility for the world around them. It seems like we’ve gotten away from that, and until we get to the point when the public says ‘this is my problem,’ it will always be our problem.”
He circles back and starts again from the beginning.
Magnet was brought in as a stray on Oct. 9, picked up somewhere off Memorial Boulevard in Kingsport, Tenn. He’s some variety of pit-bull mix, pitch black with a tuft of white on his chest and a little more around his toenails.
“You can tell he’s a baby,” Lane says. “Probably the friendliest dog in the world. But, he’s got that look, that bark. He scares people.”
He takes out his marker, bites his bottom lip and Magnet joins death row.
Then a lady named Jack, along with sisters Jill and Amy, and a shepherd mix without a name, a glassy-eyed coonhound and a stray pit bull named Pepper. The list goes on.
“He’s miserable in this cage,” Lane says, crossing through the chart of a dog named Millhouse. He’s a big, white hound mix who’d beaten his
tail against either side of his pen – back and forth, back and forth – until both cinder block walls were spattered with blood.
“I really need one more,” Lane says. “But I’m going to risk it. Let’s go on to the cats.”
The four inmates that work at the shelter are what the Sullivan County Jail calls “trustees,” nonviolent offenders let out of their cells each day to plant vegetables, pick up trash and otherwise contribute to society.
“Pound duty” is a coveted spot.
“This is the best one there is,” Magnet’s friend, Robert, says of his job. “At least we’re doing something good. We take care of these animals. We’re all the love most of them ever get. We don’t just feed them, we play with them, cause we know most of them won’t get out of here and they could at least enjoy their last few days.”
Robert, 42, who is serving 15 months for violating probation, takes care of the dogs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week. His partner is David, a 23-year-old with such a boyish face the other three inmates call him “Kid.”
Back in the cat rooms, 43-year-old Mike is counting down his final days of a six-month sentence. His partner, Jerry, is the elder of the bunch. And “Pops,” as they’ve named him, has a reputation for singing the cats to sleep.
“Oh, I followed close behind her; tried to hold up and be brave, but I could not hide my sorrow, when they laid her in the grave.”
It’s an old Carter Family song that Lane knows the words to, so he joins in on the chorus.
“Will the circle be unbroken; by and by, Lord, by and by. There’s a better home awaiting; in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”
When Lane got to work at 8 a.m., he checked his inbox for notes from local rescue groups, who know Wednesday will be the last morning many animals will wake up. They send rushed bids, pledging to save as many as they can, mostly dogs – but some cats, too. Without those rescue groups, Lane says, the euthanasia rate would double. In 2008, there were 938 dogs rescued – more than four times the number adopted. Those groups saved 379 cats, while only 43 found individual families.
Rescue groups place pets in homes all over the country, mostly in the Northeast, where the number of discarded animals is far lower. There, spay and neuter laws are stricter.
“You show me one problem with animals, and I’ll show you an answer through spay and neuter,” said Sue Williams, a retired postal worker who runs the Holly Help Memorial Spay Fund, a Bristol, Va.-based nonprofit that helps pet owners pay to sterilize their animals.
The problem has somewhat improved in the area since 2005, when the low-cost Margaret B. Mitchell Spay Clinic opened its doors outside Bristol, Va. Since then, those at the clinic have performed 35,000 surgeries, often driving to far-flung counties to pick up animals and return them home the next day, President Teresa Dockery said. Every day in the United States, she said, 70,000 puppies and kittens are born. That is seven times the human birth rate. One unfixed cat and her unfixed offspring will create 420,000 cats in seven years. An unspayed dog becomes 67,000 dogs in six years. Lane says they pick up many of those unwanted, accidental animals in boxes left at the car wash, grocery store parking lots, by the side of the road and on front lawns.
“I want to see the killing stop,” Williams said.
In nine years, Holly Help has paid sterilization costs, either in full or in part, for 13,304 animals by wrangling donations and recycling aluminum cans. Last week, the fund ran dry. “People always say, ‘if I had the money, I’d build a big farm and rescue all these animals,’ ” Williams said.
“Well, they could build a big farm the size of Tennessee and fill it up and then what? It’s a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. It takes a special kind of thought process to see it: With rescue you get to actually pet and hold and kiss and love an animal. Spay and neuter is an intangible item; you never see what you prevented. It was never born.”
Veterinarian Basil A. Jones brings biscuits and sweet tea to the inmates every Wednesday because, he says, they feed the animals, clean their cages, play with them and then have to help him kill them.
The 82-year-old has neatly parted white hair, Velcro shoes and a quick supply of stories from five decades as a vet. He started Jones Animal
Hospital in Bristol, Va., in 1951, took over the city pound four years later and has been putting animals down ever since.
“I like to think I do a good job in euthanizing,” he says. “It’s a job that has to be done, and we try to do it properly, try to do it kindly. They still die, but it’s as easy a death as possible.”
Lane’s assistant walks the aisles, giving each dog that Lane marked for death a shot of diluted horse tranquilizer. Some just fall over asleep. Others writhe and kick and bite their tongues until they bleed.
Meanwhile, Jones and the inmates set up in the euthanasia room – a space the size of a walk-in closet at the back of the building. Jones sits in a swivel stool behind a small stainless steel table, ready with a pink syringe in hand. Robert stands at one end with a garbage bag as the other three carry the dogs in one by one.
Millhouse is first. Mike puts him down on his right side, his bleeding tail still beating on the door frame and his tongue hanging from his lips.
Jones bends his front leg back, and explains that a dog’s heart is right under its elbow.
His needle is filled with pentobarbital, a barbiturate administered at 1 cubic centimeter per 10 pounds of dog.
“I always add a little more,” Jones says. “Just to hasten it along.”
He stabs the needle in, and draws it back. Black blood pours into the pink. That’s good, Jones says. That means he hit the heart. Jones then empties the syringe. The dog’s legs straighten, he shakes, kicks.
“It’s just the muscles giving it up,” Jones says, his hand on Millhouse’s heart, counting the beats. “People do that, too – when they’re dying.” Tiny black bugs scurry across the table. “When they start dying, the fleas start leaving,” Lane explains. The dog’s chest expands, his eyes open wide. Jones says the last muscle to give out is the diaphragm, which separates the lungs from the abdomen.
“He’s gone,” he whispers, nodding at the inmates.
They push Millhouse off the table into the garbage bag ready at the end. He lands on the concrete floor with a loud thud. Robert works the air out of the bag, twists the opening closed, and Millhouse is handed out of the room, assembly-line style. He becomes the first in a pile of trash bags in the hallway outside.
The Sullivan County Animal Shelter operates on about $350,000 a year, according to Sullivan County Sheriff’s Administrative Capt. Mark Ducker. Lane says that every day, the shelter goes through 50 pounds of dog food, excluding food for puppies, cats and kittens. Smith, with the Humane Society, said that’s far less than the budgets of many similarly sized shelters, which are often several million dollars. Nationally, pet overpopulation was a $2.4 billion problem in 2007, according to the Humane Society. That figure is largely comprised of the 3,350 taxpayer-funded municipal and county shelters.
“I’m euthanizing animals every week that are very good animals,” Lane says. “And it gets really disheartening, agitating and probably a list of adjectives as long as your leg when you see backyard breeders trying to make a buck off of animals, specifically animal reproduction. Then I have to turn around and take a perfectly friendly, adoptable animal, and simply because I don’t have anywhere to put them, I have to put them to sleep. It should not have to be this way. We can do better than this.”
In large part, they blame puppy mills and irresponsible, untrained breeders. But, Smith said, in the rural South, unfixed pets allowed to roam free are just as much to blame. “For the most part, these are the offspring of people’s pets,” she said. “Somebody’s unneutered dog gets out of the yard, comes home for dinner and unbeknownst to them, there’s a litter coming in three months. People need to understand that afternoon romp their dog had in the neighborhood can result in something quite serious.”
Lane supports creating legislation, as many Northern states and progressive cities have already done, that requires pet owners without a breeder’s license to sterilize their animals.
But, Jones disagrees.
“I personally think we should try hard to encourage people to do it voluntarily,” he says. “I don’t think it would be proper to make it mandatory. Education alone might get the job done more than a law that forces them to do what’s right.”
The pile of trash bags grows quickly. It doesn’t take long to kill a dozen dogs. They each react differently, they stretch and moan and urinate on the table. But they all land with a thud on the ground. The bags are tied up, and passed out into the hallway one-by-one.
“This was really tough for me my first week,” Kid says. “When we were done, I had to go outside and cry.”
Macy, the 13-year-old Lhasa apso is near the end of the list. Lane said she was dropped off a week earlier by her owner.
“If it were my dog, I wouldn’t want it to die here,” he says.
Magnet’s next. His eyes are wide, but he’s silent as Jones pushes the syringe into his heart. Robert stands at his head, drops the garbage bag and puts both hands around the dog’s face. Magnet’s neck straightens out as the life comes out of him. He lands with a thud.
“I get mad,” Robert says. “You can’t get used to it. That was my baby, but it don’t help to get attached to them. I’m just mad because it has to happen. Some of them, they don’t eat the whole time they’re here – they’re scared, depressed. Some of them run at you, some try to bite you, some just lay there. But, that black one, he was just trying to have fun.”
When they’re finished, the inmates haul the bags of dead animals to a white shed out back. Inside, there are three big freezers lining the walls where the carcasses will stay for a week before a dump truck comes to take them to the landfill. The humans converge in the lobby to finish their sweet teas, and Pops starts singing that old Carter Family tune.
“Will the circle be unbroken; by and by, Lord, by and by; There’s a better home awaiting; in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”
