HIGH-LINE HUMANE CASE

Here’s a long story that makes some points about being “humane.” It begins with a cruelty that grew out of using dogs to compete as “show” through the enablements of the American Kennel Club. At one point collies were very popular, partly through the image of Lassie. Many people bred collies for show, trying to make them conform to an ideal defined by conformation experts. These people decreed that long narrow heads were better. Pretty soon fanciers had managed to breed a collie with a head too small for its eyes, so that the dog couldn’t see. This is the original cruelty.

A woman in Alaska began breeding collies that were NOT vulnerable to this syndrome. Breeding dogs (not in puppy mills but as AKC “certified” dogs) is a common way people think they can make money. Alaska is a place where people think they can do what they want, but they don’t quite realize there are differences between what is permitted (unregulated mostly because there are not enough cases to justify framing and passing laws), what is possible in the sense of “do-able,” and what is possible in terms of one’s own limitations. The woman and her husband had more than a hundred collies and did pretty well at first, but were reaching limits, partly because the woman developed “brittle diabetes.” That is, her blood sugar went up and down suddenly and unpredictably, raising havoc with her physical well-being and mental processes. Then there was a fire in the kennels (which some said were marginal anyway).

The couple put the last of their resources into a big semi-truck, filled it with the dogs in double-decked kennels, and paid a friend to follow them in a second truck loaded with dogfood. This truck broke down on the Al-Can Highway and the friend stayed with it while the couple made a desperate run for the border. At the Sweetgrass border station in the middle of the night, on the American side, the officers heard barking inside the truck, demanded to look inside and were confronted with a canine hell. It was winter. The top kennels had leaked excrement and urine on the bottom dogs. All dogs were cramped, freezing, filthy, starving, and desperate. The border agents called the Shelby veterinarian and the whole load was seized. Now what?

Shelby is a small town on the Montana High-Line, a place not noted for its luxury and resources, but people -- energized and organized by local humane societies -- got to work. The county fairgrounds were converted to a kennel with a few loads of hog wire and straw, dog food began to arrive, and teams of people (mostly women) used to animals and hard work began triage on the animals. (There were some cats and non-collie dogs, including one trained to smell the woman’s breath at night and wake her if she began to slip into hypoglycemia.)

Probably part of the reason collies stopped being popular, aside from the eye problem, was their heavy coats which require considerable maintenance. The volunteers washed each animal (sometimes having to do considerable clipping), gave it a name, evaluated it for health and temperament, and began to walk it daily. This was quite a little job in itself as the animals were shy and skittish, unused to people, and had never been on leashes.

Then the legal part began. Charged with cruelty but out on bail, the woman settled in to a motel for the next months. Her parents came to spell her husband who went to prepare a new place for the animals if they were ever released. A jury had to be impaneled. All this cost rising amounts of money. The more hardened among the citizenry said that the vet ought to have waved them through. So some dogs died -- the pounds in this country kill hundreds and hundreds. But with the entire state watching closely and with the volunteers beginning to form relationships with the dogs as they settled into learning how to be pets, there was no chance of stopping midstream.

I thought about what the couple could have done and saw that they had simply exceeded their abilities to cope, to say nothing of their financial resources. Once that second truck broke down, they were doomed. Communities along the Al-Can Highway were not in a position to take on so many animals -- especially since they were from a foreign country, only passing through. In the States people constantly forget that Canada IS a foreign country with quite different rules and attitudes. They do not have particularly tender feelings towards Americans, with good reason. I can’t imagine a Canadian entity wanting to take custody of or kill a hundred American dogs.

The choices were 1) turn back, which wasn’t practical since their kennel had burned and it was winter, 2) somehow get more dog food (where?), or 3) give up the animals (to whom?), or 4) euthanize the dogs (how?). True, when they got to civilization again they ought to have stopped and sorted out their dogs, but they were short of money, the woman was ill, and I expect they thought their best bet was just to plunge on to the woman’s parents’ home. They greatly underestimated the curiosity of the border agents, especially on the American side.

As weeks and then months went by after the seizure, the whole matter took so long that the dogs were interfering with the traditional summer fair’s use of the fairgrounds, but the volunteers went on like soldiers, daily cleaning, feeding, walking, and taming those dogs. After the conviction of cruelty, they somehow managed to adopt out all the dogs except the medically trained assistant dog and a couple of other small animals. The woman was fined a relatively small amount and the animals removed from her ownership. A few years after the whole scandal, diabetes killed the woman.

The reason I like this story is that it illustrates how easily it is that loving animals can become cruelty and how difficult repairing the situation can be, no matter how kind and willing to cuddle the poor little beasts anyone may be. I think many people connect the humane movement with children and their love of animals, maybe because so much publicity is connected to those images. I know that when I was little I thought of the Humane Society as a place where all “owies” were healed. Maybe my attitude is somewhat tinged by an early experience of surrendering a sick kitten, lovingly wrapped in a doll blanket, to a shelter attendant -- not at all realizing that the “cure” would be permanent.

School children are often brought in a group to animal shelters, as though it were a zoo. Most of the dogs, of course, are delighted, and it’s nice for the shelter attendants to pretend that this might result in pets being adopted. Mothers say, “Don’t pull the puppy’s ears! How would you like it if someone pulled your ears?” And some demonstrate a little painfully. Children’s books and movies encourage them to identify with carefree little animals, their curiosity and small predicaments. (Why is it that people thought "Finding Nemo" was charming when it featured the loss of his mother and entrapment by a fiendish dentist?) People like to have their pets give birth so their children can see “the miracle.” They ignore the other end of the life, the death.

One of my favorite stories for teaching adults was about a kindergarten teacher who had a pregnant classroom hamster. When it began to give birth, the children clustered around and the hamster -- seeing all these avid big heads -- promptly killed all the babies to save them from predation. Kindness that is not informed is no kindness at all. Another teaching story was about my little brother, who discovered the charms of mudpuppies (salamanders) on a camping trip and yearned to bring one home. My mother told him it wouldn’t like living with us and my brother said earnestly, “But I would keep it right in my pocket!” Life in his pocket seemed to him like the ultimate safety.

Then there was the old Scotsman who wanted to dock his dog’s tail, but felt so soft-hearted about it that he could only bear to cut the tail off an inch at a time.

PETA sees the romance of it all, the white horse and the gleaming trumpet, the righteous satisfaction of setting all those other people straight. How stupid of those Ringling people not to realize that circuses are sordid and cruel (probably wicked as well) and that they ought to leap at the chance to change the name of their town! Even though this would have absolutely no effect whatsoever on circuses. How wonderful to despoil fur coats on the backs of socialites! How exalted to convert the world to vegetarianism!

What these small-town Montana volunteers did for more than a hundred collies was as much a response to their sense of justice and obligation as it was to any sentimentality. Not that they were grim about it -- they had a lot of fun, made friends, earned admiration. But the dependability, thoroughness and energy of their response to need was near heroic.

PETA wasn’t there. The Humane Society of the United States sent a rep to do a flyby and PR speech. It was local humane society members organizing ordinary moms and pops that got the job done.