Pet-Rescue Underground Railroad Won't Leave a Dog Behind

Jake, a cattle dog–German shepherd mix, showed up at the Ellensburg shelter in late January with his sister. They had been abandoned, but both were fixed, which meant that someone had once cared for them. This gave shelter staff and volunteers hope the dogs would quickly find homes. Indeed, Jake's sister, the calmer of the two, was adopted almost immediately.

But Jake deteriorated quickly. He began "fence fighting," snapping at dogs in adjacent kennels. Shelter visitors didn't seem very interested in him, and he languished for more than two weeks. "He just kept getting overlooked," says Betsy Hardin, a shelter volunteer.

Had Jake stayed in Ellensburg, which is along I-90, on the other side of the Cascades, he would have been put down. So Hardin turned to her Rolodex of dog rescuers, contacting Judith Swanson in Marysville. Swanson, in turn, put out an APB over the rescue network.

A retired office administrator, Swanson spends most of her waking hours trying to find homes for animals. Last year, she says, her back broke when, at all of 100 pounds, she went one way and a 125-pound foster dog pulled the leash the other way.

Swanson describes her pleas as akin to throwing a pebble in water; the ripples eventually turned up a half-dozen volunteers willing to take Jake, one as far away as Newfoundland. However, none was an appropriate fit for a dog that had begun to exhibit aggressive behavior. Eventually, Hardin had Jake transferred to a shelter in Bellevue.

That's where he sat for a week—a relative eternity in dog rescue. During that time, scores of other imperiled dogs emerged, and the foster homes that had expressed interest in Jake moved on to help those animals. His condition worsened.

Then, in late February, Jake got a nibble. Someone with a male pit bull was interested. The shelter typically doesn't adopt out male dogs to households that already have a male dog, but it was willing to make an exception. To test how Jake would react, the shelter staff introduced Jake to a male pit bull who was also up for adoption. Jake attacked the dog and then attacked a handler when the staff tried to put him back in his kennel. He was euthanized later that day.

Jake entered the shelter system as an outgoing, energetic dog who seemed eager to find his owner. After a month, he was so stressed that he basically went crazy. "I think it was just a classic case of this animal not being able to handle kennel life and losing his person," says Hardin. "Some dogs are just more resilient, and some aren't. They need more than a shelter can give them. He could have been a good dog in the right hands if he'd gotten out of there in time."

The key is getting the dog out of the shelter system and into the rescue network—an under-and above-ground society of animal lovers who pick up where the shelters leave off. It's a world where there are no bad dogs, only bad owners, and where dedicated rescuers will sacrifice their time, health, and mortgage payments to find doomed dogs a home. For most rescuers, there are only two kinds of unadoptable dogs: the terminally ill and the incorrigibly vicious. "You don't give up on a dog," says Swanson. "You just keep trying."

Rescuers share the common inability to refuse an animal in need. One rescuer asked that her last name not be printed, for fear that people might look her up and drop unwanted pets at her door. "I wouldn't be able to say no," she says. "But I only have so much square footage in my house."

"You see people getting in over their heads," says Nancy McKenney, director of Petfinder.com's Renton-based foundation, which provides free online listings for rescued dogs that are up for adoption. "It can get out of hand."

Seattle's own stray-pet population has been in decline for years, thanks to leash laws and spay-neuter programs. "We're seeing less and less animals dumped in front of the store," says Seattle Animal Shelter director Don Jordan, recalling the era when puppies might be left in a cardboard box at the U Village A&P. Growing up in the '70s, he remembers packs of dogs running wild in Wedgwood.

So rescuers are now busy importing canine pariahs from regions east of the mountains such as Ellensburg—where there's a greater tolerance for feral animals, "no-kill" rules are for wussies, and dumping a dog in the woods carries less chance of reproach than it would, say, in central Fremont.

Among the many rescue coordinators is Ginger Luke, whose HQ is the Rickshaw, a Greenwood restaurant and karaoke bar she's run for 30 years. There, she sends and receives about 500 e-mails a day. She founded her rescue group a little more than a year ago, and counts 231 "saves" in 2006. She's constantly expanding her network of contacts, now about 2,000, and bombarding them with breathless e-mails ("An Urgent Dalmatian Plea!").

One of her primary suppliers is the Ellensburg shelter. According to shelter manager Paula Hake, the facility's canine euthanasia rate dropped from 70 percent to 8 percent after she hooked up with Luke a year ago. "I reached out and said, 'We need some help.' I tapped into a market that was not over here on the east side. They are definitely more innovative on the west side."