October is Adopt-A-Shelter-Dog Month. Lucky is one of the thousands of animals who ended up at one of the Tucson area’s shelters this year. Here are a few of their stories, along with some of the people who are opening their hearts and homes to make sure that Lucky, and others like him, have a better life.
If you look at where Lucky lives, you’d think his name is pretty apt.
He shares a sprawling west-side home with a couple of humans and several other canines. The big-screen TV in the living room is always tuned to DogTV, which provides images and sounds designed to engage a canine audience 24-7. The pups can lounge on an overstuffed sofa or sprawl out on the cool tile floor. For the most part, each dog has a room of his or her own.
Lucky welcomes visitors with what looks like a wide grin on his broad face, and a furiously wagging tail. He looks you right in the eye, his gaze direct and expectant. He doesn’t need much of an introduction to sit at your side and lean against you. The top of his massive brown head is surprisingly soft, like velvet, when you rub it. Lean down, and he’ll reward you with a massive lick on the cheek.
Look closer and you’ll see his muzzle and head are covered in scars. Scar tissue has sealed his left ear. A serious back injury and tick fever require medication, and care that other animals not jump up on him.
In August, he was on the short list to be euthanized at Pima Animal Care Center. He’d been brought in with a couple of other dogs five months earlier as part of an animal-cruelty case. Someone at the shelter named him Lucky. They also estimated his age at about 7, and his breed as a mix of pit bull and boxer.
In those five months, the shelter grew from crowded to severely overcrowded with as many as 1,000 animals at any given time. Then one day another dog was mistakenly put in Lucky’s half-kennel, and there was an altercation.
PACC workers made the difficult decision that Lucky either find a home within the next few days or be put down because his mental and physical well-being was deteriorating in the kennels.
PACC volunteers posted his plight on Facebook at PACC Pets Need You , a page dedicated to networking the shelter’s pets. Tucson’s growing community of rescue groups get tagged about animals in urgent need of help.
Social media has revolutionized animal rescue, says Cara Ryan, who was out of town when she saw Lucky’s alert.
She and her husband, Sean, care for dogs from PACC and assist a couple of local rescue groups. They specialize in senior animals, and those who are sick, injured or have behavior issues.
“We tend to take the ones others just walk past,” said Ryan, a bookkeeper who can work from home and keeps a flexible schedule for the rescue work that is her passion.
Ryan called Fern Clark, who is starting the group Big Heads, Bigger Hearts Rescue. Clark raced down to PACC to get Lucky, signing papers promising that she would take him to a veterinarian. Ryan met her at the vet appointment after she returned to Tucson then brought Lucky home .
Ryan is working with Mary de Ranitz in Bridge Rescue for Dogs to create an online foster registry of people who could be called on a moments notice to open their homes.
While the Tucson area needs more volunteers to foster animals, part of the problem is not knowing where to find existing foster homes when they are needed in a crisis, Ryan said.
“Foster care is a premium in this community,” said Tammi Barrick, who is with Foundation for Animals in Risk. “You can only take in as many animals as you can safely place in a foster home.”
Barrick, who also serves on the steering committee of Pima Alliance for Animal Welfare, notes that foster homes also help animals make a smoother transition.
“Those animals get to live in a home environment,” Barrick said, and the foster parents can tell potential adopters important information like how the dog is doing with potty training or the cues he uses when he has to go outside.
Because of the kennel altercation at PACC, the Ryans were extremely careful introducing Lucky to the other dogs in their home. “First impressions are important for dogs, Cara Ryan said.
Lucky fit right in with their two family dogs, as well as their only other foster dog at the time — Pippy, a little pit bull who suffers from anxiety and cataracts that cloud her eyes. “He was way easier than we thought he was going to be,” Ryan said.
Still, with his injuries, age and ongoing need for medication, Lucky is an adoption challenge. He could spend the rest of his life with the Ryans, and they say they would be thrilled. But the dilemma of being a foster parent is knowing that keeping an animal means one less opportunity to save another.
Cara Ryan remembers her first dog rescue. “I was 4, much to my parents’ dismay,” she said, recalling how she told some family friends she wanted a puppy. The friends owned a corner market in a small town in central Illinois. The next day a car drove by and someone threw out a puppy. The friends took that as a sign of the power of prayer. “I named him Snoopy,” Ryan said. Poopsie, a cat, came next, followed by a lifetime of animals in need.
The Ryans keep photos of the dogs they have fostered.
One of them is Sammy, an American bulldog who was slated to be euthanized at PACC because of a serious injury she suffered from another animal. “They needed her to be rescued or put down for humane reasons,” Ryan said.
Sammy had started her life at PACC. A family had adopted her from the shelter as a puppy. “She was cute and little — and then she sat in the backyard for three years,” Ryan said. One day the family called PACC and told them to pick her up.
Ryan had been taking Pippy to Canine Good Citizen training. “I would then come home and do the training with Sammy,” Ryan said. Sammy was a quick study. “Today she has a home in the Foothills and she has her own leather couch.”
Pippy has been with the Ryans since May 2013, minus the month she lived with a family in Texas who had fallen in love with her on Facebook. Her anxieties were too much for them. Heartsick, they called Ryan, who hopped into her car and met them halfway — in Artesia, N.M., to bring Pippy back home to Tucson. Like Lucky, Pippy will have a home with the Ryans as long as she needs it.
Some dogs leave too soon. The Saturday before last, Ryan went to PACC to bring home Gladys, an extremely overweight dog suffering from a severe respiratory infection. Two jail inmates assigned to PACC helped carry Gladys from the shelter sickbay to Ryan’s car after she checked in with the shelter veterinary staff.
As always, Ryan was struck by the line of people waiting to turn their animals in to PACC — 97 that day. Over the years, she has heard people say just about everything — backyard breeders leaving puppies they couldn’t sell; owners wanting to get rid of aging dogs in favor of puppies.
While Gladys’ history was unknown, it was clear she had had many litters of puppies, and that she had been confined before she was abandoned and came in to PACC as a stray. The Ryans got her a new dog bed, where she lay — shifting her weight occasionally to get comfortable. Cara Ryan gently stroked her face, telling the exhausted-looking dog that she was beautiful.
By Sunday evening Gladys slipped away, despite a frantic race to the Veterinary Specialty Center of Tucson. “We had her for a day and a half and lost her, and honestly, it’s heartbreaking,” Ryan said, holding back tears. But she had no regrets. “We gave her love when she needed it most.”
