|
I was working export during the second week of October, when the closing of Lamar-Dixon was imminent. Every animal had to be gone, and we were calling all over the country to try to get people to take more animals in. Some shelters had already taken in so many that I felt terrible calling them and saying, "Can you take 20 more?"
At this point, most of the dogs left were pit bulls, pit mixes, and chows. One day a really nice, soft-spoken guy from a private facility in Louisiana came down and took about eight mixed breeds. We loaded a bunch of free food onto his truck and got a team of people together to help him prepare the dogs for departure at around 3 a.m.
Julie Janovsky, also from The HSUS, had been working export for weeks and had gotten the procedures down to a science. The dogs would go onto the trucks in an assembly line because they needed to have the microchips scanned before they boarded to make sure it was the right dog. And their paperwork needed to be separated; certain medical records went in our pile, and certain things went with the dogs. And then the paperwork had to be taped to the crates, and the VMAT (Veterinary Medical Assistance Team) guys loaded them onto the truck. The whole process took a while, and if there was a problem, there would be a backup.
While we waited, we couldn’t let the dogs get near each other because they might fight. So each volunteer had to take her dog and sit on this huge expanse of asphalt, about 10 feet apart from the next volunteer, and wait.
I sat there with my dog, a pit mix, and I didn’t know this dog so I didn’t want to be in his face or crowd him too much. But when I sat down cross-legged next to him, he stepped into the hole that my legs made so that he could lean up against my body. And then I felt safe to hug on him, and I put my arms around the dog and sat there. And he sat in my little cross-legged spot because that was as close to me as he could possibly get without crawling inside my body!
I looked down the row of people that were on the team transporting the dogs, and every single one of them was playing with their dog or had their dog glued to them, too. The dogs were just so grateful for physical contact, I wanted to cry.
From an interview with Kim Intino, Director, Animal Sheltering Issues, The HSUS.
| 
