Driving strays to their second shot
The first time Jan Hyne took part transporting homeless dogs from the South to the Northwest in June of 2018 will forever be burned into her mind like the battery acid that scorched eight-month-old lab mix Norman’s back. All the way down his spine, she remembers. Angry, red bleeding scabs looking back at her instead of brown and white speckled fur. Yet despite the pain he was in, Norman didn’t make a sound in his crate in the back of Hyne’s Hyundai Santa Fe. He slept the entire way along her hour-long, №4 leg traveling up Rockside Road to reach Cleveland so Norman could receive additional medical attention. When she reached the end of her leg and pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot to pass him off to the final driver, Norman licked her face as if to say thank you.
“All I know is a neighbor said there’s a dog crying out in this yard in West Virginia, and they went and got him,” Hyne says. “And of course, nobody was at the house of the yard he was in. They immediately took him to a vet, and his back was just ugly it had been burned so bad. The vet there said ‘This looks like battery acid to me. And this looks like it was done intentionally.’”
It is the goal of these rescue transport systems to partner up with Southern shelters and Northern rescues to take any number of dogs from the South where kill shelters and a lack of spaying and neutering exist far more prominently and organize a chain of multiple legs people drive for one to two hours and then pass the dogs to the next driver to bring them to Northern rescues for medical attention or adopting or foster families.
The dogs that have laid in the back of Jan’s car were all escaping past lives of pain and hardship for a chance to experience something they had been void of for many years: love. A deaf and blind mutt whose time was running out in a kill shelter. Three lone-survivor rottweiler beagle mix puppies trapped in a home where the found dead owner hoarded dogs and did not feed or maintain them. Through partnerships established between Southern rescues, Northern rescues and a transport system, dogs receive a second chance at life.
Hyne, a 76-year-old real estate title sales representative and grandmother of two from Stow, Ohio, had never heard about rescue transports until she got on the topic of dogs with a customer from work. An avid dog lover and once frequent foster “dog mom,” Hyne’s ability to take in foster dogs ended as her two rescue dogs, Jack and Smokey, aged up into nap-taking, slow-moving seniors. “The last dog I fostered, he was darling, but he was a three-year-old, and he bounced off the walls and made my seniors crazy,” Hyne says. “I can’t always take in a foster, but I can still help through more than just giving money.”
It was through contacting Cleveland-native Kathy Smola, the founder and coordinator of The Rescue Railroad, that she found her way to help dogs in need without exhausting old Jack and Smokey, who’d rather snooze in the warm sunlight than put up with the antics of a playful puppy. “I like to actually have my hand in and be a link in this chain of rescue,” she says.
Hyne is a driver for various rescue transport systems and signs up to drive any leg coming through her area she can. Through Facebook, transport systems like The Rescue Railroad post transports and legs they need drivers to volunteer for on the weekend when most people are available. Transports can take many legs, as the most Hyne has seen in her almost year-long stint is 20 legs rescuing a dog from Texas to Vermont. Since her start, Hyne has driven 12 to 14 different legs and has seen dogs in various stages of neglect, number, age and breed.
Despite working mostly through Facebook, Smola has been involved with driving dogs back when MySpace was everyone’s top starred website on their clunky desktop computers. The 53-year-old accountant got her start 14 years ago and used Yahoo to join transport groups, looking for legs organized by coordinators going through her area using “I-71” and “I-77” as keywords. Following her first transport she did with her mom, Smola was hooked, driving almost every weekend. She was content with just being a driver until a rescue she had driven for asked if she could pull a dog from a shelter local to her and set up the transport to bring them the dog. “I was like, ‘um, no, I’m just a driver.’” However, after befriending a transport coordinator, Sandy White, Smola found a mentor to help her along her path of creating The Rescue Railroad. White showed Smola how to map out transports from the Southern shelters to the Northern rescues and posted Smola’s legs on her own transport page to help get her drivers until she got herself established. “I just started setting up myself and now I’ve got over 5,000, maybe 6,000 contacts in my contact list (of drivers),” she says.
After a brief period of mentorship, her transport system was born. Back when Smola first got started, the transports weren’t typically named anything other than the coordinator’s name and “transport.” “At the time I just wanted to come up with something, and because it’s really kind of along the lines of the Underground Railroad when they moved the slaves, I came up with it like that.”
Smola puts aside her Friday nights to put the finishing touches on her run sheets sometimes organizing up to three a week, making sure each leg is filled and that she mapped and timed everything out correctly. Her 6,000 contacts are organized into her database by name and location to help her quickly and efficiently plan transports. She does panic if a transport isn’t filled all the way, but because she deals with dogs that stay in temporary foster homes instead of coming directly from the shelter, it’s not the end of the world if the transport falls through that week.
A key job within any transport is that of the monitor. A monitor stays by their phone the duration of a transport and keeps in contact with each leg driver. “Every time a driver hands the dog off to the next driver, they have to call the monitor and let them know how it went, like did they potty, did they drink, are we running on time or behind, and then we send email updates out. Anybody that’s involved in the transport can see updates throughout the entire transport until they make it to their final destination,” Smola says. Smola used to monitor her own transports, but with the stress of putting aside time to map everything out and still go to her 9-to-5 job, she needed her weekends to catch up on life.
When it comes to selecting Northern rescues to partner up with, Smola is picky. “I only deal with a few specific rescues, because just like anything in life, there are good rescues and there are bad rescues. I obviously want to make sure that a dog getting pulled from a shelter is going to be moving through a rescue and have a better life and not end up in the same kind of crappy situation,” she says. Also busy with a new grandson and rescue dogs of her own, Smola doesn’t have the time to screen rescues herself and sticks with a few she trusts, like ChicagoLand Lab Rescue that mostly pulls dogs out of Texas that she organizes.
One way that Northern rescues hear of dogs in need is through individuals working with people “on the ground” from Southern shelters reaching out via email and social media to Northern rescues trying to find permanent homes for the dogs. The networker informs the rescue of the dog’s temperament and basic information, but the most important aspect when deciding whether a rescue can take in a dog is if it has a shining health certificate from a vet. Heartworm, kennel cough, giardia and parvo all keep dogs from being transported to prevent the spread of communicable diseases to other dogs. Some states even have laws regulated by the Department of Agriculture that dogs carrying certain diseases cannot pass state lines, like Maine: “Dogs and cats entering the State that do not have health status that is satisfactory to the Commissioner, may be required to be examined by an accredited veterinarian at the owners’ expense and may be held under quarantine until the Commissioner is satisfied that the animal(s) is/are not a threat to animals or humans of the State,” according to Maine.gov.
To prevent dogs from picking up additional diseases during transport if a puppy is too young to receive adult vaccinations, Smola established strict rules as to how the dogs are transported. Puppies are not allowed to touch the ground without a puppy pad or covering, and all dogs must remain in crates or secured in the back of cars until allowed to stretch their legs and go to the bathroom or eat in between legs typically in fast food parking lots.
It is also imperative that dogs get spayed or neutered as soon as possible, which is a huge reason Smola has noticed why the South has so many stray dogs. More than half of U.S. states have proposed mandatory spay/neuter laws, but no state requires all pet owners to sterilize their pets, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Of the U.S. Census Bureau defined “Southern” states, 11 (Delaware, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas) require sterilization or a promise to sterilize an adopted animal from a pound, animal shelter or rescue, leaving five (Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi) that do not. However, most of these states have certain exceptions, like age (dogs are traditionally fixed around six months of age), health reasons, service dogs or law enforcement-assisting dogs and owners with a breeding permit.
What to do with stray animals has been an ongoing issue in the U.S., as around 3.3 million dogs are estimated to enter animal shelters and about 670,000 dogs are euthanized each year, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The BARC animal shelter in Houston, Texas, reported there are one million stray dogs in the city in 2017, according to NPR. The no-kill movement has sprung into action to stop the destroying of animals that are not adopted in a timely manner, which has greatly decreased the percentage of animals euthanized today (at one point, millions of animals were euthanized a year.)
There is a correlation between geographical location and amount of euthanized dogs, as considering the number of dogs killed per 1,000 people in each state, a healthy dog in a North Carolina shelter is 25 times more likely to be put down than a dog in New Hampshire, according to Psychologist Hal Herzog. A dog in North Carolina is three times more likely to be put down in a shelter than a dog in Virginia. Herzog also determined states with lower average incomes have a higher tendency to euthanize more animals in shelters, and Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi have made the lowest median wages since 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is also a relationship between euthanasia rates and gun ownership rates, even though it wasn’t as high as it is with income, but states with greater rates of gun ownership have more dog deaths.
“It is really just a completely different mindset down there than it is up here,” Smola says. “A lot of times we’re moving dogs that haven’t been in a shelter, like the stray dogs running around got pregnant and they don’t want the puppies. We’ll take the puppies, but we’ll tell them you got to go ahead and make sure that you get your dog fixed because we’re not going to just keep putting a bandaid on your problem here so you’re not coming to us in another six months going ‘well she got pregnant again; we’ve got more puppies,’ cause that’s not helping the situation.”
After 14 years of organizing transports, Smola estimated she has planned over 2,100 transports, each consisting of a various number of dogs. And just like how she was mentored, Smola mentors her friend Martha, who founded Martha’s Mutt Movers, adding on to the long list of dogs Smola has helped find new homes.
“There’s a line people use that getting into rescues is like getting into the Mafia. You can never get out of it. All you do is just dig into deeper. It’s just something that once you start doing it, you just get to a point where you can’t say no.”
