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closeVets to the rescue
Puyallup animal clinic staff makes a 2,200-mile trip to bring back 23 dogs from overcrowded California shelters
Neil Pierson/of The Herald
The women who keep Puyallup’s East Main Animal Hospital running have their hands full most days but that didn’t stop them from lending support to a worthwhile cause recently.
Late in the evening of Thursday, Jan. 21, Dr. Illina Berton, the hospital’s veterinarian, and Office Manager Marni Fleming embarked upon an 1,100-mile drive down the West Coast. It took them 22 hours to arrive at their destination: The East Valley Animal Care Center in Van Nuys, Calif., a northwestern suburb of Los Angeles.
Their urgency blossomed from a group of small dogs who were at risk of euthanasia if they didn’t find a permanent home.
Berton had traveled to New Orleans four years ago to rescue a pair of dogs left homeless in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She and Fleming had wanted to participate in a large-scale rescue mission but didn’t know where until doing some research.
They ran across Los Angeles Animal Services and found some startling numbers: The department had more than 57,000 dogs adopted locally in the past five years and more than 15,000 dogs adopted around the country through its New Hope program. But another 41,000 dogs died of natural causes or were euthanized at the L.A. shelters.
Berton and Fleming were especially concerned about the number of small dogs, those under 20 pounds, that were making their way into the shelters but often not coming out alive.
“I’m sure you can find that here too but we haven’t seen a desperation for it,” Fleming said. “We haven’t seen people saying, ‘We need help with this.’”
Upon arrival in Van Nuys, Berton and Fleming loaded up 23 new canine friends, a hodgepodge of terriers, Chihuahuas, Pomeranians and other breeds. Each dog had their own crate and the women stopped every couple of hours on the way back to Puyallup for feeding and walking breaks.
“It would be, ‘Open the doors up, you get this one, I get that one,’” Fleming said, laughing. “We had people all over the place just watching us and asking, ‘Are you crazy?’”
The round trip lasted the better part of two days but the hard part might have come afterward. Many of the dogs needed surgery for leg and back injuries, while others needed treatment for mange, a non-contagious canine skin disease. The Southern California shelters often found abandoned dogs on their front porch, or worse.
“People are driving by, throwing them out as fast as they can (and they) keep on driving so they don’t get in trouble for it,” Fleming said.
She believes the economy is to blame for some of those cases. Locally, Fleming has witnessed many people who can no longer afford to care for their pets.
But there are other residents like Gloria Jaeckel who are literal lifesavers for animals. Jaeckel, a Puyallup resident and retired nurse, has been taking her animals to Berton for 10 years and is volunteering as a foster care provider for Metro Animal Services.
“It’s just my way to give back to the community,” Jaeckel said. “When they have a (pregnant) mother cat that has been given up to the shelter, I hold onto her until she has the kittens and then take care of them for seven weeks until they can have their shots.”
She adopted one of the rescued dogs from L.A., a Chihuahua-Jack Russell terrier female named Reilly Jane, who is now pals with Jaeckel’s German shorthaired pointer, Bailey. Jaeckel has also adopted four cats from local shelters.
“I’ve just been an animal lover my whole life,” she explained. “The ones that have come to me have been in desperate straits.”
Many of the dogs that came to East Main Animal Hospital have already been adopted.
The hospital still had 11 of them as of Feb. 3. Berton and Fleming are trying to spread the word to find homes for each of them.