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A Carnival of Optimism
by Susie Folkes, LA/SPCA Volunteer
[Editor’s Note: Working and volunteering in an animal shelter is
one of highs and lows. Published writer and LA/SPCA volunteer
Susie Folkes shares a candid piece on the lows and ultimately
the highs that come with giving your life and time to help
shelter animals find a home and the love they so deserve. Seeing
adoptions happen and not happen is an emotional rollercoaster
ride that takes place in shelters and humane organizations
everyday all across the country. But because of all those who
have been adopted there remains, as Susie writes, “a carnival of
optimism.”]
One Saturday about two months ago, my friend Barbara and I stood
by the front exercise yard watching one of our LA/SPCA dogs,
Jerry, a goofy, bedraggled terrier mix, play with a rope toy.
We’d just come back from an off-site adoption event and watching
Jerry hop about comically in the breezy outdoors was a pleasant
way to decompress after a long emotional day. Off-site adoption
days are always full of highs and lows, one second we’re
thrilled to see a dog march off with his new family, and the
next, distraught at the thought of returning to the shelter with
dogs who weren’t so lucky. During those four hours that the dogs
get to puppy bow and romp with each other, walk around a pet
store or a neighborhood block, we indulge too much in the
fantasy that they are, well, just like any other dog. Then the
kennel doors close and jolt all of us back to reality.
 One of the dogs that returned that day was a sweet little black
Lab mix named Ethel, and she had puzzled all of us with some odd
behavior. At the off-site adoption event, she’d been
unresponsive and aloof both to other dogs and potential adopters
approaching her, despite the opportunity to spend a day in the
sun away from her kennel. And yet, as soon as her paw pads
touched back down on shelter ground, Ethel was gregarious and
playful.
“She was almost joyful when I put her back in her kennel,” her
handler, Sara, remarked with sadness as she joined Barbara and
me. “If she’d only acted that way a few hours ago maybe someone
would have adopted her.”
Borrowing a phrase I remembered from one of my favorite films, I
said, half jokingly, that Ethel had become “institutionalized.”
And then Sara, who recognized the reference to the prison drama,
Shawshank Redemption, replied back, “That’s right. Poor Ethel’s
been here so long, she doesn’t know how to act on the outside.”
The three of us shared a hollow laugh, a half-hearted attempt at
comic relief after a frustrating day where only one of the six
dogs we’d taken to our location had been adopted. The air around
us was thick with the day’s disappointments, the statement about
Ethel, albeit meant as a joke, was all too true, and perhaps for
these reasons, our conversation developed a harder edge.
“I’ll tell you what I’m tired of,” I said, referencing the
off-site event, “I’m tired of people coming up to me and the dog
I’m handling and telling me how happy they are with their dog.
And how they have to tell me their dog’s whole history and all
its little eccentricities and how cute it is. It’s like sitting
through someone’s home movies and pretending to be captivated.”
“I know,” Barbara agreed. “I’ve gotten to the point where I put
on a polite smile and think to myself, ‘look, if you’re not
adopting a dog today, shut up and move on, please.’ ”
Suddenly a geyser of complaints spewed forth from our circle,
anecdotes from off-sites past. Anyone listening to us rant
would’ve questioned why we bother at all, indeed, would wonder
if the human animal has any hope of becoming a rational,
intelligent being.
 There was the old gentlemen who approached our dog Candy and
bear-hugged her and received her kisses joyfully until the
handler told him she was a Pit; whereupon he lunged back in one
fluid motion, threw his hands up in alarm and shouted: “Good gawd. Why didn’ ya tell me she got da bad blood in ah!”
There was the man with his daughter at another event, his pumped
up muscles testing the limits of his worn t-shirt. He stood
marinating in his testosterone and was personally affronted when
the volunteer assisting him mentioned that the Chow-Lab mix pup
his daughter wanted to adopt had been neutered. He pointed his
finger at the volunteer and demanded more than asked, “Now, this
dog is going to stay small right? I want a small dog for my
daughter.” His eyes glazed over when she told him, “No sir,
that’s a large breed dog that will require a lot of exercise.”
As his daughter cuddled the fuzzy pup and said, “I want this one
Daddy! This one!” his reply was, “We’ll fine baby. We can sell
it if it gets too big.” The chilling part of the whole scenario
was not so much the man himself, but the way his daughter echoed
his intentions instantaneously. “Oh, yes. We’ll sell him!”
And then there was the lady who approached a corral of mixed
breed puppies at another off-site adoption event, who listened
wide-eyed and shocked as we told her that the intake of strays
at the shelter (and any shelter where a community doesn’t spay
and neuter) will grow dramatically. This woman, seemingly
intelligent, listened to us quote the large number of animals
arriving each week, paused, then asked demurely, “Now, why do
you spay and neuter these dogs?”
“That’s when you want the trapdoor, isn’t it?” I said, “just a
warning buzzer and pull rope and down they go.” And we all
laughed.
It’s this little fantasy I have, on my bad days: the trapdoor.
During the Christmas season last year, a young woman dropped off
four puppies, about three months old, at the adoptions office.
At the counter she chomped her gum and gabbed on her cell phone
(the earpiece kind that leaves one’s hands free for filling out
inconvenient forms) as a kennel staff member hauled the crate of
puppies behind the backdoor toward healthy hold. Finally, one
of the adoption counselors was able to engage the woman during a
brief lull in her cell phone activity to say, politely, “We
highly recommend you get the mama dog spayed,” and offered her
vouchers to do so cheaply at one of our recommended vets.
With bubbling cheerfulness, the woman responded, “Well, we want
to breed her—like the right way, you know? This last time was
just, like, an accident. She was out peeing and another dog came
up to her, and, well, you know, like, before we could get to
them, well, you know, like nature took its course!” And, as if
on cue, her cell phone went off again.
I stood there wondering how the adoption counselor kept her
cool, and asked myself: since this woman knows so much about
“nature taking its course,” about, like, animal nature, then
perhaps she’ll understand when I take this clipboard and whack
her upside the head. Perhaps she’d be familiar with that sort of
animal rage, the kind that’s fueled by myriad folks like her
coming in and dumping off litters of puppies and kittens.
I believe I can pinpoint that incident as the moment when I
dreamed up the trapdoor. The trapdoor image provided harmless,
instant gratification.
The woman who dropped off those puppies that December day
departed the adoptions office happily, with a vague commitment
to get her dog spayed, the vouchers precariously balanced under
her arm as she chattered on her cell phone and scurried down the
ramp. I saw the puppies again less than an hour after she’d
left. Some task took me to the clinic, where I saw Dr. Wendy and
the vet techs in-taking the frightened, confused pups, and
later, we would find out, severely under-socialized. They became
Eric, Precious, Kobi, and Amy-Lou, Pit-mixes, perhaps with some
Lab and, oddly enough, Greyhound, which led me to believe the
Cell Phone Queen had allowed nature to take its course more than
once.
 Eric and Precious had the fewest issues. By two weeks time,
they’d stopped curling up in the back of their kennels in fear,
and by the third week they came forward to strangers, wiggling
their butts behind the kennel bars. In a month, both Eric and
Precious were adopted into good homes.
Kobi and Amy-Lou became our hard luck cases. Both adored
volunteers and staff, but Kobi displayed severe kennel
aggression, which kept potential adopters away. It’s tough to
convince clients that dogs with barrier issues are acting out of
fear and are often happy and social once out of the kennel,
which was the case for Kobi. Amy-Lou, on the other hand,
literally went into hysterics if anyone tried to approach her
other than the staff and volunteers she’d grown to trust. We
tried everything: the volunteers brought her into the trailers;
the adoption counselors let her hang out in their office. But
she continued to growl at the outside world when it invaded
hers. Even on the day she was euthanized, we still found it
difficult to reconcile her split personality, to cuddle and play
with her, to receive her kisses and say goodbye for what would
be the last time.
Which brings me back to Kobi, and back to that Saturday where I
began, when I shared my trapdoor fantasy with Barbara and Sara.
In an effort to let people see the lovely dog he could be out of
his kennel, Kobi had gone to every off-site adoption with us
since he’d lost his sibling, Amy-Lou, in late January. But Kobi,
along with Ethel, had come back with us that day as well. For
some reason, this gentle, smooth black Pit-mix had become my
silent prayer, the dog that, if he got adopted, would provide
some proof to me that responsible, good-hearted, intelligent
people do exist. I believe we all felt this way about Kobi and
couldn’t dare say it out loud. So instead, that Saturday, we
snarled at ignorance, laughed at the imagined pleasure of
pulling a rope and letting that ignorance fall, preferably
screaming, into the abyss, and, for good measure, criticized
innocent dog owners for doing what all dog owners have a right
to do: express love for their dogs.
Michelle, a volunteer relatively new to the shelter and to
off-site, had approached the three of us somewhere in the midst
of our tirade and humored us with polite silence. When she chose
to speak, she did so with great thoughtfulness, care and
tact—always the best approach when dealing with a bunch of
angry, exhausted, and annoyingly self-righteous volunteers.
“You know,” she said, “When people come up to me at off-site
adoptions and talk about their dogs, I like to think they are
working through a process. They’re talking, petting the dog I
have, thinking about how great dogs are, maybe thinking they
want another, maybe a playmate for the one they love now. It’s a
process they’re going through and I like to encourage it. It may
be a deadend, but I think you have to find out.”
The three of us stood in silence, trying to surmount the
pitiful, comic truth that lay before us: we’d become hardened
and disdainful of the culture outside the shelter, “Oh god,”
Barbara let out a laugh laced with embarrassment, “we’re
institutionalized …”
Or perhaps we were suffering from burnout. In any case, we’d
forgotten the reason we’d all signed on to become volunteers two
years ago: to find out… as Michelle stated plainly. To educate,
to be megaphones for the animals that arrive at our shelter, now
450 a month, to be there to answer the question, “Why do you all
spay and neuter?”
Somewhere along the way, it all had begun to sound so smaltzy
and over-sentimental … responsible, good hearted, intelligent
people… existing? Come on. That’s an elusive human trifecta in
which I’d long lost faith. Cynicism felt more informed, savvier,
and oh so much easier.
But what does it really accomplish? A new volunteer, with one
earnest opinion, guileless and simply put, jolted me, us,
briefly back to where we’d began, and where we should endeavor
to remain, even as we carry the worst of our mental baggage to
the new shelter. And once rattled and shaken, I found, despite
myself, I could spill out enough success stories to thaw even
the iciest soul. The dogs, their names, their beautiful,
intelligent faces, parade before my eyes like a carnival of
optimism and hope, the faces of their adopters etched into my
memories as well.
Kobi was adopted. And yes, the young woman who approached us at
Dog Day Afternoon began like so many others. “Oh, you should see
my dog …”
 Michelle,
Kobi’s handler that day, had just taken him on the
two-mile walk where he’d strutted out proudly with the other
dogs, the ones with homes and families and cozy bright futures.
On that warm, breezy day for a few hours he was just like any
other dog … until the ACO van would arrive.
And then that young woman from Atlanta appeared at the last
minute.
“Oh, Kobi,” she continued, “You should see my dog.” Then her
boyfriend commented, “You know I bet they’d get along …” And
Michelle ran to get directions to the shelter.
Candy the Pit Bull, whose breed had caused one man to jump away
in fear, captured the heart of another two weeks later. Candy,
the little fawn pup who’d been found in a bathtub in an
abandoned house in the Ninth Ward, who’d lived in the shelter
almost a year, now has a family that includes young children,
with whom she plays and adores. Her new mom contacted one of the
shelter’s
Care Cadets right before Dog Day to let her know Candy
was attending the event.
As for sweet Ethel, our institutionalized girl, she was
transferred to another shelter in Houston. We are hopeful—the
last group that went to Houston was adopted within two weeks.
And the move bought her more time, and perhaps a new environment
will awaken something in her tired soul. Perhaps the move to our
new shelter will invigorate ours.
Highs and lows, but we have to find out …
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