Shelter dogs travel in style to find new homes

WASHINGTON — Dogs arriving at an animal shelter is usually a sad story. But the mood is more like Christmas morning as staff at the Washington Animal Rescue League wait for the Rescue Waggin' truck to open its doors.

The people and the animals have never met, but some greet like old friends. A basset shoots out to lick a face. Jodie Martin holds a small black puppy, one of the almost 40 dogs that she and the driver picked up that morning from two shelters in Ohio, and kisses it on the head before she hands it over.

"These are beautiful dogs," said a staff member at the Washington, D.C., shelter.

The Rescue Waggin' program of PetSmart Charities has moved more than 29,000 dogs since 2004 from communities with high euthanasia rates to shelters with high adoption rates. Their four trucks transport dogs from 53 shelters in 24 states, including a new route that serves Mississippi, Louisiana, southern Tennessee and Arkansas.

The pups travel in style: Specially designed trucks have air conditioning, piped-in music and video cameras so the dogs can be monitored in transit. The policy is not to transport animals more than 10 hours at a stretch, so the organization has just built a halfway kennel for overnight breaks to make longer trips a possibility.

When the dogs are led into their temporary home at the Washington Animal Rescue League, there's a full service hospital, a behavior department and a beautiful cageless shelter facility where a soothing fountain cascades over glass ceilings that let in natural light.

"We work on their physical, mental and social rehabilitation and transition them to new homes," says the league's director, Dr.Gary Weitzman.

If you live in a big city with a shelter like this one, it might be hard to understand how different the situation is in communities where the pups come from.

Mark Southwick says that when he started volunteering at the Parke-Vermillion County, Indiana, Humane Society in 2004, the euthanasia rate was 56 percent, including many perfectly adoptable animals, because they simply did not have the resources to either keep them or find them homes.

"Our shelter is situated in a very rural setting — we are literally in the middle of a cornfield," he says.