Hi everyone.  Matt here.  Hope your winter is going well.  It’s been a rough day here at Pets Alive.  Kingfish died earlier today and there’s a pallor of sadness that has cast itself across the face of Pets Alive.  I can hear the click-clacking of Kerry’s fingers on the keyboard across from me and the almost comedic yet melodious snoring of Scrumpy is floating by from somewhere off-camera.
Have I ever mentioned to all of you that we get hate mail?
Whenever I start a new business there is always someone who thinks they are doing me a favor by pointing out to me where I’m going to fail.  I’ve been tremendously successful, and they have been -well- wrong.  But that doesn’t stop them from trying.  I used to be tremendously offended by these people, but now I basically just laugh.  There is something very close here in the rescue business.
Our latest poison pen letter comes from someone who calls herself K~.   I believe she is a she by the way she writes, but who knows.  By the way…this little squiggle is called a tilde ~, which is used in scientific notation to mean “sort of.”  So this means our friend is sort of a K.  I actually thought she was sort of something else, but I’ll save that for a few paragraphs until you agree with me.
After the story about the dogs that were flown in by our generous pilots appeared in the online media we got a flood of emails and phone calls, which is typical.  Our donations also spike up, which always helps us.
Let me just take a moment here to tell you all how much I love you.  I am just floored by your generosity and support.  I am reading in all of our industry publications how far down donations are, how people are not as responsive with their time and money as they used to be.  That’s just not true here.  If anything it’s the opposite.  All of you open your hearts and your wallets on a regular basis and words cannot express how grateful and amazed I am.  We asked you to help us transport these dogs from the airport.  It was our usual half-@ssed, poorly organized last minute appeal.  15 of you showed up.  Incredible.  Whatever success we have here is due entirely to all of you.  It’s an honor and a privilege to work with all of you.
K~ sent the following email in response to our email newsletter:
Why keep going out of state when dogs needs saving in your backyard?
Normally I would hit the delete button and move on to the next email or crisis or lunch or dry martini or anti-snore aids for Scrumpy or whatever.  This just galled me though.
I responded and actually held back.  Those of you who really know me will appreciate the sarcasm of my response, and will see what I was REALLY saying:
Dear K~,
About a third of the dogs at Pets Alive come from the immediate area.   The media does not consider this eventful.  All of the dogs that come to Pets Alive have been slated for euthanasia somewhere else.  They certainly don’t care from where.  We do our best to try to make a difference everywhere.  Each life is precious regardless of its location.
Thank you for taking the time to email us.  You should consider volunteering or making a donation to help us save more animals from death.  The animals in this particular rescue would have gone to the gas chamber where 300 dogs are gassed each week.
Regards,
Matt DeAngelis
Bite me is what I really wanted to say but it didn’t really convey the depth and breadth of my feelings.
Lets put this to rest once and for all, okay?  We take dogs from all over.   When they are names on a list it’s easy to intellectualize this whole thing and start putting hard and fast rules on everything.  We aren’t choosing distributors from whom we buy our fruits and vegetables.   These are innocent lives over which we have a moral obligation of stewardship.  By my estimation (we don’t even TRACK where we get the animals from as it doesn’t matter), between a third and half of our animals come from this general area, by which I mean a two hour radius.  If you draw a big circle around an area bounded by about Waterbury Connecticut to New York City to mid-Jersey and a bit into Pennsylvania you get the general idea.
We stopped between 350 and 500 animals within that circle from dying last year.  That’s impressive, and puts us near the top of the list of the 100 or so shelters in that circle.  I am so unbelievably proud of this.  I consider it one of the best accomplishments in a life that has had its share of accomplishments.
We also saved the same to a somewhat more than that number from outside the circle.  They would be just as dead as those in the circle would have been.  Just like death, we don’t discriminate.
Here’s my aside within an aside.  We were visited by a couple from one of the boroughs of New York last week.  They were looking for a place to leave their beautiful brown dog that they had found tied to a tree in a park near their home.  They ended up at Pets Alive because they had tried many, many other places that were NOT no-kill (meaning they kill dogs if they don’t get adopted in a certain amount of time), and even tried some of the biggest names in the animal rescue business where they were told those organizations no longer TAKE owner turned in dogs.  I was absolutely appalled that one particular organization, supposedly one of the leaders with about $30 million in donations a year, doesn’t take local dogs AT ALL.   Made me very sad.
Here we are, ramshackle, tired and broke, and we’ve reached out to ALL of our local kill shelters and told them to send US their dogs instead of killing them.  We get hundreds of emails each week begging us to take animals, and we agonize over EVERY SINGLE ONE.  If we can’t take the animals we sit there and try to figure out who can.  We seem to be the only one that does this, even among the organizations for which our entire yearly budget is a rounding error.
Okay…so here’s her brilliant response:
Matt
 I am very familiar with that shelter and the gassing they do in the south.
 This issue of animals from the Southern states being brought up North en masse, as seems to be happening with more and more regularity, is something I have given some serious thought to. Like everyone else who loves animals, I would love to be able to save each and every animal that needs a home and I have absolutely nothing against any animal down South, out West, or wherever they might be. They all deserve a home and a happy ending. Unfortunately, that is not at this moment, a realistic possibility. As we all know, there are way more animals than there are available homes or at least homes willing to adopt them, especially when it comes to certain populations. Although we might have a few dozen homes to pick from for that young, healthy, small purebred doggie (preferably a female, preferably one that doesn’t shed), old dogs, sick dogs, large breeds, mixed breeds, special needs dogs, and especially the pit bulls and pit bull mixes are entirely too numerous for the few homes that are willing to give them a chance. We can all debate whether or not there are enough of those more “desirable” dogs up North to meet the “demand” but what is unquestionable is that thousands upon thousands of the less desirable dogs are killed each and every year in shelters throughout the North. For every dog that is brought up from the South, a dog in a Northern shelter dies because that home was just taken by the Southern dog. So, while you may be saving the Southern dogs, you are at the same time sacrificing the Northern dogs. Is that a fair trade? If we take the perspective that every dog and every life is just as deserving as the next, then one would think that trading one life for another isn’t exactly what our goal should be.
This is very similar to the argument against no-kill.  Basically what K~ is saying is that we are sacrificing northern dogs to save southern dogs.  We are somehow sacrificing the lives of northern dogs by not saving them exclusively.  There are more holes in this argument than swiss cheese.  The irony here is that she is basically saying that every dog has the same right to live, then telling me to let the dogs in the south die, effectively denying them that right.
If there are concrete rules for taking dogs (which we have, although they are more like guidelines), hypothetically every dog has the same chance to live or die, regardless of where they come from.  Even the argument that the southern dogs are occupying a space that the northern dogs would is kind of stupid in this case, as the average dog stays at Pets Alive about two weeks before he or she ends up in their forever home.
As far as her contention that female dogs that don’t shed are the most popular, that’ s just rubbish.  At Pets Alive, an overwhelming majority of the dogs that come to us get adopted, regardless of their size, color, gender, or whatever.  One of my favorite anecdotes is the week we read that black dogs are the most difficult to adopt, and hounds take the longest to adopt here in the North.  Shortly after that we ended up with a ridiculous number of black hound dogs.  We joked that we were going to change our name to “Black Hounds Alive.”  Based on those doomsday statistics they should all still be here.  They were, of course, adopted (all but Elvis, who is one of the sweetest dogs we’ve ever had).
We’d love to take some kind of credit for this success, but I think it’s just simply that the people who adopt from us are generous, intelligent, and judge our critters by their personalities rather than their color or what kind of fur they have, which is more than I can say for our friend kinda K.
Anyway, more pearls of wisdom drop (they are certainly droppings):
We must also ask ourselves whether the significant resources being spent transporting so many animals up North could be put to better use? And what exactly are we accomplishing by bringing up all those animals from the South? Are we doing anything to address the animal problem in the Southern states? Or are we perpetuating the problem by taking their pet overpopulation off their hands? What incentive or urgency is there for these Southern states to do something to address their issues if we continuously take all their puppies up North? If we want to really help the South and more importantly their animals, then we should be spending all this money and effort we are now spending on shipping all those puppies up north on helping them figure out how to STOP breeding so many puppies to begin with. Wouldn’t that make a whole lot more sense? Or are we more interested in having a plentiful supply of cheap puppies to satisfy the North’s demands than we are in ending the misery the animals must go through? Is the South just a different kind of “puppy mill?”
Ah.  Some more of my favorite arguments.  She is basically telling me how to spend my money.  I mean that literally because I am the biggest single donor to Pets Alive.  We aren’t teaching these people a lesson in the south by taking their dogs.  Letting those dogs die will prove the point that we -uh- I’m not really sure.  What is the point that this will prove?  If no one cares about the dogs they will die.  Yeah.  That makes sense.
Are WE doing anything to address the problem?  WE?  Does K~ have an office here that I don’t know about?  I know I am.  I know that I am asked my advice regularly by people in the south who WANT to change hearts instead of putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound like they’re doing right now.  And again…these are not statistics or incentives or columns of numbers in spreadsheets.  THESE ARE LIVES.
What are we doing to address the problem of too many animals dying?  Uh…we are saving their lives.  Did you miss that blog?  And yes, of course, we want to help them change hearts.  We do wherever we can, and we have big plans to facilitate that.
But here’s where we get to the root of the argument…a thinly veiled accusation that Pets Alive is EXPLOITING these animals by bringing them up here and finding homes for them.  That we are somehow more interested in making a profit than saving animals.  I love this one.
Genius…take a moment to consider this.  We charge an average of $200 for a dog.  Dogs down south are seldom vetted ($50), wormed and heartworm tested ($50), and more than likely not spayed or neutered ($100 – $150).  Many, many of them have heartworm (one batch of ten yielded EIGHT heartworm positive dogs at $500 each for us to cure).  We also microchip them and start them on heartworm preventative ($50).  On the average we LOSE over $100 per dog.  But we make it up in volume (one of my favorite jokes).  So give it a rest.  We’re not a profit center.
As long as thousands upon thousands of animals in the North are being killed because homes cannot be found, I cannot understand how anyone can ethically defend the practice of bringing so many animals into this area so that even more end up losing their lives. Does no one care about the fate of the animals in the North? Wait, I think I know the answer to that question. Since the vast majority of the animals losing their lives up this way happen to be pit bulls and pit bull mixes and large mixed breeds and other “undesirables,” my guess is that very few truly do
Here we go.  The pit bull argument.  Sorry…doesn’t work on me.  I own two pit bulls.  And we adopted out 12 of them last month.  Good try.   And as far as the “undesirable” breed crap goes, we really don’t have any undesirable breeds.  We can adopt any of them.  And I love the broad generalizations in this letter.  Where’s the evidence?  Where are the statistics to back up this garbage?   This is where I start to laugh and wonder why I waste my time.
 Save in your own backyard first Matt and then I will consider a donation.
When the ALL the NY state shelters are empty then go out of state.
K~
Ah…now here’s the order.  This is someone who has made no effort to help us, but she will “consider” a donation when I save in my own backyard.  When ALL of the NY state shelters are empty she will consider a donation.
I DO save in my own back yard.  Every single day.  We take dogs from municipal shelters nearby, work with the county north of us (Sullivan County), the county to the east of us (Putnam County), Pennsylvania (which is about 15 minutes from us), and even Connecticut where I live and have been active in animal rescue for decades.
Local vets call us when ignorant people bring their dogs to them to have them executed -sorry- euthanized and they just can’t bring themselves to kill an innocent animal.  We take them.   We take FIV cats that no one else will take.  We take in dogs whose owners die (or even dogs like Meeko, who lost two different owners).  The story is always the same…we are the only organization that stepped up to help.
And we will continue to help.
K~, you are ignorant.  Get off your butt and go volunteer at a shelter.  Go see the reality of the behind the misinformed statistics that you spout.  And you can keep your money.
So…this blog entry is called TWO emails.  I want to show you the other side of this.  There’s a very special person who sends us emails from time to time.  Her name is Irene, and her nickname is Doc.  She is a Fire Lieutenant and also has a PhD and MBA.  So she really is a doctor.  She works with one of the shelters that K~ complains about down south.  She is paddling against the current, and she and her group have done amazingly well.  Kerry and I have provided our advice, and offered to fly down there and talk to anyone who would listen.
They are improving conditions for the animals that are in their care, and they are making it easier for other organizations to adopt from them by vetting the dogs and spaying and neutering, which is the key to the fixing the problem down there.
I’d like to share with you the email that came in from her today and had both Kerry and I in tears.
I had surgery on Friday so haven’t been able to send out something for Tiffany.  My best friend, Mikki, got a Kong for Christmas.  Since he died two weeks after Christmas, he barely had a chance to use it.  I’m actually not too sure he actually knew what to do with it!!!  I would like to send Tiffany his Kong in his memory – I know that he would want a homeless gal to have something that was bought with a ton of love behind it…. Would it be okay to send a slightly used Christmas gift to her?
 I also made a donation to Pets Alive and I would like for you to take the small amount that I could afford at this time to find Tiffany a forever home (last month I spent over $4000 on surgeries and medical care for Mikki’s bloat surgery, treatment and eventual cremation, Martha’s hospital stay for pancreatitis- from eating BRATWURST! –  and Denver’s rectal tumor surgery and then of course, the coolant line and the #3 cylinder on my car went out at the same time so all this is on credit!!!).  I can’t believe the poor gal, along with Bindi and Cam, still haven’t found a home….. It breaks my heart.
 Thanks and have a great day!!!
Doc
I seriously thought of sending HER a check.  The perfect example of what keeps us going here at Pets Alive. We love you Doc.  Tremendously.  Thank you for your kindness and everything you do for people and for animals.
Pets Alive will continue to do what we think is right, with your help.  And if the K~’s of the world don’t like it they can get out their checkbooks and start their own sanctuaries and save whomever they wish.  We would support them 100% and not cast aspersions.
We’re supposed to all be in this together, and it’s about saving the animals.   Thanks everyone for being with us.
By the way…Doc’s email signature is  Omnis Cedo Domus – “Everyone Goes Home.”