Hi Everyone…Matt here.
Look…we all know who does all the work around here. Who worries herself sick, text messages me in the middle of the night because she’s worried about a dog, a cat, the gravel in the driveway, whether we left the garage door unlocked, or some other terribly important thing that has kept her up all night.
This last dog transport was a nail biter. I have to admit that even I was worried at some juncture, and I never worry about anything — I have Kerry to worry for both of us.
So I’ll start at the beginning. It was a dark and stormy night. No…wait a minute. It was the winter of my discontent. No…no good either. All this happened, more or less.
Patty Perfetti is an adoption machine. She and Mary do a terrific job fielding the hundreds of calls and emails we get each week. The quicker we adopt the quicker we can save more animals. With that in mind we want to make sure our animals go to the best possible homes, so the process is pretty intense.
Kerry got an email from Phyllis at the Circle of Hope rescue in Jackson, Tennessee. Phyllis takes in dogs whose time is up in area kill shelters and places them in foster homes until they can be adopted. Since she has no shelter, when she runs out of foster homes dogs begin to die. And she was full.
Kerry got a list of the dogs in the shelter and huddled with Janet, Patty and Mary to figure out how many we could take and how quickly we could take them. I was busy doing some other chore that escapes me right now, but it’s just as well as I tend to take all of the dogs now and worry about where to put them later. Choosing the animals we take in is by far the worst part of our job, because we are pretty much deciding if they live or die. We both stay up nights sometimes thinking about the responsibility and the implications.
They picked 19 dogs. The next step was to get them from Jackson, Tennessee to Pets Alive, a distance of about a thousand miles. It’s about a sixteen hour trip. Kerry called our friends at Almost Home Transport to get the job done. That’s where we get our first plot twist.
Denise at Almost Home decided that she was going to retire from the transport business, at least for a while. Denise is reliable and reasonable. Most of you don’t know this but we lose money on these adoptions. We pay for transportation, spay and neuter, medical costs and other things. So we lose $120 – $150 (sometimes a lot more) per dog. But we make it up in volume (a little rescue humor there).
So now we’ve saved these dogs, they’re waiting to be picked up, and we have no transportation.
So Kerry picked up the phone (and her typing finger) and started emailing and telephoning the transportation “underground railroad” that transports dogs. I’ve been involved with these networks and they do a great job. A group of people take different legs of the journey and deliver the dog to the next person until he or she gets to his forever home. They do a great job with one dog at a time, but the wheels fell off the bus when we introduced 20 dogs into the mix.
While all of this was going on Kerry remembered an email on one of the gazillions of message groups she participates in about good transporters. She dug up the email and starting making inquiries about which transporter people liked. She emailed and spoke to many transporters but they were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
So we were stuck. The clock was ticking and we had no way to get these dogs. Many, many times here at Pets Alive I have felt like there was a guiding force helping us. Call him God, or Fate, or Sara Whalen or whatever you wish. I feel it all the time and as usual we felt that force in this situation.
Kerry received an email from Colleen and Bill Larrea of Charlotte, North Carolina. The title was Volunteer in Charlotte NC checking in, and here’s what it said:
I am currently between jobs, and have the next week and a half off until I start my new job at the end of the month. Pets Alive is our charity of choice, so I wanted to reach out to you to see if there is any need for me/my husband to assist with any transports that may be originating from the South.
Kerry was very excited. She emailed back and explained the situation in Tennessee. Kerry also called her vet, her sister and her boss to check her references (we have to be very careful), and they came up with a plan.
She and her husband would rent a car (at their expense — wonderful people) and drive to Tennessee the night before the transport, and stay overnight in Tennessee (again at their expense). Then they were going to return the car and rent a van big enough for the transport. There’s where we got the next glitch.
Normally our transporter takes dog carriers down with them to put the dogs in for the trip. Phyllis didn’t have enough dog carriers. In steps Rose Travers, longtime Pets Alive supporter and benefactor, and gives Phyllis her credit card number to buy the carriers.
Meanwhile, when Phyllis goes to collect dogs she pulled from a shelter she saw Poppy, a Rottweiler/Shepherd mix. She fell in love with him, but had to leave. She tried to contact Kerry, who was away at the time. 40 minutes before Poppy was to be killed, Phyllis did what I would have done — she grabbed Poppy and decided to figure out what to do with him later. Anyone familiar with the management here knows what happened to Poppy — he’s resting comfortably in one of the oversized outdoor runs here at PA.
I’ll let Colleen and Bill take it from here:
While recently reviewing the Sidewalk Angels website of Marisol and Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20, I connected with their link to Pets Alive. Being a tremendous animal lover, I was immediately captivated by the wonderful work that all these volunteers do at the Pets Alive santuary.
Being in between jobs and a relocation, I found myself with several weeks off, which I have never had the fortune of having before. With this free time on my hands, I immediately knew that I wanted to try to volunteer with Pets Alive in some manner. I sent an email to Kerry, the director at Pets Alive, to see if there was any need for rescue transports originating out of the South that my husband, Bill, and I might be able to assist with.
Within the hour, she excitedly confirmed that she had just agreed to help 18 dogs in desperate need to be transported from TN to Pets Alive, but didn’t yet know how it was going to happen. Bill and I immediately began exchanging email communications with Phyllis, who had rescued and was temporarily housing the dogs in TN, and with Kerry, to determine an immediate plan of action. Bill and I were ready to make the trip from Charlotte, NC to Milan, TN and then on to Pets Alive…
Bill and I rented a cargo van here in Charlotte NC and drove straight through to Milan TN on Thursday evening, driving 575 miles and 10 hours straight. We arrived at our destination in TN at 1:30 a.m. Friday and checked into a hotel to catch 4 hours sleep before meeting with Phyllis at 7:00 am later that morning.
When we arrived at Phyllis’s house, the wonderful foster moms were already there with the dogs to be transported. At that point, my heart flip flopped and I just wanted to cry out of joy and sadness for these beautiful animals, and for what we were about to do. To be able to make a difference in their lives hit me really hard, as this was the first time Bill and I had ever actually been part of an act that was so impactful and hands on with animals in need. We have always contributed monetarily for animal rescue associations—this trip was an entirely new experience for us.
Let me back up a bit. The drive for our heroes would be 20+ hours from where they were. Non-stop. With dogs. We thought it would be a good idea to split it in half to make it easier. The idea was that the Larreas would drive half the trip, transfer the dogs to a yet-unnamed other transporter, and go to sleep.
We have a great volunteer email list. We decided to lean on it. Kerry sent an urgent email asking for help. Bill Swearer stepped up. Bill, along with his wife Linda Brink, have a long history here at Pets Alive, including transporting pigs to the pig sanctuary, watching over and taking care of our birds, and taking Buck, the abused dog from upstate into their home. Bill and Linda have been unbelievably supportive of us through all of this mishugas and we love them very much.
So now we need to rent Bill a van, pay for gas and expenses and put him up overnight so he will be rested enough to make the trip. So we scramble to figure out how to pay for this. Rose steps up again and takes care of it. Go Rose! Back to Colleen and Bill:
We all spent 2 hours assembling the new crates, placing temporary identification collars on each dog, and securing all the dogs and crates into the van. Some of the dogs were wagging their tails in anticipation of something, but not knowing what, and others were so scared, with tails tucked beneath them and pitiful looks on their faces. By 9:00 am we were ready to leave for our 9 hour (550) mile journey to Blacksburg, VA where we were set to meet with yet another wonderful volunteer Bill S. from NY, who had volunteered to take over the final leg of this journey to transport the dogs to Pets Alive. Once we hit the road, we knew it had to be a straight shot to limit the overall amount of time the dogs spent locked in their crates.
We arrived in Blacksburg Va on schedule at 6:30 pm and proceeded with the exchange of all the dogs from our van to Bill S’s who was ready to then make the final 9 hour trip direct trip to Pets Alive. As Bill and Bill removed each crate from our van, I provided just a small amount of water and food to each dog to satisfy them just enough without causing any unnecessary car sickness or other issues. All the dogs seemed to be so trusting of what we were doing, and I just wanted to hug them all and let them know that they would forever be okay. I found myself overwhelmed with hurt and happiness and sadness, and the tears came down hard. We said our goodbyes to the animals and to Bill S. as he began his part of the trip, taking him into the wee hours of the night.
Bill and I arrived back in Charlotte, NC 4 hours later, and immediately emailed everyone with our updates. Bill had done all of the driving, a total of 1350 miles in a 30 hour time frame, with only 4 hours of sleep. We were exhausted, yet so elated with the success of our trip.
Preparations for the dogs were being made at Pets Alive. Juan, Marcos and Chris set up outdoor runs for the new arrivals, and Kerry worried herself to near-insanity while the dogs were on the road. At 2:30 AM the phone call comes in. Bill is getting close to Pets Alive. I pick up Kerry and we head over there. We snap on the lights in the dog area and are greeted with the barks and squeals of its current occupants. Sammy barks at the car. When we step out he stops and his tail wags.
We go inside the kennel and make sure everything is ready. About fifteen minutes later I hear the crunch of tires on gravel. They’re here.
Bill snapped a few pictures. His only comment was this:
Kerry & Matt had surprisingly high energy levels for AM!
I’ll let Kerry take over from the email update she sent that morning at 5AM:
Every time I see the van pull up, the doors open and all those frightened eyes peering back at us, my own eyes swell up with tears at what could have been for this “load”. We take each crate out, and out of all the times we have done this, never has a dog tried to bite us.
Never. Instead, after being in these vans for upwards of 20 hours, often with little or no food or water…they greet us with just fear…or total joy and exuberance.
My heart just breaks for the scared ones, and as we carry out crates I keep up a light, soft banter telling them thy are safe and it’s ok. Many of them won’t come out of the crates at first…some – like Poppy – BLOW OUT of the crate…but those are often the exceptions. Many huddle in the back and peer at us with fear and terror and I just want to hug and kiss them and I often do. It’s amazing that they do not bite me…and have never tried.
This time, Vail was the first crate out and we wanted to get to the puppies. We had her sitting in the driveway in her wire cage and she was so polite. She sat there as we unloaded all the crates and settled the puppies in first. She didn’t paw at the cage or whine. She sat quietly, just watching patiently. She was ever so sweet and she was the third to last that we finally got to and settled her in. She took one step out of the crate and decided, nah…it was better and safer where she was. I sat for a bit and kissed her face and patted her and eventually she came out all the way.
So it was with many of them…and then there was Dexter. He…like Poppy was just bewildered as to what had taken us so long and exactly WHERE was his new family and his new home? I broke it to him gently that it might be a few weeks before he was curled up in front of an air conditioner with kids hanging off him, but he took it well.
We settled in the three little labs all together in a big spacious outdoor run. They all have their own wading pool and kuranda bed and new dog igloo filled with straw. Two other labs and a brown dog (it was too dark to read the names) together, then Vail and the little cocker spaniel mix went together, and finally Dexter and the little chihuahua mix went together. Not a single fight, disagreement or argument. They all were happy to be out, and free and went to drink water, as Matt and I laid out some food for everyone.

The puppies immediately knocked over their water and went to the bathroom everywhere – even on the nice clean blankets, but I figured the staff could manage them the next morning! Their room was a DISASTER before we even left, and they had already escaped the double x-pen and were racing around the room. Sigh. Little imps.

Poor Poppy had to go alone to the kennel since he is not neutered yet, but I left the door open between him and the next kennel where he could see two other dogs recovering from heart worm treatment, without being close enough to bother or upset them. He is just a doll and I went back after everyone else was settled and spent some time with him. He is a real sweetheart (rotties are my personal favorite breed) and I’m glad you pulled him at the last minute, Phyllis and didn’t let him die.
Colleen and Bill:
As you all can see, it took a number of us all working together to make this happen. Bill and I are so proud and feel so fortunate to have been a part of this rescue mission. It is by far the most rewarding experience of my life, and one that I will not forget. I doubt that work schedules will allow us to be part of something like this anytime in the near future, but the moment we have another opportunity, we will be there!
Animals can’t ask for help and they don’t deserve the heartache and hurt that so many of them are faced with. It takes animal lovers to step up and help make a difference in their precious, sweet lives. Please do whatever you can, whether it be donating money or time, to do your part to make an animal happy, safe, and healthy. If they could ask themselves, they would, but since they can’t we all need to be their voices for them.
Kerry:
Thank you so much Phyllis for saving all these lives. Thank you Rose for financially making this possible when they get here and for paying for all those crates and covering the van on this end. Colleen and Bill L – what can we ever say to thank you? To do this grueling trip at YOUR expense…when you could have mailed a check or sent a letter – to get so personally involved…it really floored us all. Your email came in as I sat with head in hands wondering how we would ever get them here. You were definitely SENT to us. Thank you so very much.
And Angela Huffman, MD, thank you so much for donating the fencing to make more runs for these dogs, the igloos in which they now rest comfortably, and all of the other generous donations you have made that have comforted our horses and our dogs.
Linda and Bill Swearer – thank you. Bill you have saved our hide more than once by doing transports for us but this was by far the longest, most tiring, most expensive, and driving throughout the whole night to save these dogs….you really touched our hearts. Linda thanks for mentioning it to Bill and for being such a great wife to say “GO – JUST GO, I GOT IT HERE!” You two have been a godsend to Pets Alive.
..and of course Matt…for always being there and being willing to get up with me at 2:30 am and go over there and lovingly place each dog in a safe place. You are my sanity and my peace.

For all of the terrible emails we get, all of the anguish and worry and feeling like you’re pushing with one finger against a hurricane, coaxing those dogs out of their carriers and walking them to safety makes this all worthwhile. It’s then that you realize once again that this can only be done one animal at a time. Every single soul deserves to be saved and brought to safety. And they all aren’t. But tonight Pets Alive — Bill and Colleen, Bill and Linda, Kerry and Matt, Rose and Angela, Phyllis and you, our cadre of loyal readers and supporters saved twenty souls from certain death.
And to Kerry…some days you remind me more of Sara than Sara. Some days you are just a freaking lunatic. Most days I am amazed by your compassion, strength and intelligence. You were sent to Pets Alive. You are a natural leader and you are the best partner I have ever had. In fact, you are just simply the best.
Another caper in the can.