I’d traveled cross country from Connecticut to Kanab, Utah and founded Greyhound Gang – a non-profit dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation and adoption of greyhounds.
My cross country traveling buddy, Slim, now nine years old was having some back end issues. Kanab, a town of 4000, did not have a vet. I drove over ten hours to a vet teaching hospital with Slim and Beauty, my other greyhound, to see what the vets there thought.
Surgeons there assured me they could fix Slim. He had disc issues, and they were going to eliminate those issues. I didn’t have the money, as every penny was going into rescuing greyhounds, but I had to give Slim a chance, so I said yes. After the surgery, he went into their intensive care ward for five days. Since this was a teaching vet school, there were lots of people always moving around. I wasn’t supposed to be in there, but after a day of Slim not moving or eating, they let me come in to try to feed him. I sat down on the floor next to his silver chromed cage, and offered him rotisserie chicken from my hand. He greedily gobbled it up and wagged his tail. So they let me visit with him three times a day for an hour each time. I became a fixture there, propped up next to his cage with feet hanging into the aisle and chicken dangling from my hand. Vet students would walk by, shyly smile and say, “Is that your dog?” “Yes”, I’d say. “I run a greyhound rescue organization where I get dogs from the tracks and find them homes. “ Their eyes would go wide, and most would duck their heads and walk away. I distinctly picked up the feelings the students thought my devotion to Slim was odd.
I finally got one of the vet students to sit down with me at Slim’s cage and speak with me. “So, people here are looking at me weird”, I said in my forthright fashion. That was when I found out they were using hundreds of greyhounds for ‘terminal’ surgery practice in their third year. With tears in her eyes, she told me how students were assigned a greyhound for a day to a week to perform numerous surgeries on, and then kill him or her at the end of the procedure, or bring him or her back to life, to do another procedure another day. “You really love your greyhound,” she wonderingly stated. She confirmed what I had been feeling – for students to see a greyhound as a pet being loved so well was an anomaly in their universe.
I got this student to take me down some back stairs later that evening, and show me these warehoused hounds, and that is when I met Brindle Gal. In a wire cage with a ‘yellow tag’, she was wagging her tail, extending her paw through the grate, and being as endearing as she could be. White muzzle, petite body with enlarged nipples, she wiggled her thanks to me for acknowledging her with words and pets. The worker there, with tears in her eyes, told me the tag meant she was to be used for terminal surgery the next day.
I don’t know how I made it out there with the rows of greyhounds all looking at me, wagging tails, whining , wending paws through bars, begging for attention. I went back to my Motel 6 room, where Beauty was waiting patiently for me, sprawled on that bed, and just sobbed into her fawn fur with my arms wrapped around her body. Writing this twenty years later, my body is still bent with the anguish of those eyes and paws and lives lost within those cold walls. Those imploring eyes of Brindle Gal are forever tattooed on my soul.
I had to do something. Thoughts of unlocking all the doors, and letting all the dogs free – even though some would get killed by cars – and just loading up my SUV (or renting a big van) and getting the hell out of there with the dogs flashed through my head. Calling in a bomb threat to the school and releasing all the dogs. Marching into the intensive care unit and chaining myself to something until they stopped killing the hounds. My mind raced all night with desperate and crazy and tear-stained ideas.
The next day, exhausted and a bit more grounded, I managed to speak again with that worker in the bowels of the vet school. She bravely agreed to work with me to get dogs out of there. Even though it meant she could lose her job. But what kind of job was it to care for these animals, knowing they would be killed soon. She told me, through tears, that she would give each of them a name, and tell it to them so they knew she SAW them. She lived with their deaths daily, and it was killing her.
The only way out, the only way for them to escape death, was for a vet student to adopt one before the terminal surgeries. This worker started talking to vet students. I started talking to vet students when I was in with Slim. We got them to ‘fake’ adopt, then she would take the dog home, and we’d work out transport to me. I’d get them vetted and adopt them to loving homes. We were only able to save about twenty greyhounds this way. But we also got Greyhound Protection League involved, and they got the media involved, and that vet school’s board shut down the ‘donation’ of tens of thousands of hounds to them for terminal surgeries the following year. Racing industry breeders no longer had a warehouse to ‘donate’ (and take tax deductions) for the dogs who weren’t making money for them anymore.
This story started with Slim. If he hadn’t been ill. If I hadn’t decided to spend the money I didn’t have for surgery. If I hadn’t taken him to the vet school. I wouldn’t have learned about those thousands of hounds being killed.