The Tara Foundation

The only way to survive being in dog rescue in Southern California is to focus like a laser on the victories and block out the defeats. It’s not an easy thing to do, since the number of defeats is simply overwhelming.

When you volunteer in a shelter, you try to get to know the individual dogs. That way you can provide them with affection and comfort, and you can also more effectively persuade potential adopters to take them.

The unhappy flip side is that getting to know them leads to loving them, which leads to terrible pain if they are subsequently euthanized, as so many are.

It’s as if each dog has a clock attached to it, and the time remaining on that clock inexorably clicks down. If someone doesn’t come in and adopt the dog before it gets to zero, then the dog will die. And the moment that time runs out is unpredictable; usually it’s directly related to the number of other dogs that are turned in or found stray, and the previously available space that is therefore occupied.

The rescue problem in the Los Angeles animal control system is simply a function of supply and demand; there are many more great dogs than there are good homes that want them. A deficiency in spaying and neutering is obviously one of the causes, but that isn’t nearly all of it. There are a great many people who possess what in my eyes is a disturbing mind-set toward animals. They view them as possessions, as discardable as a piece of furniture. Unfortunately, the law takes a similar position, though that is finally changing in many localities.

I’ve met plenty of dog owners who made me wish their own parents had been spayed and neutered.

One day my daughter, Heidi, was looking for a dog, and she went with us to a mobile adoption in Century City. There she met Gigi, a one-year-old Australian cattle dog mix who was pretty much as sweet as they come. They bonded instantly, and Heidi took her home that night.

Debbie and I met the woman who runs Perfect Pet Rescue, the group that saved Gigi and placed her with Heidi. Her name is Nancy Sarnoff, and she is as dedicated a rescue person as exists on the planet. Debbie and I talked with her for an hour, and by the time we left, we had come to a conclusion.

We could do this. We could start our own rescue group.

Debbie and I approached the task with slightly different viewpoints. For her it was a solution to her recently expressed desire to do more productive things outside of her job, and she relished the prospect. And if she could help animals in the process, all the better. Her commitment was total and instantaneous.

I had some concerns. For example, most adoptions are done on weekends, which happens to be exactly when football is on television. And this wasn’t some down-the-road problem; Labor Day was approaching.

As is the case close to 100 percent of the time, Debbie’s enthusiasm ran roughshod over my hesitancy and procrastination. We started with the name, which was the easy part. By decree we announced that we were now running the Tara Foundation, dedicated to the rescue of abandoned and homeless dogs, primarily golden retrievers.

There are no licenses necessary to establish a foundation like this; all it takes is the willingness to do the work and care for the dogs. We started with a couple of advantages. Rather than go through the long process of securing a nonprofit tax status, we became a subsidiary of Perfect Pet Rescue, thanks to the amazing Nancy Sarnoff. Also, having volunteered in the shelter system, we knew our way around it and had made some important contacts.

The only real disadvantage was that it was just Debbie and me, and she had a full-time job. Most rescue organizations have a large group of volunteers to draw on, but we did not. We probably should have gone out of our way to recruit, but we never did, and we wound up with only four part-time volunteers the entire time we operated. They were a huge help, especially a woman who was with us almost the entire time, Cathy Pearl.

But Debbie and I wound up doing almost all the rescuing and the walking and the advertising and the screening of potential adopters on the phone, and everything else. It was physically and emotionally draining.

The one thing that was absolutely no problem was finding the dogs to rescue. The shelter system was overflowing with them, all types and all sizes; we just needed to figure out where to put them once we got them out of the shelters.

Sort of by definition, someone who would dump their dog in a bad shelter probably hadn’t taken very good care of it anyway. So the dogs we would be saving might well have health issues that would need to be addressed. They’d also need a bath and shots, and a safe place to stay while we were finding them a home.

A vet’s office would provide all of the above, and we soon discovered that they were eager to have us. All of those things cost money, and even though they offered us a generous discount, it was still very much in their interest to serve as our base of operations.

So in no time at all we had what we physically needed to get going.

Except for the dogs.

We started making the rounds of shelters, primarily looking for golden retrievers. Amazingly, they’re not in short supply; we got eight of them immediately. But we soon realized that we could not and should not rescue only goldens; there were too many terrific, deserving dogs, both mixes and pedigrees, for us to limit ourselves.

We had the physical space at the vet’s office to house twenty-five dogs at a time, and there was no reason to ever be below that number. We would take in all the golden retrievers that needed us and use the remaining space for other deserving dogs.

We’d do our shelter runs once or twice a week, depending on how adoptions were going. We had to go through the same process as anyone else, adopting each dog individually. Once we did that, we loaded up our cars with as many dogs as we had room for. We usually placed about twelve a week in homes, so that’s how many new ones we were able to take.

Almost all of our adopters learned about us through ads in the Los Angeles Times. This was before the proliferation of the Internet, which today makes things much easier. Potential adopters can now go online and see and read about available dogs. They can also fill out pre-applications. I wish we’d had those things available to us back then.

It was a simultaneously exhilarating and horrible experience. On the one hand, it was the purest form of rescue. We were taking dogs that had no chance, and once we had them it was an ironclad guarantee that they would wind up in a good home.

But we were picking them from thousands of equally worthy animals, and we knew that only a small percentage of those we left behind would make it out. The animals we were looking at were the starfish, and like the man on the beach, we could make a difference to only a very, very small percentage.

That meant we were literally making life-or-death decisions, not something I would recommend to others. We’d walk by the dog runs in the shelters, and the dogs we’d pick out would live, and the ones we’d walk by would most likely die. And there was nothing we could do about it.

Ultimately, about 60 percent of the dogs we rescued were goldens, and the rest were mostly mixes. One thing that they had in common was their size; because smaller ones had a better chance of being adopted out of the shelter, we focused on large ones. It was rare that we took a dog under sixty pounds.

Things immediately went well, at least in terms of finding homes for the dogs. People are much more willing to deal with rescue groups than shelters, at least in Southern California. Just the idea of walking into a shelter is daunting for animal lovers. They fear that what they will see will break their hearts, and very often it will.

Dealing with a rescue group like ours removes that danger, and also provides security. Adopters had to sign a contract that obligated them to return the dog to us if the adoption didn’t work out well, for whatever reason. That removed the chance of their having to take the dog back to a shelter, where returned dogs generally did not fare well. By bringing the dog back to us, they would know that it would be well taken care of, so the potential guilt factor was removed.

I should say that the guilt factor was removed from the adopter, but not from us. We chose dogs who appealed to us, and who seemed most in need. Very often, that need would make them less likely to be wanted by others.

So what happened was that we would rescue a dog and either know going in, or subsequently find out, that it possessed a quality that would make it virtually unadoptable to anyone else. Perhaps the dog was old or had epilepsy or bad hips or whatever. The majority of people, even well-intentioned ones, did not want to deal with issues like this.

A perfect example of this was Nugget, a ten-year-old golden that was dumped in the South LA animal shelter. Nugget had a seizure while in the shelter, which would almost assure his not getting adopted, especially with his advanced age.

But Nugget was also blind, which made it 100 percent certain that he was going to be euthanized. No one would deal with the expense and difficulty of taking Nugget into their home, not when there were healthy young dogs in the same shelter, even in the same run.

But there were few things more painful than seeing how scared Nugget was in that cage, not being able to see his surroundings and being picked on by the other dogs. There was simply no way we could leave him there, though we knew it would be fruitless to even put him up for rescue. So Nugget came home with us, and he lived two happy and safe years.

That happened frequently, and was the reason our home gang kept expanding. Our guilt instantly kicked in; once we rescued a dog, how could we just leave it in a cage at our vet, constantly being rejected by potential adopters? What kind of life was that? The dog would have been better off facing its fate in the shelters.

There was also a more practical consideration. If a particular dog occupied one of our cages for a lengthy period of time, then it cut down on the amount of new dogs we could bring in.

All of this left us with two options. We could either keep the dog in a cage while we failed to find him a good home or bring him to ours. We kept choosing the latter, and it surprisingly became easier, rather than harder, as the number in our house increased.

When you have two dogs, getting a third is a big decision. For instance, the vet costs increase by 50 percent. But when you have twenty-one, one more doesn’t seem much of an additional hardship. And if you have twenty-eight, and a shelter calls and says that a twelve-year-old golden will be put down that afternoon if you don’t come and get it, then you go and get it, and you raise your number to twenty-nine.

So dogs kept coming home with us, one after another after another. We had crossed over into full-blown dog lunacy and burned the bridge behind us.