Chapter 11

The Price of Surrender

April 2013

South Los Angeles

THE INTERVENTION PROGRAM WAS A BREAKTHROUGH.

“Is there something I can do to help you keep your dog?” Amanda Casarez asked the man who stood in the South LA shelter’s “animal receiving” line, an old spaniel by his side. He shook his head dismissively, and she watched him hand over the dog, which was whisked into a nearby crate. Some surrendered dogs resisted, some barked frantically as their people walked away. This one sat trembling in stunned silence. The man headed to the rear of the shelter, where available animals were kept. A half hour later, he left with a puppy.

Her blood pressure rose. Let it go, Amanda, she told herself. If you strangle him, you’ll go to jail. (She later redeemed the old spaniel herself and placed it with a rescue group.) The next owner she approached was grateful for help getting neuter surgery for her dog and happily took him home. Hopeful, angry, sad, joyful—it was a preview of her life for the next ten years.

The South LA shelter had been relocated and rebuilt around the same time the intervention program began. The new facility was a huge improvement over its dark, smelly predecessor. It had outside kennels with retractable roofs, misters, and heated floors for the animals; landscaping and bright-green paint was aimed at making pet adoption a pleasant, shopping-like experience.¹ Yet as Lori walked the aisles on her off-hours, the shorthand heartbreak of the cage information tags told her nothing had changed. Here was a two-year-old male pit bull, owner surrender, an unaltered five-year-old female tricolor pit bull, owner surrender, a neutered ten-year-old male Chihuahua, owner surrender . . . Each was the outcome she hoped to avoid. She met with shelter staff to explain what she and Amanda were doing. “We’re not here to take your jobs,” she assured them. Some got it, some didn’t; some staffers took great exception to the idea that keeping an animal with an imperfect owner was better than finding it a new one. Lori understood that hating people who gave up their pets was necessary self-protection for anyone whose job required them to euthanize animals. It kept them from hating themselves. Still, tension between shelter staff and DDR would be an ongoing problem.

The intervention strategy was simple: Amanda would approach people who came in to give up their pets, ask what assistance might change their minds, and provide it. She had an arsenal of weapons—vouchers for free sterilization if that was the problem, vouchers to cover treatment at a partner vet if sickness or injury was. (Lori’s standby, Dr. Simon, had died in 2009, and she’d amassed a roster of vets who agreed to see clients with shaky credit, sometimes for reduced prices. She offered a retainer so the vets knew they’d get paid, but they also believed in what she was doing.) Amanda could have a free dog house delivered to someone who’d gotten cited for failing to provide his pets adequate shelter. She could order home improvements, like building a gate or dog run or repair to a weak fence, all done by a Modernica carpenter and paid for by DDR. She had collars, leashes, food, money to redeem and license impounded dogs. There were two rules: anyone who wanted ongoing help had to sterilize their pet, and for a problem requiring a cash outlay, clients had to contribute what they could, even if it was just a few dollars. They weren’t to be passive charity cases, but part of the solution.

No one knew how or even if things would go. DDR’s entire budget was limited to the $100,000 that Found Animals had provided, so Lori’s initial goal was modest, too: over the course of a year, their help would keep four hundred animals out of the shelter and in their original homes.

They blew past that goal in three months.

Daily, as many as a dozen people found their way to Amanda, singly, in pairs, as whole families, Black, brown, white, English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, both, carrying terriers and Chihuahuas, pulling burly pits. They were sad, angry, wounded, broken, defiant, depressed, occasionally in the grip of active psychosis—they were all poor. They were single mothers making less (sometimes a lot less) than $25,000 a year, most of which went to rent. They were men who cleaned offices and women who did childcare and sold tamales on the street, people who had three jobs or none, who shopped with food stamps, who ate out of dumpsters. People trying hard to craft a better life than what they’d known in distant countries, people who’d given up, who’d made bad choices, who’d never had choices to begin with—immigrants, transients, locals. People who couldn’t read. People who were being evicted, deported, facing trial, homeless, who had no papers, ID, bank accounts, or street address because they rented a converted garage on a property with four other illegal units. People without a pay stub to “prove” their need because they worked under the table for cash. People who ran out of food for their kids every month, don’t even talk about the dog. People for whom a subsidized $15 vaccination charge was a burden. People so close to the edge that any surprise meant escalating disaster: the dog got mange and there was no money to treat it, so it got worse, someone complained, animal control came, and now there was a cruelty charge on top of everything else.

Like the man who’d given up the old spaniel, some were the “people just dump their dogs” assholes of humane movement cliché. A group of friends whose boxer-mix puppy had been badly injured by a neighbor’s dog abandoned him at the reduced-rate vet to which Amanda sent them. A young couple complained that their two pit bulls had been wrongly confiscated as “dangerous,” but animal control had found them in a feces-filled yard and both had blisters on their backs.

Some people were hard to help, mad with a lifetime of grievance, and Amanda was a convenient target. “I knew you wouldn’t help me—you racist bitch! I want to speak to the supervisor! Don’t tell me it’s you, you are not in charge. I’m gonna get you fired!”

Some radiated rage that was a cover for pain.

“I can’t take the dog back!” a woman’s angry voice carried from the receiving line. She was a Black woman in her thirties, well dressed and wearing sunglasses, with a little mutt on a leash.

“We don’t serve your zip code,” an animal control officer answered. “I’m sorry, but we can’t—”

“I need help!” she shouted. “If you can’t help, what do my tax dollars do? Why the fuck are you here?” She stomped out. “What the fuck! What am I supposed to do?”

“I work with a shelter intervention program,” Amanda said to her. “Not for the shelter. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not unless you’re gonna take my dog!”

“Come inside.” She pulled the woman into a small office the shelter let her use. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try. Whatever you tell me is confidential. I can try to find a rescue but I need to understand why you’re giving it up.”

“It’s a matter of life and death!” The woman burst into tears, her legs gave way, and she slumped to the floor. “This is too much,” she wept. “This is too fucking much.” She pulled off her sunglasses. Both eyes were blackened. “My husband tried to kill me last night. I got away when he was asleep. He said he’d kill my dog, and he will.”

Amanda made a call to Lori, and they made fast arrangements. DDR paid for a hotel room for the woman and her dog, then a bus ticket that sent her to her sister’s in the Bay Area.

There was no “typical” intervention case. Everyone Amanda dealt with was different; every solution had to be customized. Every day was a roller coaster that showed how much pets mattered to people whose lives were a struggle, and how much that struggle strained the bond. Amanda played animal control officer, peacekeeper, transporter, liaison to rescue groups. She found a place for the twenty-three Chihuahuas belonging to a man who’d started taking in street dogs he’d never sterilized. She was a home improvement project manager—So your dog got out and you want to keep it from happening again but the landlord said ‘don’t change the fence or you’ll lose your security deposit’? Our carpenter will bring chicken wire to cover the gaps that let the dog escape and attach it with zip ties that can be cut off.

She was a scheduler of vet appointments and a graphic, grisly educator on the medical benefits of spay and neuter: photos of a dog with testicular cancer finally turned the tide for a tattooed cholo who’d first showed up reeking of weed and exclaiming that “Neutering’s against my religion! You’re taking his manhood!” (He returned sober, bearing his pet’s surgery certificate and offering thanks.) She taught pet care and follow-through, small steps that could mean future generations would be more responsible animal caretakers.

She arranged transportation to vets’ offices, sometimes drove people herself, sometimes played mediator when an owner repaid a doctor’s offer of affordable care by not returning to pick up their animal or even throwing a tantrum in the office. One incensed a vet who’d cut his price by giving him a one-star Yelp review. Occasionally the police got involved. Amanda pushed through the terror when a man who’d ignored her warnings that his dog could die in surgery blamed her when it did and sent death threats.

She was a housing advocate and a dog whisperer’s agent, sending families with unruly animals to attend Larry Hill’s training class for a reduced price or even for free. Pets had to be sterilized by the third class, and anyone who stayed for five sessions got a certificate of completion. One client, a woman at least sixty, cried when she received it.

“I never finished high school,” she said. “I never got a diploma. But I’m so proud of my dog. I’m proud of myself.”

She played case manager, crisis counselor, shrink, mom, referred people to food banks, legal clinics, sliding-scale therapists. She learned to tell the difference between people about to blow and those ready to fall apart, and that she had to move fast: if someone seemed ready to accept help, it had to come now, otherwise it was like telling an addict there’d be a rehab spot next week. If I give you a plan, can you stick to it? she asked. Does everyone in your family support what you want to do? Do you have a place to live? If I send you to a doctor, can you afford to follow up? Are you at risk for going to jail next week? Is somebody at home hurting you?

And she played the angel of merciful death, offering vouchers for humane euthanasia, so low-income families with pets at the painful end of their lives and who wanted to end their suffering had an option besides letting the shelter do it. Making it possible for pets to pass away peacefully, surrounded by the people they loved, was one of intervention’s most precious gifts. Lori had never forgotten the homeless Vietnam vet she’d met, whose voice fell to a whisper as he confessed to her “how my last dog died. She had cancer. She was suffering. I have a gun . . .” Killing his beloved pet was the kindest thing he could afford to do for her, he said, but even ten years later, he cried telling the story. He had never forgotten where he buried her body.

How can I help you?

“My dad brought my dog in . . .” There’d been a ticket that young man didn’t pay—okay, a couple of tickets—and when he got busted, his father was so angry he got rid of the dog.

Can I help you?

“This dog just showed up, so I’ve been taking care of her and I didn’t know she was in heat. She was raped by a pit bull, right there in my yard! Now there’s all these puppies—I breastfed three kids but she’s got six pulling on her and I don’t have the money for dog food.”

Oh my God, can you help? The shout came from a shelter staff member. When Amanda rushed over, she saw a young girl writhing on the floor. Her mother had been signing the surrender papers for two older terriers—“The landlord said get rid of them or we’ll be evicted,” she said in Spanish. She was a low-wage worker, a single mother, and the dogs were the only bright spot in her daughter’s life. But if they lost their tiny apartment, they’d be on the street.

The girl had held up her dogs proudly. It was clear she had developmental issues, and it wasn’t until the animal control officer reached for them that she grasped what was happening.

“No!” she cried.

“Dáselos a ella,” said the mother softly. “I’m sorry.” The officer reached out again, prying one animal then the other from the girl’s arms.

“No!” the girl shouted again, grabbing desperately at the squirming dogs. “Mami!” Another howl, and suddenly she was down and gasping, her face frozen in midcry, like a grotesque mask.

That case took paramedics, a hospital stay, a letter to the apartment management company, and a doctor’s letter classifying the animals as therapy dogs. DDR paid a $500 pet deposit. The girl recovered, and she and her dogs went home.

“I have to be honest, this job breaks your heart,” Amanda told me one day as we sat together at her folding table outside the South LA shelter. Next to us, a sign in English and Spanish asked, Would you like to keep your pet out of this shelter? “There’s not a day when I don’t go home crying or angry.”

Each time I hung out with Amanda, I marveled at her ability to keep going. Despite the plants and green paint, the shelter atmosphere was grim. Across the street was a school bus depot and a weedy lot, empty since the fires of 1965, whose only occupant was a middle-aged Black man sleeping rough, surrounded by shopping carts full of junk, the birds and feral cats he fed, and his two dogs. (The man, beloved by many in the neighborhood, was traumatized when a self-styled animal activist stole his dogs, who were never seen again.) A recycling plant operated next door. The noise never stopped—frantic barking, loads of bottles crashing. Neither did the need, both human and canine. That included Amanda’s own. She liked to tell Lori “I am the client,” and it wasn’t a metaphor. She was juggling the intervention job with running her own rescue, caring for her sons, supporting the grandmother who’d raised her, mourning the premature death of a beloved aunt, fighting an illegal eviction, and then searching for housing that accepted a family with not-great credit and multiple dogs.

Lori still struggled when a rescue effort went bad though she tried not to show it. “I say to myself that if I weren’t here, it would be going down anyway,” she told me. “I can cry in the car.”

Amanda, too, took failure hard, when people who claimed they wanted her help holding on to a pet returned to the shelter to leave it when she was off duty or who pleaded poverty even as they whipped out the newest-model iPhone. There had been a client who showed up one day with a new pet, nonchalantly explaining that “Yeah, the one you were helping me with got hit by a car.”

A decade after she began the work, she was haunted by some of what she’d seen. The surrounding neighborhood was high-crime, and one day a man was stabbed right in front of her while she was stopped at a traffic light. He stumbled against her car, she jumped out, and he died in her arms. “These are the things people who live around here face on a daily basis,” she said. “It’s hard for people on the other side of town to understand.” Then there was Rudy.

He’d showed up at the shelter looking like a figure from a horror movie, his face completely covered in crude tattoos. In his arms he carried a bloody Chihuahua. The stray dog had just been struck by a car. “Please help me!” he cried. “Don’t let him die!”

“I did what I’m never supposed to do and drove them both to the vet,” Amanda said. “I mean I had no idea who this man was.”

The dog’s injuries turned out to be relatively minor, and Amanda paid the bill, then gave Rudy dog food, a crate, and her cell number. After that, he came to the shelter regularly to “give back” by sweeping the sidewalk around her table. Gradually his story emerged. He’d been convicted of armed robbery as a teen and sentenced to twenty years in an adult prison. He was beaten there, raped repeatedly, and emerged with PTSD and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. The Chihuahua, whom he named Toby, became his anchor. So did Amanda, who for two years helped him track his medications and appointments.

Then Rudy got sick, missed meetings with his probation officer, lost his Medi-Cal coverage and access to antipsychotics. The last day Amanda saw him, he was pacing and talking to himself, a bad sign for his mental health.

“Have you taken your meds?” she asked.

“They didn’t give me my refill,” he muttered.

This was serious. Amanda called around and found a drugstore that would supply a few doses until she could get his situation straightened out. But her car was in the shop and she couldn’t take him there right then.

“Go straight home and rest,” she ordered. “Don’t stop anywhere.” But Rudy, heading down Western on foot, met a prostitute. He took her back to his little rented room, and murdered her. He was sentenced to thirty years.

Had it been a dog or cat in trouble, Amanda knew, she could have taken it in, found it help. She couldn’t do anything for the man—or the woman who’d died. “I know it was the system that failed,” Amanda told me, her eyes wet. “But it hangs heavy on my heart.”

Amanda had ended up in the hospital more than once from stress. “I acted like a tough kid growing up, but now I’m the biggest chillona [crybaby],” she said.

Four hundred animals kept out of the shelter by July of 2013 became two thousand that December, and the numbers just kept going up. Holding and caring for dogs and cats requires municipal shelters to pay for staff salaries, food, cleaning supplies, and medication. In LA in 2019, the price was just over $10 million. DDR’s average intervention cost them just $65.²

Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks, who often wrote about South LA, reported the success with wry amazement.

“It’s an idea so simple, you have to wonder why it wasn’t done before.”³

Banks’s question had a complicated answer. The intervention program was simple, but to insist that people without money deserved to love and be loved by animals, and that those with resources should help them, was also profoundly radical. If poverty was a moral failure, you didn’t save people from its consequences. Rather, as Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, would later put it, “the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century” was punishment.⁴ Workers who couldn’t pay their debts, defendants who couldn’t make bail or hire private probation consultants, addicts who couldn’t afford treatment, people of color targeted for traffic tickets they couldn’t clear, the unhoused cited for sleeping on the sidewalk, should suffer. Suspend their driver’s licenses, even if that made it impossible to work, garnish their wages, jail them.⁵ It wasn’t surprising that 80 percent of the nation’s incarcerated came from low-income communities.⁶

Parents who couldn’t provide their kids decent housing or enough to eat or who left them alone while they searched for a job should pay by losing custody.⁷ It was poverty, wrote law professor and sociologist Dorothy E. Roberts, “not the type or severity of maltreatment [that was] the single most important predictor of placement in foster care and the amount of time spent there.” Economic status also determined who would be punished for not meeting society’s parental standards. Law professor Linda Fentiman noted that while prosecutors filed charges against low-income mothers for “risky” behaviors like drinking beer while breastfeeding, affluent women who refused to vaccinate their kids against deadly diseases were rewarded by state legislatures that “changed their laws to accommodate [them].”⁸

The same thinking applied to pet owners. The well-off might proclaim their pets to be family members, but for the less fortunate, they were “a luxury, not a right.” If someone didn’t license and sterilize an animal as regulations required, fine him! If a dog or cat had a flea infestation or an untreated wound or illness, that was neglect—don’t question, cite! In at least one state, not providing adequate veterinary care was a misdemeanor carrying ninety days in jail or a fine up to $1,000; a second violation was a felony.⁹ As with parenting prosecutions, it was easiest to go after those without resources. In 2014, Riverside County, California, animal control inspectors went door-to-door in some low-income, mainly Hispanic, neighborhoods verifying that pets were licensed, vaccinated, sterilized, and microchipped and levying fines up to $400 if they weren’t. The county’s chief vet, who oversaw the program, was offended by the suggestion that these poorer pet owners had been singled out: “It’s not our fault that we don’t go to the gated communities—we go there all the time, they refuse entry.”¹⁰

If a pet got loose or escaped and was picked up by animal control, it was routine to charge a hefty fee to reclaim it—and add on the cost of any vet care provided at the shelter, boarding, even the cost of the animal control officer’s field visit.¹¹ “Imagine if you dropped your wallet and the grocery store held it hostage and sent it to a warehouse in a different part of town,” said the Koret Shelter Medicine Program’s Allison Cardona. “And then you had to pay $500 to get it back.”

What if a pet owner didn’t have the cash? In Stockton, California, one young husky mix that escaped through an open gate and ended up at the local shelter lost his life because his unemployed owners couldn’t come up with $180 to reclaim him.

“We were crying, pleading . . .” Robert Aflleje told a local journalist. “I feel like they killed one of my kids.”¹²

Shelter intervention challenged all that thinking, as well as the rescue narrative that when innocent animals suffered, bad people were to blame and the answer was always a new and “better” home. That narrative remained strong. In 2014, the LA rescue world erupted around the saga of an adorable eight-month-old Rhodesian ridgeback named Raffiki. The puppy, who wasn’t yet spayed or microchipped, disappeared from the yard of a small rental home in an unglamorous part of town; her Latina owner searched for her, checked the local shelter, and posted online notices. But the dog had been found and turned into a shelter ten miles away, which the owner didn’t know she should contact. Soon, someone she knew spotted the dog advertised for adoption on a rescue group’s website. The owner left a voicemail for the group, and when she didn’t hear back, filled out an adoption application, both times saying essentially that’s my lost dog, my four-year-old son is grieving and I want her back. But by the time the group listened to the message, Raffiki had been adopted by a new family that refused to return her.

What could have been a sad story of loss, miscommunication, and bad timing got nasty after the angry original owner contacted the media. The rescue group then issued a statement blaming the owner for the situation. If only she had microchipped the dog, if only she had been “a little more diligent” in her search . . . Besides, the adoption application she’d filled out—for her own pet—revealed that she “did not meet the qualifications that [we] look for when adopting a dog to a home.”

News stories criticizing the rescue brought a torrent of online comments that vilified the original owner for being poor, ignorant, and undeserving.

[She] clearly cannot afford to properly provide for herself and her son, much less an animal. [She] needs to get her act together, work to make a decent living for herself and her son and then when she can properly provide for an animal which includes spay/neuter, microchipping, and providing an I.D. tag, then she can adopt another animal.

The 4-year-old will recover and hopefully learn about responsible pet ownership.

This lady should be grateful. I’m sure she is sad, but her sadness comes from selfishness and poor her.

They don’t deserve the dog back.

Never let [her] ever again have an animal.¹³

The family never saw their dog again.

The failure that actually brought many animals (and their people) to the shelter door, Lori insisted, and repeated on multiple social media posts, was not personal but systemic. It was the lived reality of being poor—what Jo Barker had called “bigger than both of us” and sociologist Matthew Desmond more artfully described as “an exhausting pile of problems . . . a tight knot of humiliations and agonies.”¹⁴ It was having a second or third full-time job of juggling bills and stretching dollars while enduring the physical pain of dental and medical problems there was never money to address and nights of crappy sleep from living in an overcrowded, thin-walled place that you were also terrified of losing. Being poor used up so much mental energy, some researchers said it was like losing thirteen points of IQ.¹⁵ So sometimes you didn’t think. You didn’t deal with the cat or dog getting sick. You forgot to close the gate. You didn’t pay the traffic tickets. You made mistakes that made things even worse until you couldn’t afford to fix them and the pet was gone, the kids were crying, and you’d let them down again.

To fund her work, Lori applied for and received grants and, as Aimee Gilbreath had demanded, kept meticulous records of whom DDR served and how. But if a situation wasn’t covered by donor money—if a shepherd owner showed up at a community clinic aimed at pit bulls—she simply dipped into her own pocket. When one elderly couple couldn’t afford insulin for their dog, she simply committed DDR to cover it, for that animal’s life. She was less interested in how her programs looked to donors than what they did, and she was on the ground seeing that firsthand. There might be other organizations funding spay and neuter surgeries or offering a monthly pet food bank, but which had a president walking the street, running clinics and talking to clients? Which had staff willing to listen when the conversation was about human struggle and had nothing to do with a pet?

“The difference in what we do is the difference between an interaction and a relationship,” Lori told me later. She was in this for the long haul.

Lori met one client when she helped her care for the dozens of Chihuahuas living with her in a derelict Skid Row apartment. The contact grew into a connection of calls, texts, and visits that lasted for years, even after the woman escaped the Row. “I love you,” the woman told Lori, saying, like Benny, “I’m your daughter.”

Longtime DDR volunteer Ruthie Redfern gave months of telephone support to an alcoholic homeless veteran whose PTSD traced back to the two weeks he’d spent trapped and starving in an attic after Hurricane Katrina. He came to call her “Ma.” Ruthie also became the caregiver of a cat owner who rented a small room near Skid Row; when the woman died of cancer, Ruthie was holding her hand. Amanda drove to Skid Row very late one rainy night after a young man she’d been helping was robbed of his tent, sleeping bag, and dog crate. “How could I sleep warm knowing that my client, who I’ve built a bond with, is in the freezing cold?” she asked.

DDR was an anchor for those whose lives were a series of crises, for whom the escaped pet and unaffordable vet bill were just the visible tips of gargantuan icebergs. Perhaps rescue paradigm shift was too weak a term for what they did. It was something without precedent in the animal welfare world, less “rescue” than some new multispecies social work.

I need to give up my dog because my neighbor, he’s in a gang. Chucho barked and he said he’d kill him. He would hurt us, too. We can’t afford to move.

Our house burned down, we’re living in the car.

I’m a Vietnam vet, I have PTSD plus I just lost my wife after 48 years of marriage, and I’m kind of torn up. Can I just sit here awhile?

After Amanda helped a local man adopt a dog, he brought it to visit her every week while she sat at the shelter. The night his mother died, he called Amanda, crying. “That’s it, you’re all I have left.”

Amanda, and later a second counselor, Yesenia Conde, and the volunteers that supported them and Lori, who still woke at night panicked that she’d lose everything, weren’t just saving pets, they were holding up a piece of the city. During her years downtown, Lori had noticed how some homeless coped better than others and were more likely to escape their current situation and move on. It was those who’d had someone in their past who’d cared for and believed in them. They would be that someone.

To Lori, one truth was evident: the continual flow of animals into the nation’s shelters, where many would languish and some would die, was neither a pet problem nor a people problem. It was a poverty problem. And if animal lovers still hadn’t found the answer to ending shelter death, maybe it was because no one had been asking the right questions.