Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507150019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER EDITORIAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"He was the ugliest thing God ever let live on the face of this Earth." Filthy. Full of fleas. Couldn't have weighed more than 3 or 4 pounds. And he trembled all the time. All the time.
Al, who was doing a little P.R. for the animal shelter, is not a trembling kind of guy. A 30-year Navy man, he's gruff and he's blunt - and he's kind to animals. You always know he's going to say something to reveal the truth of this when he starts out, "It may sound corny, but ... "
Well, it may sound corny, but Al noticed this trembling mutt (``It looked like a little rat") and started taking him out of his cage every morning to play with him. Just to cheer him up. Al knew he wouldn't be able to adopt him; he and his wife lived in a townhouse and it was not the ideal place for a dog.
Not that he wasn't tempted.
"You sure you don't want to take him home?" an SPCA technician asked him that last day.
Al was sure.
"Because he goes back today." Goes back to the room where the overflow of unclaimed or unwanted animals is killed.
No, Al couldn't take him.
So the technician took the mutt out of his cage, and "that little snot jumped out of his arms, and I had to catch him [of course!] to keep him from falling [absolutely!]." So, Al growls at me over the phone, "I say, 'OK, take him back and give him a bath.'''
And Al snatched Muttley from the clutches of death.
"He's the owner of our house now."
Yeah, house. Al didn't say he bought the house for Muttley. I'm sure he and his wife, Shirley, enjoy it, too. But Muttley really enjoys it. I know, because I invited myself over to meet him. He prances. He struts. He leaps into laps at the slightest encouragement, and runs around furniture with a ridiculous looking plastic hot dog in his mouth. Then he steps out to enjoy the amenities of his back yard (``I just bought him a 12-hundred-dollar fence," Al grumbles).
Besides being one helluva great rescue story, Al would be pleased to tell you, Muttley's is a "real ugly-duckling story, too." He spent $125 at the vet getting his dirty little rat fixed up, and Muttley, clean and groomed and well-fed, has turned out to be a lovely Lhasa Apso mix - part poodle, perhaps.
The first couple of weeks, Al says, "he wouldn't let me out of his sight." He was shy and scared, and was very irritable if he found a piece of food. Two years later, there's no trace of that insecure scavenger. "He's an arrogant, self-centered, spoiled rotten little brat," Al said with a grin.
Actually, he's a friendly, well-mannered, playful little dog who watches his people with adoring eyes. But I didn't want to be argumentative.
Besides, I found Al to be a hard man to argue with. I had called him because I read where the SPCA was going to launch a fund drive this fall for a new shelter, and expected to start building it by spring.
Right.
I heard that one 15 years ago. Since then, several floods, an embezzlement scandal and personnel controversies have occurred - the latest, in 1993, left Al Alexander as executive director. What hasn't happened is any construction on a new shelter. Why should folks believe it will be built now?
Well, Al said, there are a lot of good people in the Roanoke Valley. Couldn't argue with that. There are good people with money, he said. Couldn't argue with that, either. "We have to let people know what we're doing here," and they will help. Right. What are you doing?
What they are doing - or trying to do - is high-volume adoptions.
From an adoption rate that hovered around 10 percent when he became executive director, he said, the shelter now has an average rate for the year of more than 50 percent. And in April, 70 percent of the animals that were brought in were adopted rather than destroyed.
"We've gotta go to work, clean the place up and get adoptions up," Al said. "That's all I think about is how many lives I can save."
It would be more if the SPCA could get a new shelter. Now, sick animals that normally would recover have to be put down immediately, because there is no way to isolate them to keep an illness from spreading. And there just is not room for all of the strays and cast offs - some had behavior problems when they were brought in; some were wonderful pets for years, but go "cage crazy" after being abandoned, and sink into depression or act mean. They won't get new homes.
But they might, if the shelter staff had room to work with "these kids," as Al calls all the dogs and cats, and resocialize them.
Isn't the risk of saving them that they will run loose and reproduce, adding to the valley's already considerable overpopulation of strays?
No, Al said. Folks sign a contract that they will spay or neuter their pet when they take it. If they don't, he pays them a call and either makes the appointment on the spot or takes the animal back. "And I'm not very nice about it."
But most everybody does. There are, as Al says, a lot of good people here.
by CNB