Gimme Shelter

On a typical day at the Dewey Animal Care Center, strangers swap stories, hugs and training tips. They form friendships as they wait for their new pets. They can't wait to find out if it's a boy or girl, and coo over each others' new family additions.

Also on a typical day, more than three dozen animals are put to sleep, and several neglected or abandoned animals funnel in the side door.

On a recent morning folks lined up to adopt pets. Some had been on a waiting list, their fingers crossed to get the pet they had already bonded with through multiple trips down the cold cement corridors of the kennels.

"I knew what I would want when I saw it, and I found her," Cheryl Zavetz said on a recent afternoon at the pound as she waited with four other future pet owners for her name to be called.

Zavetz was first on the list for her 9-week-old puppy, but she worried that she still might not be able to own the wiggly brown stray. "Number two was here," she said. "She looked upset when she knew I was here."

A new purple dog collar with a bone-shaped tag inscribed with the puppy's new name, "Hershey," was clutched in her worried hands. "I called breeders but I figured there were plenty of dogs here that needed someone to live with," she said.

And so did a dozen other animal lovers who waited on benches in the lobby with Zavetz.

The Clemmons family is about to add a puffy-haired puppy to their clan.

"He stood out to us," Donna Clemmons said. "We wanted to rescue (an animal's) life so we came to the pound."

Connie and Dave Tyler plan to take their new dachshund, named "Holly," on a desert trip next month. "We've come every day since Saturday to visit with her so she will get to know us," Connie Tyler said. "We can't wait to take her home!"

For some, visiting the pound is an emotional test of strength.

Zavetz tried to choose a dog the week after Christmas, but halfway through the nearly 300 kennels at the shelter, she could feel all those sad puppy eyes begging her to take them home.

"I started to cry and I turned around and went home," she said. "It was bad. They are all in there and they just want a home."

After three trips to the shelter and down the long, dark rows of barking, pleading dogs, she found "Hershey."

"It was love at first sight," Zavetz said. "I wanted to see the temperament of the dog so I sat in front of the cage and played with her. I wanted her to know she was the dog for me."

When she knew she would get the dog for sure, she hurried to a pet store and plunked down $125 on all the little things a growing dog needs: food, bowls and toys -- lots of toys -- and new pet announcements.

Proud owners

Lisa Gonzalez pushed open the glass doors to the lobby area of the pound after she had wished Zavetz good luck with her new dog. Gonzalez recognized the dog from her own trips through the kennels to see her soon-to-be adopted dog. She was alone, but not for long.

Ann Marie Conroy immediately asked Gonzalez which dog she was there to adopt. She was relieved to know it wasn't the basset hound she is No. 2 on the list to receive.

"I hope I get it, I love this dog already," Conroy said.

"You will," Clemmons assured Conroy.

"My dog is roommates with your dog," Gonzalez said.

"Really?" Tyler said, pointing to Clemmons. "So is ours!"

And so it happens. Four women and two men begin to talk about their new puppies, each holding their white claim slip tightly.

"I've talked to so many people since I've been at the shelter," Gonzalez said. "People really care for pets. They want to save them from the ax."

Gonzalez hoped to bring her dog home the same day to meet her husband and children waiting patiently at home. "He's timid, he just needs love," Gonzalez said. She has toys and a bowl for him when they get home.

"I can't wait to take him home and play with him," she said.

Monica Meng, office manager of the pound, said the shelter tends to adopt out more dogs than cats. "I'm not sure why, it's just always been that way."

Gregory Popovich is one reason why. The Circus Circus entertainer trains cats he adopts from the shelter to perform in his act at the hotel's mezzanine level. "You look for their actions, they have to be alert, and look at those eyes,"he said on a recent afternoon as he carried a large, orange tabby with big golden eyes out of the shelter. It would be roomies with Popovich's 13 other cats and six dogs, which he has a special license to board.

Another feline friend, Kristi Jones, a dancer in Siegfried & Roy's show at the Mirage, waits silently, away from the dog lovers, an expectant smile on her face. She has a lonely tabby at home named "Tiger" whose playmate, "Sophie," died last month.

"Tiger looks out the window and he just looks sad," she said. "I think he misses (Sophie). It'll be fun to have another cat around."

The happy new owners discuss their new darlings as they wait for the animals to be released from the kennels and examined by a veterinarian. They kibitz about past pets and what they plan to do with their new ones. Meanwhile, a few people have come into the shelter and left with large empty cages.

Stray stories

"People can pay $10 and rent (cat) traps from animal control and bring in strays," Meng said. "Anybody can trap a loose cat. A lot of people don't know that Nevada has a leash law, even for cats. Animals have to be under your control at all times."

Debi Frailer brings a dog into the waiting room. The future pet owners glare at the tall, thin woman with the puppy, a shepherd mix. Fortunately for the dog, and Frailer, it would seem, the young pup isn't kennel bound. The black dog, dressed in a sweater, was a stray Frailer had found in her neighborhood.

"I'm sure this dog was well-loved, somebody misses her," Frailer said. She signed in the dog's vital statistics for the owner to claim, but took it home so it wouldn't have to stay overnight alone at the shelter. "Most people don't know to call Dewey for lost pets."

Dewey is trying to change that. It holds an adopt-a-thon four times annually, receives a plug on KLAS Channel 8's Wednesday morning newscast, and has recently upgraded its computer filing system to better serve customers -- and the animals.

"It's going to save a lot of time, a lot of animals," Meng said. "We can look up by breed or address and store as much information as possible. If somebody calls in to look for their pet, we can help them find it better."

More improvements

Dewey goes cyber in March with its own website, with daily updated profiles and pictures of incoming animals, information on how to find pets, lost-and-found reports, and rescue listings among other helpful information.

Behind the shelter is a fenced area for strays and pick-ups that don't match the usual suspects. A little black pig roots around a muddy pen, which includes five chickens, two roosters, a duck and one timid and plump white rabbit.

"We get those from time to time," Meng said, shrugging. "People aren't always zoned for pigs."

They also get a lot of exotic pets from arrests or evictions. "We had one guy who was arrested and he had all kinds of exotic (animals): birds, dogs, snakes, tarantulas," Meng said.

The shelter has farms in Pahrump, and friendly animal lovers in Clark County who are called in to save the farm animals. "We have a lot of people who come in and visit with the animals," C.J. Quick, Dewey animal assistant, said. "They feed them treats and just pet them. Sometimes they find one they really like and they find someone to adopt it, some friend or something."

One dedicated source of friends are the various rescue volunteers who peruse shelters daily to find families for the kenneled animals.

Volunteer force

Ken Sondej is a dealer at the San Remo hotel at night, and a shelter dog rescue volunteer by day. He roams the pound five times a week, looking for puppies to save. He sees up to 400 dogs a day at the area's three shelters, then makes a list with descriptions of all adoptable dogs and places the list on a private website, where would-be owners can choose an animal for adoption.

"I lost my dog March 3 of last year and I came down here to look for her," he said. His Siberian husky, Nova, sadly was not there, but a Siberian husky rescue volunteer was. Sondej was given tips on how to track down his large dog, as well as support for his loss. Three days later he was a volunteer himself as he continued to search for Nova and look into the eyes of orphaned animals.

He is currently fostering a full-bred Akita, which was to be euthanized at the pound over the holidays. "I asked them not to euthanize her, to put her up for adoption," he said.

He holds her at home and takes her to an adoption fair every Saturday.

But Nova is still missing.

"If we could get to 1 percent of the population to adopt a dog, we wouldn't have a problem," Sondej said.

The final alternative

Although puppies and kittens and other animals under 6 months old are not euthanized, all other animals not adopted within three days after the three- day mandatory hold for owner reclamation are put down. The pound receives between 60 and 100 animals a day on average. Of those, a little more than half are adopted. The rest are put to sleep.

Put to sleep, put down -- it sounds innocent. But each weeknight Matt Rake, euthanasia technician at Dewey, prepares to put down the unadopted animals. "I really had to think about it, if I wanted to do it," Rake said. "I like animals. It's not an easy job."

His wife already worked at the shelter as a receptionist, emptying the kennels through the happy job of pet adoption. He would work the other end of the shelter.

Technicians go through rigorous testing and are licensed through the Drug Enforcement Agency, the State Board of Pharmacists and medical examiners before they can legally inject animals with a lethal dose of 1 cc per 10 pounds of the anesthetic sodium pento barbitol.

The test also prepares them for bad reactions from animals. Bad, meaning they are still alive after the required lethal dose. "It varies, some animals have a tolerance for it," Rake said. "You may have a 50-pound animal and 60 cc's won't put them down."

His first night on the job two years ago was an initiation by fire. "We had a big list, it wasn't easy," Rake said.

He prepares for the evening's work around 5:30 p.m. He is handed a list of animals that are to be put down. Runners fetch the animals from their cages and walk them to the hospital. Their identification cards are double-checked with all their vital information on the list.

A handler gently restrains the nervous animal and Rake injects the solution. Dogs, usually easily restrained, are injected directly into a vein in the front paw. They die within 10 seconds. Cats, a more nervous species, are harder to hold still for the delicate vein injection. Instead, they receive the shot in the stomach where the intestinal lining absorbs the drug. This takes 15 minutes.

"We put them back in the cage to protect us and them, they (can) get pretty wild," Rake said. "Some of them do freak out a little bit, before they lay down and go to sleep."

Sometimes the drug doesn't take completely. "If the cat is unconscious we do a hard stick into the heart of 1 cc, which usually puts them down right away," he said.

Rake has received animals at the shelter that are malnourished, beaten, abandoned.

"It could be a lot worse, they could be out there starving, spreading disease," Rake said. "It never gets easy. Each euthanasia technician has their way of dealing with it. I box."

Rewarding endeavor

All in all, the job has its heart-lifting and heart-breaking moments as he cares for the hundreds of animals daily.

"We are trying to get the euthanasia rate down," he said. "It's 3 percent of the valley population now, which includes the (city) Animal Foundation and Henderson (shelters)."

Last week a fluffy Pomeranian was dropped off at the pound, outside on the curb. It was wandering the parking lot, on little legs seemingly stiff with arthritis. The dog had just had a bath and been groomed and recently neutered. A mystery, but not unusual for a day at the Dewey animal shelter.

"This dog was just dumped off by somebody, they just open the car door and out they go," Don Wilson, security guard at the shelter, said. "Sometimes they just do that, they can't take care of it anymore.

"It's awful what people will do."

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