How Much Is That Five Dollar Dog?

I went to a pool party last week.  I haven’t been in a bathing suit since the early 2010s and I didn’t intend to wear one that day, either.  Some of the guests were in grass skirts; others had on fur coats and collars. The best I could do was take off my shoes and wade around in the nearly drained pool.  There was a scuffle or two, but mostly a lot of splashing and name calling;  “Waylon, stop popping the beach balls!  Precious, don’t be afraid to go in the water.  Tanner, come here!” It was a fun couple of hours and if you haven’t figured it out by now, it was the end-of-season Milligan Park Beach Party for the AWL dogs.  The Animal Welfare League dogs and handlers had the pool to themselves on Friday and Saturday, the pool was open again to the public pups to come out with their owners. It was a fun event for the dogs and human participants. 

I wanted to take Waylon home.  He is a hound mix with more energy than my seventy year old body could handle, but man, he is adorable. We really have no more room in the inn, so to speak. Our 50th Reunion Committee compiled a yearbook with updated information and asked us to share our bucket list.  Dan and I both put “run an animal rescue” as our second drop in the bucket.  I think we can cross that one off. 

Rescuing animals has long been a hobby of mine.  When my second husband and I married,  I brought a nine year old son and a fifty pound Dalmatian into the union.  The dog, Daphne, was my constant companion and slept curled up in the bend of my legs.  A boundary was set by my newlywed husband:  “No dogs in the bed.”  So we wheeled a rollaway next to my side of the full sized mattress and that is where she slept.  I didn’t think anything about it until our minister came over to visit a few weeks after the ceremony. As we were giving him the grand tour of our house, he spied the rollaway shoved up against our marriage bed.  I saw him squirm and before he could ask or turn away in horror, I blurted, “That’s where our dog sleeps.”  He chuckled, but I am pretty sure he left thinking he had now seen everything weird there was to see in East Tennessee.

I was working as a Speech Therapist in a rural county at the time and came across many stray animals, mostly dogs.  I brought home two puppies cowering in some weeds along a dirt road, a furry Corgi mix loose in a Long John Silver’s parking lot, a Brittany Spaniel running down the middle of the road and a shepherd/hound cross I found leaning up against a door to the entrance of a gas station.  With each foundling, my husband at the time warned me to stop bringing strays home!  I called one of our local rescues led by a woman named Minnie.  I needed consoling after dropping off a couple of the furry friends.   I hung on to the Brittany Spaniel thinking I might be able to find someone interested in taking him.  Minnie, in her wisdom offered, “Don’t just give a dog away.  Even if you only charge five dollars, put some value on its life.”  I call it her Five Dollar Dog Theory.

The truth is, an animals life is worth way more than five dollars, yet some are treated as if their lives don’t matter at all.  I won’t use my platform to lecture people on the responsibility of pet ownership, but as Gandhi once said, “ The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”  Sometimes it feels as if our moral compass isn’t working anymore. Our shelter is overflowing with dogs and cats right now.  These are tough times for people for a multitude of reasons and our beloved pets are treated as disposable entities.  The men and women who work and volunteer at the Animal Welfare League are angels; they do the bittersweet work of rescuing, rehoming and rehabbing animals brought in as strays or surrenders.  Yet there are some dogs and cats who don’t make it out of the shelter for one reason or another. 

Right after I moved back home to Indiana from Tennessee,  I went on a ten year hiatus from rescuing stray dogs.  Then during the Fourth of July celebration of 2008 at Milligan Park, a sassy little stray caught my eye.  I carried the little terrier mix around for hours asking if she belonged to anyone.  She ended up coming home to live with us and is aptly named, Millie.  A few years later while driving to work from Broad Ripple to Avon, an emaciated Pit Bull was standing in four lanes of traffic, trying to look in car windows.  I pulled my car to the side of the road and called to the dog.  By then she had jumped into some weeds and as I walked towards her, she belly crawled over to me. I picked her up and hefted her into my car.  That was twelve years ago and Chloe rarely leaves my side. The last of the “street dogs” as I refer to the pack of three, is an eight pound holy terror.  He ran the area around Wabash College and Sycamore Hills for three months until Dan and I managed to catch him with some cheese in one hand and Millie on a leash in the other.  My good friend, Dawn, who is a Vet Tech, saw his photo and commented, “He looks a little rough.”  So Little Ruff became his moniker. They are all in their senior years and I wouldn’t take any amount of money for them.  They are like family to us. 

For the rest of August, the Animal Welfare League is sponsoring a “Clear the Shelter Event” in which all adoptions are half-price.  If you are so inclined, please check out their adoptable pets or at the very least, drop off five dollars or so.  You’ll be glad you did.

Gwynn Wills is a former speech therapist, certified Amherst Writers and Artists workshop Affiliate and Leader and founder of The Calliope Writers Group. After growing up in Crawfordsville, her and her husband returned several years ago.