Rescue Road by Peter Zheutlin

Author:Peter Zheutlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

6

HOUSTON, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM

WHEN I SEE TADPOLE FOR THE FIRST TIME, he’s sitting on a white plastic lawn chair on the front stoop of a one-story brick house in Houston’s impoverished Fifth Ward. A tiny dachshund mix puppy about eight weeks old, Tadpole looks like a large but very cute rat because mange has denuded most of his body. A few stray hairs stick out from his head behind oversized ears. He’s completely docile and doesn’t move, except for a slight turn of his head as two strangers approach.

It’s been several weeks since my trip with Greg from Ohio to New England ended (a trip we’ll rejoin in Chapter 9), and I’ve returned to Texas, as I had to Louisiana, to learn more about Kathy Wetmore, Tom English, and others here who rescue the dogs who ride to their forever homes on Greg’s truck from Baytown. I was especially eager to spend time in urban Houston and its surroundings and see its staggering dog overpopulation problem for myself; I had been under the misimpression when I first started learning about rescue that it was primarily a rural problem. Houston proves that’s not the case.

• • •

Kelle Davis and Alicia McCarty are part of small grassroots group of volunteers that comprise Forgotten Dogs of the Fifth Ward Project, a so-called ”street” street rescue devoted to improving the lives of the stray and neglected dogs in one of Houston’s most destitute and dangerous neighborhoods. The Fifth Ward is ground zero for Houston’s 1.2 million strays that roam rubbish-strewn streets riddled with drugs and violent crime.

For the next few hours, I’ll be riding along with Kelle and Alicia in Alicia’s SUV as they take to the streets of the Fifth Ward. Two teams from the Project patrol different parts of the neighborhood twice a week.

There are strays everywhere. When Kathy Wetmore of Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue brings me to meet Kelle and Alicia at the CVS just off the freeway, a thin, mangy female pit bull, nipples elongated from nursing a new litter, ears infested with mites, wanders the parking lot, licking at food scraps, while people come and go as if it were a perfectly ordinary sight. In the Fifth Ward, it is.

When Kelle and Alicia arrive they immediately pull a bag of dry food from the back of the car and spread some on the walkway just outside the drugstore entrance. The mama pit bull is calm but wary, and when she’s had her fill, she walks off toward a busy four-lane road. We hold our breath as she trots right into the roadway, cars speeding by or slowing suddenly to avoid her, and then ambles off into a field across the way.

Kelle and Alicia know these streets and they know many of the dogs, for they have seen them before. Dog by dog, person by person, street by street, they are trying to make life just a little better. They drop off free dog food for people who can’t afford it.

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