Does Animal Rescue Need Rethinking?

I have fostered 11 dogs, but it wasn’t until my most recent fostering experience that I really stopped to think about the series of events that brought the dog into my care. At the time of his arrival, I had just read Carol Mithers’s new book, Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets (Counterpoint Press, August 20). What Matthew Desmond’s Evicted does for housing, DAME contributor Mithers does for pet ownership—lays bare the many ways in which poverty and pet ownership intersect, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry of a system that largely fails both animals and people. 

Mithers recounts that story through the life of an extraordinary woman named Lori Weise—also known as “The Dog Lady”—who has spent the past 20 years doing direct outreach work with the often forgotten dogs and people of Los Angeles, from Skid Row to Compton. What started as a personal mission to help those around her office whom she saw actively suffering evolved into a coordinated operation with the mission of caring for animals and people in a way that allowed them to stay together. Her organization, Downtown Dog Rescue, provides services like veterinary care, spay/neuter surgeries, behavioral training, food stipends and more to countless pet owners in underserved communities throughout Los Angeles each year. 

“Animals in shelters don’t necessarily belong to humans who didn’t love them, but to those who lacked resources, chiefly money,” writes Mithers. I can’t help but think about this when looking at my foster dog, who arrived already housebroken, wearing a squirrel-print collar with a stuffed bunny toy in tow. Rethinking Rescue opened my eyes to how much the animal shelter crisis in America could be alleviated if we worked half as hard to keep dogs in the loving homes they already have as we do trying to get them adopted. 

I spoke to Mithers about her new book and how we can work toward a rescue system and narrative that helps animals without harming people in the process. 

DAME: How did you first learn about Lori Weise, a.k.a., “The Dog Lady,” and why did you want to tell her story? 

CM: I read about a case of animal hoarding and I thought it was really weird and horrifying. I really needed to write about it, but I knew nothing. I asked a friend from junior high who was a dog rescuer what she knew about it and she said, “You need to talk to Lori Weise.” The more I learned about her, the more I thought, This might be interesting. I could feel pretty early on that there was a book there because I could feel it expanding in my head, but it was very hard for a long time to figure out how to put it all together. 

DAME: How do popular narratives around animal rescue in America perpetuate underlying issues around inequality and class? 

CM: Early on in the ’90s, when all of this was getting started with “no kill” and “save shelter animals,” there really were tons of wonderful adoptable animals that were getting killed for no reason. The people who were trying to save them had to come up with some way to tug on heartstrings. It was a way to get people involved, but it never outgrew that and so you then have this heroic narrative of “someone goes in there and saves the pet,” and it’s all about heroism and suffering. It was a useful way to raise money.

DAME: Is there a way for people to utilize these classic marketing strategies that do bring attention and money to rescue organizations doing important work in a way that doesn’t perpetuate harmful narratives? 

CM: I think it’s super hard, because it’s not sexy. It’s like how writing about war is always more fun than writing about what happens during peace and rebuilding a country. Prevention is not sexy because it doesn’t show a before, a climax, and a resolution. Nothing happens.

[Lori]’s social media, especially after she started doing shelter intervention, would tell a lot of stories of who had come in and what they needed help with. She tried to humanize the people and their struggles, and she’s still doing that. It’s just not as exciting as the people who are still out there showing pictures of pitbulls tied up on skid row with drug addicts, tied to shopping carts and “we went in there and we broke them free.” I don’t know what you do about that type of inability to turn prevention and helping into drama.

DAME: It seems so much of this has to do with housing rights. Can you tell me a little bit about how housing policies play into all of this? 

CM: What I learned from some of the people who study housing is that there’s simply a continual shortage of affordable housing in the United States, period. If you are a person of limited resources and you are looking for a place to live, your choices are already enormously limited. So if they’re further limited by refusal to accept pets then you really have very few choices, so you might end up turning in your animal because you really have no choice.

The issue about housing is that it’s so varied across the country. There is an enormous number of renters in this country, just like there’s an enormous number of pet owners.  I think we’re moving away from breed restrictions to some extent, but a lot of landlords will only let you have a small dog, and right now the shelters are filled with big dogs. People will let you have one dog but not two. There’s this new issue, which has been increasingly prevalent, which is pet rent and pet deposits. A lot of landlords say, “well you can have a pet but it’s $100 more, and there’s a $500 refundable deposit for damage.” Again, it may not seem like a lease killer to me, but if you’re already at the edge of what you can afford, $100 a month is a lot and it adds up over the years. 

You can also have instances where landlords maybe years ago didn’t really pay attention to whether their tenants had pets. And then over time the neighborhood has gentrified, and now that apartment could go for a lot more, and suddenly it’s “you’re breaking your lease, get rid of your pet or get out.” 

DAME: There are also pet owners without any access to housing, many of whom are featured in the book. Can you talk about the relationship between homeless people and their pets? 

CM: Not to be contrary, but it varies. Even Lori will say that there are numbers of people out there on the street who have animals not for the best reasons. There are dogs that are bred and the puppies sold to get a hit of something. There are definitely those situations and people whose addictions and illnesses prevent them from actually paying the kind of attention or being the kind of pet owners that they could be. That being said, there are also people for whom it’s their only connection. Leslie Irvine, a professor who wrote one of the first books about homeless people and their pets, pointed out that one of the things pets can do for people is providing structure. If you have a pet, you have to make sure they get walked or fed or cared for. There’s structure, there’s a reason for living, because this animal needs you. There’s somebody who cares about you, who shares your tent, who is happy to see you when you get back from wherever, who keeps you company, who keeps you warm at night and gives you the kind of unconditional love that we all know animals do.

DAME: Adam Serwer’s essay “The Cruelty Is the Point” came to mind when I was reading your book. The cruelty is the point of a family not being able to pay $70 to get their dog out of the pound when it’s going to cost more money for the dog to stay in a public facility long term. 

CM: There’s this punitive way that we deal with poverty. Like if there’s somebody who can’t pay their traffic tickets, you take their license away and they can’t get to work so they lose their job so they even more can’t pay their ticket. That’s insane. With the animals, there’s even more at stake because sometimes people’s pets die. This one guy I [interviewed] was unemployed, the family couldn’t pay the reclamation fee, and the dog died. That’s just egregiously cruel and it doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve gotten a question a bunch of times, which is “How do you justify saying that someone who can’t afford a house or to feed themselves or is struggling to pay the rent—why should they have a dog?” And it’s like, well, we talk about moral reasons and we talk about practical reasons. The practical reason is that if we take the dog away it’s going to cost more than giving them the $70 or the extra food, and the dog may die. We’re talking about emptying the shelters and everyone should adopt, but then you’re putting limitations and financial standards on who gets to do that and who gets the love of an animal and whose children get to grow up with an animal. Some people in Laurie’s population work multiple jobs, some of them have left other countries where life was worse, and their lives are really tough and their children’s lives are really tough. This is something they can have.

DAME: What actionable steps or policy changes do you think would be the most effective at improving the situation for both animals and humans? 

CM: There should be much better access to subsidized spay/neuter so that people do not have to present IDs, so that they don’t have to travel, so that hours are expanded. Lori has bought a truck and assembled a mobile clinic, and she’s going to the police station in a struggling part of L.A .to do spay/neuter. We should have fleets of those trucks. Somehow finding a way to make veterinary assistance more affordable. That’s a really complicated issue because it’s been taken over by corporations and private equity, and that’s making it much harder to have affordable care. It’s no different from what people go through. A lot of pets get turned in because they’re ill, they’re suffering, and people can’t afford the hundreds and hundreds of dollars that you have to pay to get a vet check. 

I wish there was more foundation money to support efforts like Lori’s. She was at the forefront, but there are others now where they could simply … help people. If $50 relieves an animal, it’s just more practical than having rescue groups try to bring that animal out of the shelter and find it a home and have adoption days. 

DAME: You talked about sexism in the rescue industry, which is overwhelmingly female. Every single time I do a foster dog pickup, I’m there with predominantly other women. 

CM: I think the answer is sadly predictable. Women like to nurture, and rescue doesn’t pay. Men do not put up with efforts that don’t pay. It’s not just women, it’s relatively affluent white women, and that’s also not surprising because it doesn’t pay, because it requires time, because if you are a single mother working a low-wage job, you simply don’t have the energy or time to be driving around and transporting dogs and going to adoption days. If you look back at a lot of social movements—temperance and suffragettes—it’s upper-middle-class white women. because that’s who has the time to do it. If you have that privilege, you might as well use it for good. 

DAME: How can those of us involved in rescue work be agents for positive change not just for the cute dogs, but for everyone? 

CM: You have to realize that your frame of reference is a specific one, and not the only one. Be open to how other people live without being judgmental of it. Consider and remember, which is really hard to do, how relatively privileged our lives are, and understand the pressures that people are under. Be willing to go into other neighborhoods and listen instead of telling them what they need. Listen to what people need instead of what you want to give them. 

To learn more about Lori Weise and Downtown Dog Rescue, visit here. 

** This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.