The Potts-Suarez Home for Wayward Animals

And Working Dogs Without Jobs

I will write something about the election, but not today. What I will say for the moment is this: Beware the Takes!

Instead, I’m taking my friend Britt’s advice and writing about how I acquired my dogs and cats. It will be a bit of an homage. A rescuer I knew named Gary passed away this week. It was not a surprise. He’d been ill for a very long time. He was very sick when I met him in 2018, soon after I moved back to Arkansas. Gary ran an informal rescue called Gary’s Adoptable Dogs, and had always taken care of everything by himself but relied on help more and more as he aged. He was about 71 when I met him, diagnosed with a lung problem and waiting for a surgery that he wasn’t healthy enough to have. His friends and family wanted him to rest and get well enough for surgery, but he had dogs to take care of.

I responded to a call for help on Facebook because I’d always loved helping dogs at shelters and wanted an excuse to drive up the beautiful, wild, lonely mountain road where Gary lived. I first met him standing outside his rundown trailer, inside a ring of dog kennels in various states of disrepair while we were aurally battered by a chorus of desperate and excited barks. Another rescue that worked with Gary had hired someone to help him, and she was cleaning around us, performing the glamorous tasks of scooping poop and filling water and food bowls. An older couple who had also answered the call were there bringing Gary food. They were talking to him before they snuck away and pulled the helper aside. “Does he need anything for himself?” they asked her discreetly. “He’s only asking for food for his dogs.”

I helped Gary on and off for the next five years. Sometimes he had 20 dogs; sometimes he had more than 100. I helped him because the stray pet problem in rural Arkansas was unsustainable, untenable, insufferable for me. Throughout that time I helped so many dogs at Gary’s, through Gary’s, dogs I helped leave Gary’s for other rescues and adoption elsewhere. I found so many dogs myself: dogs that showed up in my yard, dogs wondering the side of the highway, dogs stuck in barbed-wire fences, dogs tied to trees emaciated and thirsty, dogs people asked me to take because they couldn’t keep them and had nowhere to turn. I drove dogs across the state and across the country and spent thousands on their vet care. Cats, too. I tried to get almost everyone I know to adopt a dog or a cat, started a nonprofit to help people spay and neuter their pets to stem the tide of strays, and none of it worked. There were always more.

Of course, I ended up keeping a menagerie of my own, and moved to New York with 6 dogs and 5 cats (One cat, Marbles, passed away a few months ago.) Here is a list of my current animals and how they came to live with me, in chronological order:

1. I adopted my orange cat Sampson when I lived in D.C. and a friend's friend had a baby and couldn't keep him. This was in the fall of 2013. I’d just gotten out of a long relationship and suddenly found myself with more time on nights and weekends and wanted to fill this new quiet aloneness with another soul. The first night Sampson lived with me he meowed uncontrollably — he sounds like a baby crying — and I thought, “Oh my God, what have I done?!?” But I woke up with him curled inside my knee triangle and that was pretty much it. It’s been me and Sampson against the world since then.

   

2. I sort of became a stepmom to two old chihuahuas and an old cat, long since gone, when I met and moved in with Samir, but I didn’t really get another new pet until Banjo, who came to live with me as an adorable and absolutely insane puppy in 2017. Samir brought Banjo home because his clients (he's a social worker) had found him and his sister — who they called Buddy and Trixie — abandoned in trailer with their German Shepherd mom (or something like that) and they decided not to keep the puppies because they were trying to herd their children by biting their ankles and driving them all nuts. They were going to sell Buddy on Craigslist and Samir put a stop to that. I was so angry with Samir when he brought him home that we had a huge fight for weeks, but ultimately he became Banjo is now my son now and I can’t imagine life without him.

   

3. When the older black cat Samir had when I met him, Mimi, passed away, we were left only with Sampson and Banjo and we had a kitten-sized hole in our lives we decided to fill. We drove to the shelter where we lived at the time in Virginia, “just to see what they have,” and Samir said, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they had a little black female kitten?” When we got there someone was bringing in foster kittens they'd had that were ready for adoption, and set a cat carrier on the front desk and opened it up. Out popped a tiny black female kitten and we adopted her immediately and named her Eclipse, but we call her Eek. The universe could not have planned it better.

   

4. When we moved to Arkansas Banjo was lonely as an only dog without a doggy daycare or dog park or dog friends and neighbors to visit, and so I went to the shelter looking for a smaller female dog in January 2018 and found the pup we named Tulip. There’s nothing more to the story except that Tulip is the only dog I adopted on purpose, and she is a good dog to have chosen, and I tell her that all the time.

   

5. We hadn’t been in Arkansas for more than a few months before we started hearing about and seeing dogs and cats abandoned and needing homes. A woman we knew found a female cat in her shed and was going to take her with her on a trip to visit her sister to give her the cat, but the cat had kittens before they left. We fostered the mom, Sunshine, and six kittens, got them all spayed and neutered and vaccinated, and found most of them homes. Except for Pandora, who ended up staying. Pandora likes to keep herself to herself all day and is probably the cattiest cat we have, but wants to snuggle at night and has claimed the primary bedroom as her own.

   

6. For a brief while, the shelter in my home county that was once run by local governments was taken over by a nonprofit, and I used to volunteer to walk the dogs. Betsey was at the shelter for 6 months. The nonprofit didn’t like to euthanize animals for space, but no one wanted Betsey because she had a heart condition and a messed up broken leg that had healed incorrectly, and was generally old and busted up. I wanted her, but we thought three dogs were too many (laugh-cry emoji). I’d tried to talk Samir into adopting her but he maintained that it was A Bad Idea. I found out she was going to be in a dog beauty pageant hosted by the shelter at the county fair, so I talked Samir into going because I knew he wouldn't be able to leave without adopting her. (The winner of the pageant was a little girl walking a yorkie, and how that whole event symbolized everything that bugs me about life there is another story for another day.) Afterward we went up to pet Betsey and Samir wrapped her up and said, “We’ll just take her.” We thought we were giving her a good home to pass her final days in. That was 6 years ago.

   

7. Oh Christmas Day 2019, we were leaving our house when we saw a yellow dog sitting outside our yard. We figured she’d probably been left at the hotel next door to us. We brought her in to sit on our couch while we figured out what to do with her. A couple of people were somewhat interested in adopting her but it never panned out. She basically never got off the couch again. We named her Prairie.

   

8. Argo  was surrendered because his owner was going to shoot him. He spent almost a year at Gary’s and he did really horribly there. He was too anxious and energetic to stay locked up in a kennel surrounded by other dogs, and he developed mange and got too skinny. I took him home to get him vet care and foster him, but he is an 80-pound hound who is too much and was not on the top of any rescue’s transport list and could you even imagine him in an apartment in New York City? So he stayed. He is Samir’s soul mate.

   

9. One day Samir saw a gray and white kitten climbing into an engine compartment in a car parked in the lot at his job: he fished him out and stuck him into a cat carrier he happened to have (because of course he did) and brought him home and said, “This is an emergency kitten.” The kitten was in our house but hiding for two weeks. We left out food and it would get eaten, but we didn’t see the kitten. When he finally emerged he was much cleaner and a little bigger and less scruffy, and we trapped him and got him vet care against his will and he has resisted our love ever since. We named him Lucky. This is still how we interact with him, although he will occasionally venture out if he is low on food and very rarely lets me pet him. Cats are tricky: they really need to be around humans a lot in the first four months of their lives, which was about how old Lucky was when we caught him, or they are basically a wild animal, and living with a feral cat is like living with a raccoon. Lucky is neither quite tame nor totally feral and was never quite adoptable and we are ok with this liminal state of his for as long as he requires our assistance.

   

10. Scout was our neighbor’s dog and was kept tied up outside, barking at our dogs through the woods. In the fall of 2021, he broke free and came into our yard to play and hung out for a few days. We figured out where he belonged and tried to take him back and make him stay home but it never worked. He kept coming to visit us and slowly started bringing his toys over to our house. When he left our yard we worried about him because we knew he walked around the whole town, and worried that one day we’d see him dead on the highway. Or worse, we might be the ones to accidentally hit him. So we asked our neighbor if we could just keep him and he said yes and we neutered him and treated his tick fever and sometimes dogs make up their own minds about what kind of life they want.

    

The lesson I learned living in my home county again is that no one person, not even someone with a heart as big as Gary’s, can take care of a basic societal problem like “what do we do with stray and abandoned pets” on their own. You might think it’s a problem that can be left to animal lovers like Gary or Samir and me. You might also think that you are not an animal lover and so this would never be your problem if you lived in a community without animal control. But actually, everything is a little bit of everyone’s problem. If your town or your county doesn’t have good animal control services and a dog shows up in your yard, who’s problem is it? If you don’t have a number you can call to deal with a stray and injured cat yowling outside your window, what happens then? If packs of feral dogs and cats are roaming your town or city and you have to navigate through them, that’s everyone’s problem, isn’t it? What if stray animals start spreading diseases or causing accidents that impact humans? You can make a decision to care or not, but even the lack of a decision becomes a choice that impacts at least one living creature and can lead to a chain of problems that come back to you eventually. Society only works if everyone has to care about all these kinds of problems a little bit, even if they don’t really care, or it all starts to unravel. It leaves holes too big for people to patch on their own.

We’ve been in upstate New York for over a year now, and we’ve been confronted with a loose dog only once: a German Shepherd running down the street in our town that someone caught. Our neighbors knew we had dogs and asked if it was one of ours: It was not. The owners were found quickly and reunited with their pet. That was it, that was the whole incident. It turns out that with basic social services and rules and expectations, an omnipresent crisis in one place just doesn’t exist in another.