(USA) NYT:For Poor Families, an Added Burden of Too Many Pets

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This link also has a slideshow entitled " Bigger Hearts than Bank Accounts "

Hope this area of USA can get some help after this news coverage.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/us/30dogs.html?_r=1 & th & emc=th & oref=slogin

 

For Poor Families, an Added Burden of Too Many Pets

By ERIK ECKHOLM

SELMER, Tenn. — Phillip Swetman is an accidental owner of 13 dogs. Most, Mr.

Swetman said, came from “drive-bys.”

 

“They hear a dog bark and they throw theirs in the ditch,” he said. “Then for

us, it’s either let them starve or get hit by a car, or take them in.”

 

Midnight dumping of unwanted dogs is common here on the southern tail of the

Appalachian Mountains, where large numbers of poor people are attached to

multiple pets but cannot afford to sterilize or vaccinate them, and where

impoverished county governments do not maintain animal shelters, require

licensing or enforce requirements for rabies shots.

 

The combination of pets and poverty, veterinary experts say, brings similar

results to many rural areas: unhealthy conditions for oversized animal

populations, desperate efforts by often-overwhelmed individuals to help and a

lurking threat to human health.

 

Dr. Bob Sumrall, a veterinarian in nearby Henderson, in Chester County,

estimated that more than 75 percent of the thousands of dogs in the county alone

have not had rabies shots. “This poses a definite health risk,” he said.

 

Excess animals, dropped on dark roads that wind through oak and pine forests and

cornfields here, tend to end up in the care of people with bigger hearts than

bank accounts. People like Mr. Swetman and his wife, Alicia, who have a hard

enough time paying their own mortgage and gasoline bills on what Mr. Swetman

earns as a machinist at a bathtub factory but have ended up with a large

menagerie nonetheless, mostly because of abandoned animals and unplanned births.

 

The Swetmans live on a back-country road near Finger. They keep two dogs in

their cluttered concrete-block house, two tethered to trees and the rest in

three wire pens. They somehow eke out $26 a week to buy two 50-pound sacks of

dog food.

 

“I’d do without food myself before they do,” Ms. Swetman said. But they say with

some despair that veterinary care, which can run $100 a year per animal for

vaccines and $100 or more for spaying or neutering, is far beyond their reach.

 

“A lot of poor people here end up with lots of dogs and they get a feeling of

hopelessness, they don’t know what to do,” said Sherrye McKinney, who works for

pet-rescue groups in the region.

 

So the Swetmans were grateful to get an appointment at a temporary free clinic

for their latest two puppies, even if there were no slots left in the

overd five-day program for their eight older unspayed females.

 

The clinic was set up in Selmer’s National Guard armory in mid-June by Rural

Area Veterinary Services, a program of the Humane Society of the United States

that sends volunteer veterinarians and students to Appalachia, Indian

reservations and other areas to sterilize and treat pets whose owners live in

poverty.

 

“With every animal we prevent from having a litter, we’re making a difference,”

said Tammy Rouse, Appalachian coordinator for the volunteer service. Inside the

hall, three veterinarians and 28 veterinary students spent 15-hour days

sterilizing up to 50 dogs and cats a day and provided vaccinations, deworming

and other treatments.

 

But the volunteer service faces a Sisyphean task, Ms. Rouse said.

 

“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing artery,” she said. “Spay-neuter has

to go hand in hand with education and legislation.”

 

Tina Churchwell, head of the humane society in McNairy County, where Finger and

Selmer are situated, calls 12 dogs her own and has set up a makeshift shelter at

her home, kennels holding 22 other dogs she hopes might be adopted. The society

is searching for money to build a proper shelter on land the county has offered,

but community support is lacking, Ms. Churchwell said.

 

Lacking money for the normal accoutrements of pet care, some people improvise.

James Cotner, 64, and his wife live on $9,000 a year in a wood-heated,

tin-roofed house. Fifteen cats wander the grounds and the Cotners have three

dogs, the latest taken in after being found dumped on the road. “I tried to give

her away but nobody wanted a big dog because they eat too much,” Mr. Cotner said

 

Buying feed at Wal-Mart has stretched their budget, he said, and he was grateful

for the free clinic, which sterilized the dogs and provided rabies shots. “I’ve

been afraid they’d bite somebody and I’d get sued,” he said.

 

To fight fleas and ticks, he has used a folk remedy. A tobacco chewer, he saves

the juice and sprays it on the lawn.

 

Janet Stanford Brown, 28, took two cats to the armory for spaying and one of the

four dogs her family now keeps. The brown mixed-breed, Punkin, had an infected

wound on her shoulder, probably a bite, Ms. Brown feared, from a young pit bull

they had recently taken in.

 

“I’d take her to the vet if we had the money,” Ms. Brown said as Dr. Lydia Love,

chief veterinarian at the free clinic, examined the nasty wound and made

arrangements for treatment. “Punkin is my son’s dog and if it came to that, I’d

borrow the money to get her cared for.”

 

Her husband, an apprentice electrician, does not earn high wages. Their animals

feed on table scraps and hunt for food, dragging in rabbits and other creatures.

 

Each evening of the clinic, as the staff finished long hours of surgery and

hands-on comforting of animals groggily recovering from anesthesia, owners, many

pacing with the anxiety of relatives in a human hospital, waited to pick up

their pets.

 

Alicia Swetman looked especially anguished because she learned that one of her

puppies, the one with one blue eye and one brown eye, had a health problem that

made surgery too dangerous. To Ms. Swetman’s relief, as the puppies were brought

out, their tails wagging furiously at the reunion, Dr. Love said it was probably

a curable worm infection.

 

“I’d happily give these two away to a good home, where they’d be loved,” Ms.

Swetman said, not entirely convincingly, as she hugged the afflicted puppy.