Thread: Found, Friended and Saved, Through Facebook

Saving Dogs From Death Through Facebook - NYTimes.com



November 4, 2010, 10:39 am Found, Friended and Saved, Through Facebook

By ANNIE BYRNES



Courtesy Urgent Part 2 Jeb on death row, left, and after being saved.


When Spike Cutolo, a retired New York City police officer, saw Jeb’s old, wrinkled face on Facebook, she thought he was a dead dog. It was Labor Day weekend, and he was scheduled to be killed within the next day.
“He looked like he was 100 years old,” Ms. Cutolo said. “He looked like he’d been through the mill and back.”
Luckily for Jeb, a two-year-old pit bull mix, Ms. Cutolo stepped in and placed him in a veterinarian’s care at Bay Ridge Animal Hospital. In the weeks since Jeb’s rescue, he has become a new dog.
Jeb owes his life to the Facebook group “Urgent Part 2,” which posts pictures and information about dogs scheduled to be put down by Animal Care and Control of New York City, which runs the city’s municipal shelters.
The page, which started in August and is the successor to another page that ran for a few weeks before that, has quickly gained more than 3,700 followers, many from outside New York and as far off as Indiana. Many visitors also follow a similar group, Pets on Death Row, that posts about kittens and cats at Animal Care and Control’s shelters.
Urgent Part 2’s Facebook page on Wednesday morning.
The dog group is run by a woman who would not reveal her name, fearing that the shelter agency would stop sending her the list of dogs scheduled to be killed. The group’s creator, who wants to be known only as Kay, said she spends about six hours a day maintaining the site.
“It’s unbelievably large amounts of time — too much time,” Kay said. “But not too much time, because it does work and animals are being saved.”
From September 2009 to August 2010, of the 12,054 dogs Animal Care and Control took in, it killed 2,725, more than 50 a week, because of limited space or because the animals had health or aggression problems, according to the agency’s Web site.
Courtesy Urgent Part 2Gone but not forgotten: Milk.
Kay said she posts pictures of 4 to upward of 30 dogs a day that are in need of being saved. She maintains two photo albums — “Saved” and “Gone but Never Forgotten” — for the dogs that were adopted and those that were not so lucky. Kay said that of dogs that have been featured on Urgent Part 2, more than 600 have been saved and at least 245 have been killed.
Some visitors to the site, Kay said, do a “fake pull”: they call Animal Care and Control to have the dog removed from the kill list and set aside for them, but then never show up to claim the animal.
Jeb was one example. A visitor to Urgent Part 2 saw Jeb and asked for him to be removed from the kill list. But when the time came for someone to claim him, the adopter backed out.
“Some people think it’s like shopping on eBay for dogs,” Ms. Cutolo said. “This is a life. It’s a living breathing creature. You need to get off the computer, get in your car and go get it.”
While the intention is to buy the dog more time, a “fake pull” also can mean less cage space for an incoming dog. Episodes like these sometimes put “Urgent Part 2” at odds with the shelter agency.
“We’re always happy to have attention put on the animals and saving their lives — we just want to make sure they don’t create hysteria and create this negative image of the A.C.C.,” said Richard Gentles, a spokesman for Animal Care and Control. “It becomes a problem, because if they do, then people won’t adopt from us or donate to us, and it ends up hurting the animals.”
For her part, Kay posts a disclaimer to visitors not to call Animal Care and Control unless they are serious about adopting the dog. But for Kay, her biggest problem is the people who stop visiting the site.
“No one wants to deal with it, so they shut it off,” Kay said. “People have unfriended me because they didn’t want to see it. But if enough people know about it, something will happen.”
Something did happen for Jeb. He now lives with Ms. Cutolo, who already had five other dogs. She said Jeb did not even know how to play with toys at first because he wasn’t used to them. His vet bill topped $2,000, but the expense and time has been worth it, Ms. Cutolo said.
“You can see it in their faces,” Ms. Cutolo said. “As soon as you take them out of that situation, they’re completely different. They’re not the same dogs.”

I'd love a dog but I work long hours. Bengals for me!