The paperwork accompanying the little gray stray dog said that a cop had found her scrounging around Taste of Chicago, which helped explain how an animal that stood less than a foot tall could weigh 27 pounds.
No tags. No collar. So the cop scooped her up and, as Chicagoans have been doing for a century now, brought her to the Anti-Cruelty Society at Grand Avenue and LaSalle Street.
“Terrier mix,” the paperwork said, but “scrappy little mutt” would have summed up the whole genetic package nicely.
But she had cage appeal, this dog–tail ceaselessly wagging, pink tongue coyly protruding, chestnut eyes peeking from behind curly bangs–and staff veterinarian John Shudell clearly liked her from the start.
Shudell was in the midst of a busy morning of “preliminary examinations,” a triage process that determines which animals live and which don’t, and he was not having an especially uplifting day.
The first dog he had examined had been dropped off by its owners–“Landlord said can’t keep,” the paperwork said–and it came into the exam room coughing, a death sentence at the shelter because of the potential for spreading respiratory infections.
“Sorry, Sico,” the vet said as he checked off “E,” for euthanasia, on a form. A volunteer tossed a biscuit, Sico’s last, before leading him away to what Shudell calls “the most depressing room in the building.”
The second dog of the day, Spass, was a frightened 67-pound black mutt, a bundle of nerves with an ear infection. “Owners have no time for,” his paperwork said.
Spass wouldn’t let the vet near his sore ear, and that was that. “It needs treatment and I don’t know an owner that could treat it,” Shudell said and marked an “E” for Spass too.
So when the third dog, the Taste of Chicago dog, was led at a perky trot, his coat a shade of flannel-gray that Brooks Brothers would envy, the vet was ready for something good.
Indeed, the little dog weathered the exam splendidly, wagging her tail through even the most undignified parts, and Shudell was prepared to check off “A” for “adopt” and send the dog to a cage where potential owners could look her over.
And then the little dog coughed.
Since 1899, the Anti-Cruelty Society has been one of the happiest, and one of the saddest, institutions in the city, a place of hope and heartbreak. In its centennial year–marked with a black-tie dinner in June–some 16,000 animals will enter its doors, every one at that moment living what could be a tear-jerking chapter in a children’s book.
More than 5,000 of these stories will have happy endings, as dogs are led out on leashes or cats are carried out in carriers to new homes, new lives.
The majority of the stories, though, end with an injection of Fatal-Plus, a brand of sodium pentabarbitol that kills an animal within a few heartbeats after an injection. The society buys it in bulk bottles.
In the 100 years since the society was formed, the role of pets in American culture has changed dramatically. Pets now eat better than many people on the planet. They can be treated for cancer, and some even get braces to straighten their teeth.
What is so remarkable, though, is that despite the changing role of animals, the mission of the society hasn’t changed at all. And neither has its workload.
The neglect, abuse and cruelty are the same as ever.
At the end of the last century, people were just waking up to the notion that animals should be treated decently, a sensibility fostered in part by the popularity of 19th Century books like “Black Beauty” and “Beautiful Joe.”
When five women gathered in a North Side home for the society’s first meeting in 1899, their primary concern was mistreatment of the horses that pulled carts and carriages around Chicago–fittingly, a worry echoed by animal advocates about modern carriage horses on Michigan Avenue during the July heat emergency.
The turn-of-the century group set about establishing drinking fountains and delivering blankets for draft horses on Christmas. From the onset, quick death was considered a cure to cruelty, as inspectors were empowered to kill miserable, mistreated horses with “a friendly bullet.”
For a time, the society even became an advocate for children, who, in the days before social reforms, could be treated almost as poorly as animals. In the society’s archives, the tales of cruelty to children and to animals are hauntingly similar.
“On April 14, 1914,” one old report says, “one of our members called the office, stating that an old, worn-out grocery horse had fallen down and was being beaten by the owner.”
“On Oct. 8, 1914,” a report about a runaway girl said, “an officer of the society found that the father was a blacksmith and that the little girl, Margaret, had gone to her aunt to seek relief from intolerable conditions at home. When the father discovered this he got the girl home and unmercifully beat her with a strap on the girl’s neck and body. A warrant was secured for this burly brute, whose defense was that he did not want to have his girl grow up wrong.”
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Recently, one case of animal cruelty in particular at the society shook up the staff.
A golden retriever was abandoned at an animal hospital in a horrible state of neglect: the skin on her face had turned black from a rampant, untreated infection and was sloughing off. By the time she was dumped at a veterinarian’s office, her sinuses were exposed, and bone was beginning to show.
The vet’s office sent her to the Anti-Cruelty Society. In two words, the very first medical report on the dog noted the truly remarkable thing about the case: “Tail wagging,” it said.
For seven days, volunteers sat by her kennel, brushing her coat as she breathed heavily, a troubling wheezing sound in each breath.
Medically, she got worse and worse, and veterinarians had to cut away a dollar-bill-size portion of her face.
But the dog never complained.
“I took her out on a walk in the alley and she took the leash in her mouth, the way golden retrievers do, and she wagged her tail,” said Sue Reiter, a veterinarian assistant at the society.
Every day, staffers who had nothing to do with her care checked on her.
“They see a lot of bad things, day in and day out, so when something really bad comes along, it makes all the maternal and paternal instincts come out,” said David Dinger, vice president of operations.
For that reason, after it was clear the dog could not be saved and a legally required waiting period had expired, Dinger took it upon himself to lead the dog to the fateful room.
Gil Morales, a field service agent, tossed her a biscuit, and she snapped it up, tail wagging.
Morales squatted next to the dog, pulled her close, and Dinger lifted her front paw with his left hand. In his right hand he had a syringe with a 20-gauge needle and 5 ccs of Fatal-Plus.
He found her cephalic vein, pushed the plunger, and the dog sighed when the sodium pentabarbitol reached her lungs.
As her legs began to give way, Morales expertly gathered them under her so she would not fall awkwardly, and he spoke quietly to her. “When you cross the rainbow bridge,” he said, letting her settle gently to the floor, “you’ll get a new face.”
None of the deaths is easy, but they have been a part of the society from the beginning.
“The number of horses killed during July and August is unusually large,” said a 1917 report. “Fifty-three animals were killed by our officers during these two months. The poor brutes were absolutely unfit to work another day, and death brought them a blessed relief.”
In 1925, 7,000 dogs came to the Anti-Cruelty Society, and 6,058 were destroyed. Only a handful were adopted. Last year, 2,179 dogs were euthanized.
“It’s not our fault,” said Jane Stern, the society’s former executive director. “We did not breed these animals to euthanize them. But society has made it our problem.”
The number of animals being put down is decreasing, which Stern and others attribute to education about the importance of getting pets “fixed” to prevent their breeding.
Just in recent years, the society has begun spaying or neutering every animal that leaves, regardless of how young it is, rather than waiting until it approaches sexual maturity.
If the euthanasia area is the most depressing place in the building, then the most heartwarming is an open courtyard where prospective owners are allowed to play with dogs they are considering adopting.
On a recent day, Gina Liverpool, from Hillside, watched her 10-year-old daughter, Sarah, being pulled around by a little gray dog.
The dog had picked her, really, giving a little bark when Sarah approached her kennel. Sarah thought she was the perfect size, at 27 pounds.
The dog, found scrounging around Taste of Chicago, had coughed once during its preliminary exam, but even after Shudell waited several minutes, she didn’t cough again. The vet marked her paperwork “A” for adopt, then ordered her taken from the room so he wouldn’t hear it if she coughed again.
“What’s her name, Mom?” Sarah asked, her mind made up.
“It’s up to you,” her mom replied.