Homeless puppies

Homeless local puppies to find new hope at Colorado shelter

Lucy Schultze -Staff Writer
The Oxford Eagle
916 Jackson Ave., Oxford, Miss. 38655

A van-full of unwanted Mississippi canines will soon find new homes with Colorado families after one man spends four days on the road to give them a chance at life.

Larry Avery left Oxford around 4 a.m. today to make the 16-hour trip to Boulder, Colo. With Avery are six dogs and 39 puppies packed in as many animal crates as would fit in the back of his Enterprise rental van.

"They're going to be nose-to-nose and stacked on top of each other, but we're going to fill it up," Angie Avery Lewis said Thursday afternoon as her father was en route from Kansas City, Mo., where he spent Wednesday night. He arrived late yesterday afternoon in Oxford, to the elation of Oxford-Lafayette Humane Society members.

"I think he's St. Francis in a man's body," said Elizabeth Speed, OLHS development director.

Avery will make a rest stop today in Tulsa, Okla., where staff at the Tulsa Animal Rescue Foundation will help him clean out the kennels and replenish the dogs' food and water. He will leave two of the dogs with this no-kill rescue league.

The rest of them are bound for the Boulder Valley Humane Society in Avery's hometown, where the animal shelter has room and provisions to keep all adoptable animals indefinitely until they are placed in homes. Like many others in the West and Northeast, Boulder's humane society runs such a successful spay/neuter program that it actually has a shortage of unwanted puppies and so accepts them from other states.

Lewis, who came to Oxford from Boulder two years ago and serves on the Oxford-Lafayette Humane Society board of directors, had been in contact with the Boulder shelter director since November. Together they had been trying to think of a way to get the puppies across the country.

The need became more urgent in recent weeks as the Oxford shelter received litter after litter of unwanted puppies, most of which faced euthanasia because of overcrowding.

"Everyone's jaws dropped," Lewis said, when her father offered to save the dogs' lives by making the whole trip himself.

The trip to Boulder marks the second salvation for 17 of the puppies, who came to Oxford from the Tippah County Animal Shelter, which was shut down recently after dozens of sick or dead animals were discovered at the filthy facility. Others had been at the Oxford shelter since before Christmas where they faced a 4-in-5 chance of being put down.

Costly, difficult transfers to out-of-state shelters have become OLHS's best option for helping homeless pets as too many Lafayette Countians continue to ignore the spay/neuter message, Lewis said. She credits a lack of education and the "ridiculous" misconceptions that fixed dogs won't make good hunting dogs, that female dogs need to have at least one litter to be happy, and that fixed animals get fat or lazy.

OLHS expects another influx of puppies after hunting season as a result of unsterilized dogs coming in contact with each other. Some people drop their puppies off in the shelter's outdoor kennels at night to avoid being seen by shelter workers, Lewis said.

"People don't seem to care that they are living, breathing creatures," she said. "They seem to be expendable pieces of property. It is a terrible cycle that just won't end until we educate folks about the benefits of spay/neuter."

Lewis father owns and operates Avery Brewing Co., which sponsored the first beer-tasting fund-raiser for OLHS in October. The Averys plan to participate in "Barktoberfest" again this year, she said.

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Elizabeth Speed
Director of Development
Oxford-Lafayette Humane Society
662.281.8888
www.oxfordpets.com