Sometimes A Ride Means the Difference between Life and Death

There are times in Rescue that a certain rescue can help an animal but the distance between the animal in need and the rescue is too far. This is when talented transportation experts come to save the day. Laurel from RollingRescue an internet-based transport list where rescue groups needing to move rescued animals to safety and new homes and people who can help can find each other. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rollingrescue

I have interviewed Laurel to learn a little more about this life saving work.

Can you tell us what is required to become a transport volunteer? Such as what you look for in volunteers, how you screen volunteers to make sure the animal is safe?
A love for animals is the only common denominator amongst transport drivers. They may drive a semi truck or a Honda Civic, as long as they are responsible drivers, willing to learn a few rules of the road for transporting and make their availablity known, there’s a need and a use for them.

RollingRescue screens drivers by having them fill out a New Member Survey that collects their personal information, rescue affiliation, transport experience and asks them in what capacities they can help. We will check references if they have rescue or transport experience and if not, we will ask for and check their personal vet reference.

Many transport lists exist today; literally hundreds of them. Not many bother to screen members. That is unfortunet. In our years of doing transport, we’ve been asked for help by a variety of people who should not be getting animals. Bad rescues, collectors, horders, back yard breeders, adopters that no one has screened and they all sound good in an email. And while screening is time consuming, we don’t see any other way to do it.

The compelling responsibility of a transport volunteer, be they a driver or a coordinator, is to know where the animals are going and to know that it is a good, safe, place that will be better than what they have.


What are the steps that our adopters/members would take part in a transport?
Identify some good transport lists and sign up. Rescue Angels on Wheels, RollingRescue and other groups that bother to ask for real names and addresses and references are going to be your best bet.

If they are screening you, they are also paying attention to what and who is posting to their list. Then, set yourself to daily digest or individual emails and watch for runs going through your area.

When you see a run that you can help with, contact the transport’s coordinator by direct, personal email. Responding via the list is seldom effective. Most coordinators are on a lot of lists and are no mail. Their post should give an email address to contact them at, that’s the best to use. Look at the destination for the animal, satisfy yourself that someone has screened it and that its solid. A post for transport should clearly identify who is getting the animal, where they are located and give a website for the rescue involved. Check it out. Ask questions of the coordinator if you don’t see what you should expect in a good rescue.

How did you get involved in Rescue and specifically transport? In my B.R. days (before rescue) I was just the dispatching half of a small owner operator trucking company. Then one day a letter from a group called RollingRescue was posted to a trucking group I belonged to. I knew that my ‘other half’, the driving half of our business, would be eager to help and I signed us up.

The list was new and the owner was a long-time rescuer with no trucking experience. The first task was to devise a list that could work for truckers. Before long I found myself list owner when circumstances took the founder out of the picture.

One day a run was posted that was coming through my area and I offered to drive. A Michigan rescue going to a forever home in MN. Until then, I’d been working behind the scenes, ususally with rescues thousands of miles away, trying to utilize the truckers. A friend and mentor in CA, Gail McKenzie, was coordinating that run and from there on we were soon going to the dogs here at home as well as on the road.

Meeting local Michigan rescues soon led to doing temporary fosters from a shelter in the next county that wanted the dogs out the very day they became available or else. A few days foster was needed while the transport was arranged. And then came the longer term fosters and eventually, joining The Animal Placement Bureau as a regular foster home.

What types of situations are animals in need of transport.
Most transports fall into two catgories: Rescue in-bound and rescue out-bound. Shelter animals, owner surrenders, strays found by good samaritans making their way into rescue and the rescue dogs going to forever homes. Ocassionally, there will be a private party who has been separated from their pet by some kind of crisis and needs help to be reunited or to help get the pet to a family member who will care for it until the owner is able to.

What type of tools are used in arranging a transport? A coordinator’s best tools are their people skills and their organizational skills. Communications are everything. Beyond that, good routing software or the ability to use an old-fashioned Atlas and the access to good transport lists are critical. A good route, divided into reasonable “legs”, a schedule for meetings, factoring in things like time zone changes, weather, special needs of the animals, capacity of the driver’s vehicles, ability to handle specific animals___there is a lot of detail work involved in coordinating a run or trucker transport.

Each driver fills out a driver information sheet, giving their name, phone numbers, vehicle description and self description. That is compiled into a run sheet that will show the meeting times and places for the entire run and each driver has a copy of the run sheet. That run sheet and the presence of a coordinator who is monitoring the run are the most important tools when it gets down to actually carrying out the run.

For the drivers, most any type of dependable vehicle will work. Crates are extremely helpful although not always necessary. A spare leash and collar, a pan for watering transports and paper towels and bleach are good accessories.


Can you share with us you most difficult transport?
Well, I don’t know how many times I have said that sometimes it is harder to move a dog across the state than it is to move it 2,000 miles. Those short, emergency runs of 150 to 200 miles, usually where some rescue has stepped up for a dog at the last minute before it was to be put down, create a life or death situation that requires fast action and sometimes will not wait until a weekend.

Overall, the weekday transports are some of the hardest. You usually end up with as many drivers as you might have on a run twice the distance because the legs have to be kept very short to accommodate a weekday afternoon / evening transport. It takes the same amount of work and the same kind of run sheet and organization as a much longer run would take and you’re under the gun to do it quickly.

For the long haul runs, one of my earliest relay coordination efforts involved two runs that were part of an effort to relocate dogs in a remote northern NM rescue that was closing. The second run took place in December and involved moving seven dogs up out of northern NM to rescues in CO, WY and MT.

Juggling the weather in the Raton Pass, rescheduling due to blizzards in CO, arranging a one week layover for the northern WY and MT bound dogs and then praying the weather didn’t get us____I credit that run with giving me my first grey hairs. But seven dogs were delivered safely and I met a lot of fine people in places where you don’t think there are many people at all.

Can you share with us some of your best memories involving a transport? That’s hard, there are so many. In retrospect, one of the funniest situations was a trucker bringing two chows to rescue, who ended up whelping seven puppies at a truck stop in Little Rock, AR when the OR vet turned out to be a bit off in his predictions of one passenger’s whelping date.

Half the night, emails and Ims were flying across country, seeking someone with contacts in Little Rock to get supplies for the driver. Finally, about midnight, he got a call from the fuel desk asking “Are you the driver having puppies ? There’s a woman here to see you”. And an Italian Greyhound rescuer from Little Rock arrived with a shopping bag full of clean blankets and towels.

About 3am the driver called me to say that while he really appreciated all the advice, the whelping was over, all the pups were fine and “please, ask people to stop calling, I need to go to sleep”. It seems that people from coast to coast and as far north as WI had been calling him with advice on whelping as the word spread out over the internet.

The most heart warming may have been the reunion of a CO family with their dog which had turned up in Joliet, IL after the children had been kidnapped, along with the dog, by their non custodial mother and her drug addict boyfriend. The kids were flown home by their father after authorities intercepted them in a Joliet motel, but the man could not afford to fly the dog. Joliet Animal Control director, Andy Iverncky, contacted one of our coordinators who posted a relay to RollingRescue. I saw the post and one of our truckers, just leaving Detroit for Los Angeles, rerouted himself through Colorado to get the dog home the following night.

The dog’s reaction upon seeing his kids across the truck stop parking lot and the kids, lit up like Christmas trees, seeing their dog, was one of those Kodak / Kleenex moments, for sure.

Please feel free to share with us anything you would like to add. The most important part of transporting is making sure you know that the animals are going to a good place. Everyone involved, coordinators, drivers, shelter volunteers and staff and rescues share in that responsibility.

Someone has to screen a receiving rescue, check vet references, look at their website, their placement policies, their adoption contracts and assure yourself that you are moving a dog to a rescue that will see to all of its medical needs, spay and neuter it and place it in a well screened home.

If it’s a shelter dog and the shelter hasn’t done it, which most don’t, then the transport coordinator has to do it. The shelters don’t have our network resources, they aren’t accustomed to screening people as we do in rescue and they don’t have the staff and time. It is on us to do it for them if they can’t.

A rescue has to screen their adopters carefully. Any long distance adoption should only be to a home that has undergone reference checks and a home visit and is adopting an already altered, fully vetted pet with a contract that specifies a return to rescue if the adoption fails.

There are fates worse than death. That is the reality. It makes no sense to drag an animal hundreds of miles just to see it land in another shelter or turn up in a cruelty investigation of a bad rescue. There is no better feeling than being part of a happy ending and no worse feeling than finding out that you helped move an animal to a life of continued suffering.

Ultimately, the buck stops with us. The dogs don’t go anywhere without our help. Coordinators have to make sure these precautions have been taken and any driver has to demand to know that these things have been done before they drive.

Thank you for your time and knowledge.

With Gas prices Rising, Please post any travel plans where a ride might be met,
Dogs are dieing for a ride to safety.. Many humane Societies will take a dog from high kill if they have room and a ride..

Sherri,

This was a wonderful piece. A real glimpse into animal rescue transport. Thank you.

Jane

We just started a tranport services, it is paid as if it were not I could not do it. We will be doing weekly transports. No dog will be turned down. I am hoping this will help. I also want to take donations thru the site, to help with costs. Its called Kritter Kab.

Samatha

Where are you located, and does the Kritter Kab have a website?

Sherri

It is going to be kritterkab.com I am in the process of making the site now. Would you like to know when it is up?

A Video Tribute To Our Wonderful Volunteers: (New Link)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZGas9nKDPU