The following article is excerpted from “Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets” by Carol Mithers. Copyright © 2024 by Carol Mithers. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Downtown Los Angeles, 1998
One morning, not long after Lori Weise began working at the Modernica furniture factory in downtown LA, her co-worker Richard Tuttelmondo came back from an errand all revved up. “Lori, want to meet the coolest dog?”
He led her behind the factory to an unpaved, graffiti-scarred alley. It stank of garbage and shit. Twenty feet away, a huge cardboard refrigerator box lay on its side, like a coffin. Lori hesitated — was this a safe place to be? Suddenly, a big-headed, barrel-chested black dog came at her. She froze, then realized that the dog’s tail was wagging, and its lips were pulled back in a grin. A man rose up out of the box, a slender African American of indeterminate middle age, with close-cropped hair and tattoo-covered arms. He called the dog, which bounded to his side.
Lori was 31, a child of the Southern California suburbs. With the new job, she’d grown accustomed to seeing unhoused people around her, but Benny Joseph, who lived in the alley, was the first she’d actually met. His dog, Iron Head, was her first pit bull.
“I call him that because when we met, he had a burn there, like someone hit him on the head with a frying pan!” Benny told her. An echo of New Orleans softened his speech, and missing teeth blurred the words.
Lori smiled. “He’s beautiful!” she said, and stroked the animal’s big head as Benny beamed.
There wasn’t much else to say. The moment passed and she and Richard went back to work. It was almost a year later that they heard Benny had found a new place to stay, and that he was caring for a litter of puppies. On impulse, they dropped by one afternoon, to see if they could help. The decision would change Lori’s life.
Benny had moved up in the world. The new alley was far cleaner, and the owner of an adjacent sewing company had set him up with a “house,” a metal Home Depot tool shed that was bolted to the company’s loading dock. An extension cord and garden hose brought him electricity and water. Most importantly, the shed was surrounded by a chain-link fence with a lock. In exchange for sweeping the alley, Benny had a home that was both private and secure — for the street, million-dollar real estate.
Two more dogs had joined him: Lizzy, a brown-and-tan cattle dog mix; and Pookie, a three-legged shepherd mix. Pookie was the puppies’ mother, Iron Head their father.
“The dogs just find me!” Benny told Lori and Richard in delight when they arrived. He limped to greet them. “They just come by me! I’m the dog man!”
Lori looked around. The compound was surprisingly tidy and smelled of Pine-Sol. A five-gallon plastic jug, its top cut off, held fresh water for the dogs. But when Benny proudly displayed Pookie’s puppies, they lay in a filthy jumble in a cardboard box, slick with their own waste. She and Richard were so disgusted they left. Then, they worried.
“The puppies will freeze in that shed,” Lori said. So, back they went, with a clean, towel-lined box for the pups and a Coke for Benny. He took both gladly, but the next time they returned, the new box was as fouled as the old. They also learned that Benny planned to sell the puppies as soon as they were old enough — and that there were more on the way, thanks to another (unfixed) female that had shown up in the alley to be impregnated by the (still-unfixed) Iron Head.
“He’s a damn puppy mill,” Richard said.
They might have just walked away, ending the story there. But earlier that spring, Lori had bought a house. It was a major fixer, and Lori had emptied years-old savings accounts to buy it, leaving nothing for furniture. But it had a yard, which meant that for the first time since childhood she could have a dog. Benny had sold a few of Pookie’s puppies, but four were left, and when she next visited Benny, she said she wanted one. She pointed to a squirming lump of black fur.
Benny shook his head. “If you want that one, you’ve gotta take the white one, too.”
“Oh no.”
“You gotta. I’m keeping the other two.”
“Benny, you already have too many dogs! You can’t!’
“I’m keeping these two for Pookie, so she can raise her own children,” he said firmly. “Nope, Miss Lori, if you don’t take this dog, I’m never going to speak to you again. In fact, if you don’t take the white one, you can’t have the black one.” He grabbed an empty beer carton and dropped the pups in it. “Here — one and two. You don’t have a choice. Good luck!”
It was a nightmare. The puppies had mange, cried all night, tore up the couch, and pooped everywhere. But the next time Lori went to Benny’s shed, she found him weeping. He had wakened to find Pookie and the puppies he’d kept dead in a pile — poisoned, he said, by “someone mean and jealous.”
“They killed my dogs, Miss Lori!” he cried.
The raw force of Benny’s grief touched her. She returned to the alley that Sunday with Polaroids of her puppies playing in the yard, so Benny could see how happy they were. With the dogs as a connection, something between them changed. She began coming to see Benny more often, and without Richard.
Benny had turned the tool shed into a real home. A bookcase he’d found somewhere was filled with old National Geographics and paperback books; a kitchen area held a tiny refrigerator, a skillet and hot plate. Pieces of carpet served as dog beds; his own was a single mattress, put on risers, out of the reach of rats. A small TV was always on, “Judge Judy” a favorite. Outside, metal shelves held his slippers on the top shelf, boots below. The left boot contained the lift that helped him walk.
When Benny was young, thieves held up a parking garage that he managed. He turned over the money, but the robbers shot him anyway and a bullet ricocheted off his shoulder and hit his spine. He could walk, painfully, but well enough to make his way around downtown collecting the recyclables for cash — bottles and cans that he’d load into the shopping cart he called his “buggy” and, when possible, more profitable wooden pallets.
He spoke without bitterness. He mentioned sisters who seemed to live more conventional lives, an ex-wife, a child, but not where they were. And while it was clear that Benny drank too much, he never revealed what chain of events had landed him on the street. It was a way of life he’d learned to navigate brilliantly. He knew which dumpsters held the freshest vegetables and when the charitable groups that handed out food were scheduled to arrive. He was always working.
With a dog at his side, he recycled, washed cars and trucks, pumped propane, cleaned and painted sweatshops, swept loft owners’ garages, and, during an era of underground parties, sold directions to wannabe hipsters.
He didn’t snitch. When another homeless man cracked him over the head with a pickaxe handle, he refused to file charges, choosing “the Biblical way,” forgiveness. He sometimes used the services of the local “night ladies,” but he treated the women kindly and sometimes welcomed them to his locked space to just sit and relax safely.
He’d done a stint in county jail, he confessed, laughing, for being a “pallet bandido,” but shunned serious crime and hard drugs. Honest, industrious, neither angry nor visibly mentally ill, he made no enemies and many friends both on and off the street.
Benny always appreciated Lori’s company and the gifts she brought — El Pollo Loco chicken dinners and German chocolate cake, a sack of dog food — but she got nowhere urging him to sterilize his animals.
“I’m doing people a service!” he said indignantly. “All my puppies get adopted! ‘Fix’ what? Miss, that is not in my blood!”
It was a source of endless frustration. Yet there was no question that Benny loved his dogs. Lori had never met anyone who spoke of his animals in such human terms, who dressed them in T-shirts when it got cold, and left the TV on when he went out so they wouldn’t get lonely. Who saw them so completely as family.
“Sometimes to me the dogs is better than people,” he told her. “People do things dogs ain’t never gonna do.”
Word got out about the helpful white girl coming to the alley. Soon, other unhoused people with animal companions showed up when Lori was around. For several years, she and Richard had made it their mission to do what they could for the many strays they saw downtown — they fed some, found homes for others, and used their own money to sterilize as many as they could.
But there was something they’d misunderstood: many of these dogs weren’t strays at all; they were unhoused people’s pets. She’d be at Benny’s talking, hear the rattle of his gate opening, see a stranger accompanied by a scruffy canine. She’d tense, then look to Benny’s dogs for cues. If the very protective Lizzy didn’t growl, the new arrivals were friends. They brought a dog that had been hit by a car and so badly hurt all Lori could do was pay to have it euthanized.
Another arrived with a gash on its side; she covered the cost of stitches.
At first, the visitors, almost all men, didn’t know what to make of her. “Are you a social worker?” one asked.
The rules and rhythms of downtown life had been mysterious to Lori, but with Benny as her guide — what anthropologists would have called “a native informant” — they took on a new coherence. The prowling dogs weren’t as aimless as they appeared, Benny explained. They had territories, alliances and turf, whose boundaries they would fight to defend. For instance, Iron Head “owned” the alley where he and Benny lived, plus one side of nearby Santa Fe Avenue. The opposite sidewalk belonged to the German shepherd guarding a truck repair yard.
“See, Iron Head always stay on his side,” Benny said in his soft drawl. “He knows if he crosses, the other dog has the right to jump him.”
People were the same. Older and “independent” homeless, like Benny, avoided the nearby Skid Row shelters and missions except to get a meal or some other service. They lived alone or with a single partner or friend, guarding their privacy and autonomy.
On the Row itself, each block was controlled by its own crew, while encampments under the bridges that spanned the LA River operated more like fiefdoms. One woman ran the Sixth Street camp like a queen. She even had a “servant,” a man who never spoke, and who made her tea. Just as in the rest of America, segregation was the rule: Black people didn’t hang with Latinos and vice versa; alcoholics looked down on “crackheads” who wouldn’t go near heroin addicts.
But everyone liked Benny. Strays always found their way to him. So did people who’d found dogs or had news of dogs. No matter when or where it happened, if someone wasn’t doing right by an animal, Benny heard about it and then he told Lori.
“The man is hitting her. I feel bad about that dog.”
The next day, she and Richard would go out looking for it.
The people Lori met through and because of Benny were impoverished, addicted, criminal, mentally ill — the kind of people anyone might cross the street to avoid. Sometimes they frightened, angered or repelled her. Some were broken, like the young prostitute born and raised on Skid Row by a prostitute mother, who had sold her for the first time when she was just 12. Some were always angry; if she dared to offer a polite “How are you?” they hissed “How do you think I am? I’m here. How would you be?”
Some who kept animals were predators, drug dealers, thieves and addicts who bred them for money or to trade for a hit of whatever they smoked or shot. Lori paid one man a staggering $750 out of pocket for a litter, because it was the fastest way to get the puppies to safety. She soon realized the futility of that — the man had kept the mother and surely would breed her again.
But other street dwellers loved and needed their pets as she herself had depended on the German shepherd of her painful childhood. A drug dealer and sometimes pimp who lived in an Airstream trailer parked near the river cared for his two dogs, and even the strays he found. A serial burglar and crack addict doted on a small mixed-breed who was so smart he knew not to cross the street until the light turned green. The alcoholic couple who’d spent a decade on Broadway, living on the pavement in front of a liquor store that gave them credit, were surrounded by several generations of dogs, their “children.” Whatever these people’s failings, Lori could feel a connection.
Across America, many such human-animal pairs lived on the street, though no one really knew how many. The homeless hid their pets for fear they’d be taken away; the pets themselves usually ran loose, and custody of them could be fluid, with dogs and cats left behind, given away, or passed to someone else if an owner went to a shelter, rehab or jail.
According to some later estimates, maybe 10 percent of homeless people were pet owners, maybe as many as 25 percent. The few academics who studied this group between 1994 and 2000 did agree on one thing: unhoused men and women were deeply bound to the animals they called my “best friend,” the “only thing I love” and the “only thing that loves me.”
Having a pet made being homeless less lonely, reported sociologist Leslie Irvine in her 2013 book “My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals.” They brought structure, constancy, permanence and a reason to get up in the morning. Against the daily rejection of upstanding citizens, who skirted past, mouths pursed in distaste, pets said you are wanted. A dog missed you when you left, joyously welcomed you home, and brought solace when no other source of comfort existed in a cold, solitary tent.
***
Far from the downtown streets, the national movement to end euthanasia in animal shelters, popularly known as “no kill,” was bringing big changes to what America did with its “surplus” dogs and cats. To remove the “reject” stigma frequently attached to shelter animals and encourage the public to adopt more of them, some shelters adapted business strategies — “marketing” pets with appealing photos, improving the public’s access to them with longer hours. Some city governments and shelter boards in Texas, Michigan and New York adopted no kill resolutions. An ardent convert to the cause produced the nation’s first “No Kill Directory” and, in 1995, its first “no kill” conference. (While only 75 people attended, the number almost doubled the second year and, by 1999, had shot up to 600.)
In California, Gov. Pete Wilson signed legislation prohibiting the use of carbon monoxide in shelter killing, while the Hayden Act, sponsored by Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist and then state senator, extended the time a stray animal was held before it was put down. It also required public shelters to provide a place for posting lost and found notices.
The no-kill effort also produced the movement that would be called “rescue.” There had always been individual animal lovers whose passion was helping strays, though most stuck to their own neighborhoods and were seen by the public as tenderhearted eccentrics: one feeder of feral cats cheerfully told an LA Times reporter in 1987 that “we’re known as fanatics and crazy people.”
There also were loose confederations of breed enthusiasts, who sometimes stepped in to find new homes for Labrador or golden retrievers that had fallen on hard times. This new iteration was far more extensive and complex. Because would-be adopters often avoided public shelters as depressing and overwhelming, rescuers would serve as middlemen, brokers, curators. They’d find placeable pets at the shelter, take them out (“pull” them in rescue lingo) and clean them up to offer an easier, more manageable adoption experience.
The groups’ existence was vital to the success of no kill, and they appealed to animal lovers eager to make a difference. The fight to change shelter policy was morally important, but impersonal. Rescue was about salvation — literally standing between life and death. Data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics showed that the number of “animal protection” organizations formed in the 1990s was triple what it had been in the 1980s. (By 2006, it would rise another 40 percent.)
Rescue was a Wild West of a world. The groups’ grassroots nature made it impossible to say exactly how many existed and who their members were. A rescue could be two people meeting in someone’s living room or a dozen like-minded friends or a large organization with its own kennel. It could focus on saving Chihuahuas or shepherds or bottle-feeding kittens or animals with medical needs or seniors on their last legs. It could pull animals from the local shelter or from one in an adjoining county or the streets of another country. Some rescuers even bought dogs advertised on Craigslist in the hopes of cutting the supply to backyard breeders and dog-fighting rings. Everyone had their priorities and rules, which they regularly broke when some animal tugged at their hearts in an unexpected way.
A rescue group could fade in a year or last more than a decade, could survive on a shoestring or tap wealthy donors to bring in millions. With the exception of zoning requirements and kennel licensing, there were no laws governing how such efforts operated. Rescues had to become IRS-approved nonprofits in order to collect tax-deductible donations and adopt at reduced rates from municipal shelters, but that basically meant filing paperwork. There was no mandated training, background check or rulebook. Whoever ran a rescue was the sole arbiter of who adopted its animals and how much information was required before an adoption was approved.
Often, it was a lot: signed contracts, promises of vet care and that the pet would be allowed inside a fenced yard. Slate writer Emily Yoffe would later bemoan the barriers would-be adopters faced from these animal guardians, the “Jeopardy-like quizzes” — Where will the dog sleep? Do you plan to have children? What happens if you divorce? — and lengthy applications that were “as much fun to fill out as a Form 1040.”
The growing legions of rescuers, like many past reformers — suffragists, temperance advocates, anti-vivisectionists — were largely female, white and middle-class or above. This was no surprise; that was the demographic with enough time and cash for the effort. There was no money to be made in rescue, in fact it was usually the opposite: the cute little terrier saved from shelter death could turn out to have distemper and need a week at the vet; the appealing litter of puppies could all have parvovirus, an infectious, potentially fatal gastrointestinal virus whose treatment could wipe out a yearly budget in a week.
It also demanded a tremendous amount of hands-on, drawn-out, emotional and all-consuming work. A rescuer had to make alliances with shelter staff and with the volunteers who helped you, who would then call when they took in a dog that was your “type.” Over and over, you had to brave the shelter itself, the smells and immensity of need, the imploring eyes and desperate cries. You had to make a series of ugly, Sophie’s choice decisions: Did you take a healthy animal over one that was injured and needed you more but would be pricey to help? You made impractical decisions just so you could sleep at night, like pulling that arthritic, not-very-adoptable 11-year-old because he looked at you with a despair you couldn’t stand.
You always faced the arbitrary cruelty of limits: each animal saved meant one left behind.
That was just the start. Dogs often emerged from the shelter ragged, dirty, angry and scared. They pulled on the leash and tried to escape, showed teeth, found their “freedom ride” so terrifying they shit in the car. Once home, they whined and cried all night and peed in every corner. Dozens of hours of rehab and training might follow. Sit. Come. Potty. I’m your friend.
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There would be vet and grooming appointments, meet-and-greet sessions and interviews with potential adopters, home visits and applications to read. Money would have to be raised — money always had to be raised — to pay for the vaccinations and sterilizations and the expected unexpected: dental issues, blood work, tumor removal, X-rays.
Rescues without kennels had to recruit and maintain a network of responsible foster families to house pets until they were adopted (while paying for their food and medicine) or arrange commercial boarding (more money to raise). Those that owned kennels needed funding to pay staff and buy food. To raise money, you had to find and target donors, schedule events, solicit donated goods for auctions, and once social media took hold, stay eternally active. It was Sisyphean, endless. The shelter never emptied. The second one animal got a home, it was time to take in another. It simply wasn’t viable for someone juggling childcare and a long-hours, low-wage job.
As varied and valuable as rescue was, though, it left some gaps, particularly in terms of what happened to needy animals outside the shelter. Nationally, there were charities that helped homeless people and scattered attempts to help street dogs. Stray Rescue in St. Louis picked up feral animals; free vet clinics operated in San Francisco and Sacramento; and twice monthly, the 64-year-old owner of a Seattle animal hospital offered food, veterinary exams, and shots in the basement of the city’s Union Gospel Mission. But these efforts were intermittent — “You treat people’s animals for something, and you never see them again,” Stanley Coe, the Seattle vet, ruefully told a reporter — and focused on people or pets, not the two together.
No one was observing, as Lori was, the streets’ human/animal pairs, noting that while dogs loved their homeless owners and their humans loved them back, often they failed them in the same ways they failed themselves. They couldn’t provide many basics like cleanliness, a good diet or medical care. They couldn’t take action to prevent a crisis (like an unwanted litter) or put aside cash to cover one just in case. The easy solution to that problem might be to call animal control to confiscate the pet and find it a new home.
But no one had tried what Lori began to do, long before she was able to articulate it: care for street people and their pets in a way that helped both and allowed them to stay together.
It was about justice, yes — some of the people living on the sidewalk actually had saved their pets. Surely someone who’d pulled an abandoned puppy from a dumpster and warmed it inside his ragged shirt deserved the joy it brought. But it also made sense. If an unhoused person lost his dog or it was taken from him, what good would come of it? The man would mourn. The dog, used to running free, might never adjust to life in a silent suburban yard.
It came down to an understanding that would guide Lori’s work for the next almost three decades: Some animals suffered because their owners lacked the information and/or resources to properly care for them.
What if someone just … helped?