Free Little Boy Blue by Kim Kavin Page B

who are hired as independent contractors to assist troops in combat, and who get offended if anyone dares to call them a mercenary for hire.
    One of the first things Shaw did after we sat down across from one another was attempt to size me up. He wanted to know whether I really was the unlikely person I had claimed to be—a journalist from New Jersey who had somehow ended up adopting a dog who was once on death row in this building, and then drove hundreds of miles because I wanted to have a conversation. My entire existence seemed far-fetched to him, like a cover story begging to be blown apart. And I couldn’t blame him, seeing as how some rescue advocates try to infiltrate shelters and catch the bosses saying something that will ultimately get them fired. I also didn’t mind him poking at me a bit with a few questions, since he was just as respectful as I planned to be with him when I started asking questions of my own.
    “I’d like to know, before we get started, what your view is of no-kill shelters,” Shaw said. “Everybody who comes in here to talk to me, I always want to know the answer to that question.”
    I took a moment to think before I spoke, assuming that others with zero experience had sat here plenty of times telling the fourteen-year veteran of animal control precisely how they thought he should be doing his job differently.
    “I’m no expert,” I said. “I’m just an everyday dog owner. But if you mean shelters where they say ‘no-kill’ as if it’s a good thing but then keep the dogs locked in cages all their lives, well, I’d have to say I think that’s cruel to the dogs. On the other hand, if you mean ‘no-kill’ as in people working hard to save as many dogs as possible and get them good homes, then I’m for it one hundred percent.”
    Shaw nodded and said, as if checking a box in his mind, “So then we’re in agreement on that.”
    He kept looking directly at me, holding my gaze as if it were tangible evidence, really, as he relaxed ever so slightly in his chair. He didn’t sit back the way somebody does when he believes he’s completely safe, but his arms and fingers loosened just a few fractions of an inch, as if to say he trusted me—but just a little.
    And then he started to talk about life inside this facility as he has lived it, beginning back in the days when things were much worse than they are now.
    For about the first two years that he held the job, Shaw told me, he was required to kill every dog who came in unless somebody could prove the pup had been vaccinated against rabies. Plenty of raccoons, foxes, bats, and skunks in Person County are rabies carriers, and far too many dog owners fail to vaccinate their pooches against the disease. The county’s rules meant that if a family’s dog got loose, and the family could not produce a rabies vaccination certificate, the dog would die at animal control even if the parents and children came looking for him. Period.
    Shaw says this was too much for him to bear, so he went to the county Board of Health and asked if he could at least seek new homes for dogs found in areas where no rabid animals had been recently found. “After some controversy,” he recalls, “they said yes. And immediately, we were allowed to work with rescue groups and do adoptions. We thought it was great. We started ‘Pet of the Week’ in the local paper.”
    At that time, the building filled with offices where we were now sitting comprised the entirety of Person County Animal Control. It wasn’t just office space. It held all the cages and animals, too—and precious few people knew or cared that it existed. Shaw describes those days as almost a full decade’s worth of years before rescue groups became prominent or vocal, and before people beyond his officers paid any attention whatsoever to what went on inside the shelter. He and his small staff were awfully isolated as he learned firsthand what it felt like to be the human being in charge of