“This place was a kill zone,” admits Tanner, who reports the shelter’s euthanasia rate is down to a best-ever 41 percent this year, including nearly all adoptable dogs, thanks to the transports set up by Mugan—whom he hired and put in charge of adoptions in 2008. A similar change has been taking place across rural New Mexico, where kill rates of 50 to 85 percent have long been the norm. Where communities are making a dent in those numbers, transports (or “relocations”) are the main reason.
    Devastated by what she discovered at the Valencia shelter, where up to 70 animals are surrendered in a day, Mugan went from being a volunteer dog walker to dialing desperately for solutions. It was Natalie Owings of Heart and Soul Animal Sanctuary in Glorieta who advised her to try getting animals out of New Mexico. “I started laughing,” Mugan recalls. “I said, we can’t even place them here. Why would I send them up there?”
    Last year, Mugan worked nonstop arranging the transport of 2,200 dogs out of Valencia County to homes up north, a phenomenon that is happening everywhere that rescue workers are stepping in to help overburdened municipal shelters. In Las Vegas, N.M., Martina Holguin moved 900 puppies to Denver last year. Even in the high-kill zone of southeastern New Mexico, a rescue group is moving puppies from Hobbs to Boulder every month on the PetSmart Rescue Waggin’.
    Certainly, the rise of the Internet and social media has a lot to do with the relocation phenomenon. Also, well-publicized animal sanctuaries like Best Friends in Utah and North Shore in New York have long attracted inquiries from across the country for animals whose options run out.
    But it was really Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that laid down a network of drivers and routes, according to Sandy Monterose of the national ASPCA. Rescue workers loaded up their vehicles nonstop to get animals out of the disaster zone. Those networks continue to be used, inspiring the ASPCA leadership to launch a nationwide Web-based mapping service last June to help make it official. The MAP (Moving Animals Places) program at ASPCAPro.org allows qualifying rescue groups to input and share their information on a map, indicating whether they have or need space for homeless animals.

Where all roads lead
Part of the impetus for the program came out of a workshop that the ASPCA hosted in New Mexico in 2011, says Monterose, who is senior director of community initiatives. At one point, rescue groups drew lines on a map to show where animals were being sent, and all lines seemed to lead to Colorado. “It was an ‘A-ha’ moment, where everyone said, Look at that!” Monterose said. “But you couldn’t have that knowledge until you put the dots on the map.”
    The challenge now, she said, is to reach hundreds of shelters and rescue groups across the nation and get them plugged into the map so transport can happen more effectively.
    Meanwhile, informal networks have sprung up spontaneously on email lists and social media, such as the Animal Rescue Transport Network, Animal Transport Resources, and Shelter Transport Animal Rescue Team (START) on Facebook. “I can’t imagine doing rescue without Facebook,” says Holguin of Las Vegas, who used to fi nd adoptive homes by working the phones. For about a decade, private pilots have helped transport animals cross-country through organizations such as Pilots N Paws Rescue, Flying Paws, Air Angels, and Animal Rescue Flights. Long-haul truckers have stepped in with Operation Roger and Heart’s Hope, which carry animals on routes they’re already driving.    

  Of course, not all transport happens well or legitimately, which is one reason the ASPCA includes peer reviews in its network. Locally, the group Animal Protection of New Mexico is working to set basic standards for transport, coordinating with the ASPCA to establish “best practices” that lessen stress and risk on animals and drivers.
    Leslie King, APNM program director, said the group counted roughly 10,000 dogs and 900 cats transported in New Mexico in 2012—a 73 percent increase from 2009—most of them headed north to Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The northward trend holds nationally as well, with animals on the East Coast moving from the southern states to New England, though there are also destinations in Florida.
    “Economics and population density are factors,” explained the ASPCA’s Monterose, “but it’s also climate, attitudes toward pet ownership, and affordability and accessibility of spay/neuter.”

The reason is legal
New Mexico rescue workers will tell you the main reason Colorado and Washington can take so many homeless animals is because they have successfully limited their own.“In the Denver area, they’ve had over ten years of enforced spay/neuter, so they don’t have the overpopulation,” says Holguin. It’s not that wealthier communities make better homes, she said. “Economics are absolutely a factor, but it isn’t what makes a good pet guardian. It’s having the laws and the judicial system to enforce them.”
    King agrees. “Spay/neuter has to be the number-one solution” to the problem of pet overpopulation in New Mexico, she says. “Passing laws is part of it—but it takes effort and time.”
    Mandatory spay/neuter laws have proved difficult to pass here politically, and APNM doesn’t think they make sense until and unless spay/neuter is widely available and affordable. But communities are seeing some success with levying fi nes, requiring litter permits, and other types of pushback that force pet owners to be more responsible, and prevent situations like in Valencia County, where the same people bring a litter of puppies to the shelter every few months. “They tell me it’s cheaper to dump the dogs at the shelter than to pay for spay,” Mugan says sadly.   

    This year for the first time, Albuquerque Animal Welfare started refusing intakes because the public shelter is full, putting applicants on a waiting list and encouraging them to find solutions on their own. “It’s a bold move, because everyone thought they had to accept anything at any time,” says Peggy Weigle, executive director of Albuquerque’s largest rescue organization. Weigle herself set the tone last year by instituting “managed admissions” at Animal Humane New Mexico, whereby pet owners must make appointments and meet with a counselor before turning over a pet. “Since neither of us euthanize for space, the public is being trained,” she says.
    Under Weigle’s leadership, Animal Humane has become a model of the multi-pronged approach needed to attack the crisis of pet overpopulation. Th e group has used everything from professional marketing campaigns to animal personality assessments to its recent $5 million state-of-the-art renovation to create optimum conditions for adoption.
    As a result, Animal Humane is one of only two organizations in the state (along with the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, also recently rebuilt) that is a destination for transported animals. Thanks to its ability to get 100 percent of its healthy intakes adopted, according to Weigle, Animal Humane took in 1,300 animals last year from high-kill shelters around the state. Its Project Fetch works with 15 groups in 13 counties on a rotating basis, taking in a dozen or more animals each week. Once a month, its mobile van goes to Roswell to load up with 35 to 40 more dogs deemed “highly adoptable,” and bring them here for adoption.
    “The trend is not to take them to the point of being over capacity,” Weigle says of recent changes in thinking about shelter management. “Push back on owners to re-home or solve behavioral problems” on their own, she says. “Because if you drill down, it’s behavior problems that are behind owner surrenders.”
    Of course, such solutions take money, which Animal Humane has been highly successful at raising.

Mission to save lives
Municipal animal shelters, by contrast, generally cannot refuse intakes, since their mission is related to public safety. They also cannot solicit donations or volunteers, the engine of successful rescue. That’s why, wherever animals are escaping high-kill shelters, it’s because the shelter has contracted with a nonprofit to take over the business of saving lives.
    In Taos, Espanola, Gallup, Silver City, Ruidoso, Las Vegas, and other communities, the public shelter has partnered with an established local rescue group to oversee adoptions and public education programs like spay/ neuter. Similarly, Erik Tanner was only too happy to turn over Valencia County adoptions to Patty Mugan, given that the county takes in 7,500 animals a year and has just 76 kennels. He jokes that she has him driving to Colorado all night, hustling back to the shelter at dawn to load up another van and hand over his own cash to the driver.
    It’s a 180-degree change, in many cases, from the way public shelters used to treat rescue groups. In the past, some would not even hand over animals on the kill list, for fear they would end up back at the shelter—or their puppies would, said Joyce Fay, Bosque Beast columnist and founder of Bro & Tracy Animal Rescue. Traveling around the state, Fay has noticed changes lately at rural shelters that work with rescue groups to institute best practices.
    Still, the situation in New Mexico has not really changed, she says. “The places that are getting better, it’s primarily because they’re transporting. It’s not because they’re adopting more, not because they’re doing more spay/ neuter or getting fewer dogs.” 

  Leslie King confirms this sad truth. Statewide, the number of animals showing up at shelters remains unchanged, she says, with the euthanasia rate still around 50 percent. That’s why the ASPCA has targeted New Mexico, among other states, to focus its efforts (“High-risk breeds get help”). Shelters here often lack adequate training and funding; many have cramped, dismal facilities and don’t do enough to keep animals healthy, King says.
    Transport is undoubtedly saving hundreds of lives each month—in Valencia County, it accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the shelter’s drop in euthanasia—but moving animals elsewhere is clearly not a long-term solution. And while donations tend to pour in for transport, rescue workers say, taxpayers have proved less willing to underwrite it.

Problem is here
“We don’t want to be pushing our problems onto Colorado because they have their spay/neuter laws in place,” says King. Transport also fails to help a large population of homeless animals in New Mexico: Pit Bull breeds and cats, which are not wanted anywhere.
    “Ultimately the problem is here,” agrees Holguin, who returned to the town where she grew up and realized the animal abuse and cruelty was not alright with her. Committed rescue workers like Holguin and Mugan have a boots-on-the-ground view of the long-term need for funding, legislation, education, and communication. But their energy is exhausted short-term getting an endless stream of animals on the freedom train up north.
    That’s why, in the predawn darkness in Los Lunas, no one questions whether it’s worthwhile to spend eight hours on the road fueled on minimart coffee to deliver one vanload of dogs to safety—when 70 more will be waiting to enter lockup on Tuesday. It’s like going from the gas chamber at Auschwitz to writing Schindler’s List; like whisking slaves from your attic to the underground railroad, seeing even one litter of innocent puppies escape the pitiless fate created by humans.
    It’s angelic. It’s exhilarating. And Victor Galvan’s look will tell you, it’s worth $9 an hour.