The Airlift Operation That Has Transformed Pet Adoption

Kristi Wright was hired as the animal-control officer in Pecos, Texas, in 2src17. The town’s shelter, a windowless cinder-block building behind the police station, had twelve bare-bones kennels and few resources. “People thought of it, like, That’s where animals go to die,” Wright told me. “And it wasn’t untrue.” In Pecos, a West Texas oil-field town dotted with man camps, equipment yards, and the occasional roofless adobe structure melting into the scrub, packs of stray dogs congregated by the gas stations and the elementary schools. The animals that wound up in the shelter, some strays and a few surrendered by owners who couldn’t care for them, were unlikely to get adopted; anyone in Pecos who wanted a dog probably already had three. The shelter had a budget for euthanasia drugs and food but not for vaccinations.

Wright reached her limit within a couple of years. It was euthanasia day, and next up on the list was a wiggly four-month-old puppy named Honey. “I went into that kennel, and that dog was just so happy to see me, jumping all over me,” Wright recalled. She looked at Honey and thought, I am not going to kill this dog. Instead, she went next door to tender her resignation to the police chief. After some discussion, Wright agreed to stay in the job, provided that she was allowed to try a different approach. Then she sent cold e-mails to every rescue group that she could find in the region.

Municipal animal shelters like the one in Pecos typically have to take in any animal within their community boundaries. They are often underfunded and overcrowded and have higher euthanasia rates than privately run organizations. Rescue groups, of which there are nearly ten thousand in the U.S.—twice the number of shelters—attempt to ease the burden by removing and finding homes for adoptable dogs. “The rescue dog is now, indisputably, a luxury good,” Allie Conti wrote in The Cut in 2src21, after the pandemic dog-adoption boom. It was clear that there was a persistent geographic disparity in the supply of adoptable pets. Broadly speaking, the South has lower spay-and-neuter rates and larger populations of strays. “I have a letter from a woman who got a dog from us that literally says, ‘In Portland, Oregon, there’s a saying: That it’s easier to buy a house than to adopt a dog.’ That’s just how it was in northern shelters,” Heather Hall, the director of One Tail at a Time-West Texas, a rural animal-rescue organization, told me. “It didn’t take too long to realize that, if there are empty shelters in the North and overflowing shelters in the South, this is a distribution issue.”

The past few years have seen significant growth of transportation networks that move animals via commercial flights, private jets, chartered planes, R.V.s, passenger vans, and personal vehicles. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ transport program began in 2src14 with seven thousand transfers and by 2src24 had relocated nearly three hundred thousand animals; Facebook groups such as the UnderBoneRailroad match animals in need with volunteers willing to drive them across the country. The work appears to be having an impact. In 2src16, just under half of shelters in the U.S. could be classified as no-kill—at least ninety per cent of their healthy animals were adopted, fostered, or reunited with their owners; last year, more than two-thirds were no-kill. (Best Friends Animal Society, a rescue nonprofit, says that the ninety-per-cent benchmark allows some leeway to account for animals with “irremediable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life and prevent them from being re-homed.”)

The first dog that left Pecos in a plane was a sweet, rambunctious stray that Wright called Felicia. For years, Wright had strategically avoided bringing her into the shelter, assuming that it would amount to a death sentence: “She was huge. Nobody wanted that dog.” (The shelter had so little space that ownerless animals were typically euthanized after seventy-two hours.) Once, Wright managed to find Felicia a local foster family, but she escaped from their barn—she “broke a window,” Wright said. In 2src22, an animal rescue in Oregon found a foster home for Felicia, and a nonprofit agreed to fund her trip on a charter plane. Wright took Felicia to the small municipal airport herself. “I stood there and boo-hooed on the tarmac for, like, thirty minutes about that stupid dog,” she said. In the past year, nearly six hundred dogs have been transported out of Pecos, most of them flown out of state. In June, the shelter celebrated its twelfth consecutive month as a no-kill facility.

If spun correctly, a dog’s difficult past can be a selling point. “People want a dog that has an incredible story, that’s really been saved from something terrible,” Hall told me. “Who wants an eighty-pound black pit bull? Well, we can make you want them, because that’s a really incredible dog that was tied up on an oil rig for four weeks and then fed by two different crews and then got bit by a rattlesnake and abandoned at the vet. Now he can be your heroic save story.” (She later told me that this example was not hypothetical and that the dog is now living happily in Portland.)

Long-distance transport is expensive and stressful for animals. (Flights, typically covered by animal-rescue nonprofits, can cost as much as twenty-five hundred dollars an hour.) Ideally, dogs from Pecos would be adopted by people living in Pecos. But Hall argues that long-distance relocation is an “essential stopgap measure while shelters get a handle on their pet populations.” In the past six years, she has facilitated the transport of more than three thousand dogs from remote communities in Texas to places such as Portland, Chicago, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “I’m not going to say it’s easy and I’m not going to say it’s cheap, but there’s a mechanism to get dogs pretty much anywhere you want at any time you want,” Hall said.

Wright works out of a cozily cluttered office near the entrance to the Pecos shelter building. A value-sized jar of dog treats sits on her desk next to a sign that reads “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, we’ll train you.” On the afternoon that I visited, a shelter employee named Laura was holding a timid Chihuahua mix with comically outsized ears. The dog was named Allsup, in honor of the gas station where she was found. Wright told me that she’d seen Allsup around for years, but the dog had always avoided capture. “Then the other week I get out to go get my coffee, and she got close. I was, like, Today’s the day, ma’am.” Small dogs are prized in cities, and a foster family in Portland had quickly agreed to take in Allsup. She was scheduled for a flight later that week.

Wright grew up in rural Alabama; like many people who wind up in Pecos, she was drawn by the promise of high-paying oil-field work. She got a job supervising pipeline inventory, which regularly took her hours outside the city limits, making it difficult to pick up her daughter from school. The hours in animal control were better, but the social cost was steep. “My daughter’s at elementary school, and a kid’s, like, I think your mom killed my dog,” she said. Until 2src19, there was no dog park in Pecos. The town had no groomer or pet trainer; there was only one vet within a hundred miles. “Most people think everybody here is making oil-field money, and that’s just not the case,” Wright said. “Mental-health issues are pretty prevalent. There’s a lot of addiction, and there’s not resources for those things. When you go to these houses and there’s an animal tied to a tree without shelter, nine times out of ten there’s a whole lot of other things going on.”

When Wright first reached out to Hall, Hall was nervous about working with the shelter. “A place that was managing eight hundred dogs with twelve kennels and one employee?” she said. “I was afraid that I was going to be super fucking sad.” Hall lives off the grid on a dirt road in Terlingua, at the edge of Big Bend National Park, around two hundred miles south of Pecos—a place so remote that she sometimes calls it “the worst place in the world to run a dog rescue.” At the time, she was working for a public-defense association and saving dogs in her spare time. “I used to, like, throw twenty-five dogs in my car and drive them to Colorado,” she said. In 2src19, Hall began working with a shelter in Presidio, Texas, which is just across the border from Mexico. Hall sent dogs to two rescues she’d come to know over the years, One Tail at a Time PDX and One Tail at a Time Chicago. They shared a commitment to keeping animals in foster homes instead of in kennels; there they’d be socialized and happier, and therefore more adoptable. Previously, the Presidio shelter had euthanized around eighty per cent of dogs that came in; that year, it didn’t euthanize a single healthy pet.

Hall has an understated manner that belies her ability to catch people up in the gravitational pull of her mission. Last year, she left her job in public defense, started a West Texas branch of One Tail at a Time with seed funding from the other locations, and devoted herself to dog rescue full time. Last year, thanks, in part, to funding from Best Friends, OTAT-West Texas formalized partnerships with six shelters spread across an area the size of South Carolina. Many were even worse off than the one in Pecos. In Van Horn, ninety miles southwest of Pecos, the shelter consisted of four outdoor cages bolted to a concrete pad. In most municipalities, the shelter was run by the police department; Van Horn was too small for a police department, so the public-works department was in charge.

Rescue organizations sometimes position themselves as the good guys, swooping in to save animals from certain doom in shelters. But the moral accounting is not quite so clear, according to Cathy Bissell, the founder of the Bissell Pet Foundation, a nonprofit that supports shelters and rescues. For one, as municipal services, shelters have some level of public accountability, while rescues do not. “Just because it says it’s a rescue doesn’t mean it’s going to save that animal’s life, or that animal is going to be better off, because I can tell you what I’ve seen and it’s not great,” Bissell said. “We have moved so many dogs out of failed rescue operations that, for a while, I was, like, That’s all we do. People start with good intentions, they want to save lives, and then they get overwhelmed.”

Some rescues focus on finding homes for a shelter’s most adoptable dogs—“young dogs, cute dogs, small-breed dogs, different-looking dogs,” according to Hall. “But, when you go into a shelter and you pull out all their Chihuahuas and poodles and you leave them all their pit bulls and German shepherds, you’re actually hurting the shelter.” As Hall saw it, her job was to build capacity in the regional-shelter system, not just to save individual animals. OTAT-West Texas provided shelters with staff, medications, veterinary supplies, microchips, and animal-tracking software. It taught them how to list animals on the OTAT adoption portal and facilitated transportations. Within a year, all six shelters qualified as no-kill. “If you throw resources and effort at it, you can change everything quickly. You don’t have to plod along for a generation like public defense—man, I did that for twenty-five years, and I don’t even know if we ended up in a better place than we were when we started, to be honest. But to be able to go into these shelters and just change things . . .” Hall said. “I think we all want to live in communities where we don’t have to see a lot of suffering.”

In Pecos, a shelter employee named Luis gave me a tour while Wright was waylaid by a man in a black pickup truck who wanted to surrender four pit bulls. The facility was basic but clean, and dogs pressed themselves against the metal grates at the front of the kennels, eager for attention. The former euthanasia room is now a space for medical treatment; a small fridge full of vaccines sits in the corner. Feral cats used to be immediately euthanized, because the shelter had no space for them; now there’s a dedicated cat room, where Wright joined us. “We flew eleven cats last week,” she said.

Some people in Pecos were skeptical at the idea of flying local strays thousands of miles, including the area’s lone veterinarian, Ronald Box. “He’s great, but he’s very old-school. You know, ‘There’s enough dogs. If you put that one down, it’ll be fine,’ ” Wright said. But, as the project progressed, she felt that the community’s perception of the shelter began to change. “We’re getting a lot of surrenders because people know we’re saving them,” she said. Intake surged from around three hundred and fifty animals a year to more than eight hundred. Donations have also increased since the shelter became no-kill. The county judge brings by a big bag of dog food once a month, and coaches from the local high school have become reliable dog fosterers. Thanks to budget increases from the city government, Wright hired two employees who make house calls to encourage owners to get their animals fixed and mend fences so that dogs known to wander can’t get loose. Even Dr. Box had come around, agreeing to provide the health certificates required for interstate transport at no cost. “I guess you’re rubbing off on me,” he told her the other week. “This was this mean old man that didn’t care,” Wright said.

Though Hall refers to transport as a “stopgap” solution, it doesn’t seem as though it’s going away any time soon. Many shelters have seen an uptick in surrendered animals, which Cathy Bissell attributed to the housing crisis, rising veterinary costs, and general economic stress. “If you’re a young family in your thirties and you have two children, most likely you can’t afford a dog,” she said. Limited access to veterinary clinics is another obstacle for people in rural America. Hall told me a story of a woman in Pecos with “two giant bulldog-y, pit-bull-y, Shar-Pei things.” After the sudden death of her husband and a car crash that left her severely injured, she moved into low-income disability housing that had a no-dog policy. She surrendered her animals to the Pecos shelter. “A couple years ago, that would’ve been the end, right?” Hall said. Instead, the dogs were rehomed together in Portland. “This lady who lost her husband, and then her mobility, and then her housing, and then her dogs, was just literally crying with happiness.” Like many OTAT adoptions I heard about, the happy ending didn’t fully cancel out the story’s underlying sadness.

Just before midnight on a Saturday in early October, I met Hall at a gas-station parking lot in Marfa, where she was about to begin the second leg of an all-night dog transport, a trip she’s taken roughly every three weeks for the past five years. Hall, wearing a gray hoodie, hopped out of a van that was already partly full of crated animals. A woman in a baseball cap arrived to reluctantly hand over a nine-week-old Shepherd mix she’d been fostering. She’d been crying so hard that, when she passed through a Border Patrol checkpoint, the agent had asked her if she was O.K. “It’s like having another baby. You’re feeding them with a bottle and wiping their little butthole,” she said.

Hall appraised the van critically. Sixteen dogs already loaded, with thirteen more to pick up along the way. “If we’re in a real tough spot, then you might get a dog,” she told me, eying my truck. We drove west. At one-thirty in the morning, Hall pulled into a gas station in Van Horn, where Wright was waiting with two volunteers. The women had a kind of giddy midnight-mission energy as they loaded the van with dogs from the Pecos shelter under the gas station’s flickering fluorescent lights. “This is your freedom ride!” Wright cooed to a spaniel mix that had been found at the bottom of a well a few weeks earlier. Allsup, crouched in a small crate, looked quietly apprehensive.

At 2 A.M., we pulled into a motel in Sierra Blanca, where a barefoot woman with a gray ponytail microchipped two dogs she’d been fostering. One, frightened, pressed her belly into the pavement. “All right, sweet girl, you go have a good life,” the woman said as Hall helped load the animal into a crate. Two hours later, we were at the El Paso airfield, where a nearly full moon hung low and gold above the horizon. Hall uncrated dogs, clipped leashes to collars, poured food and water into silver bowls. A van full of volunteers showed up to walk dogs around the parking lots, where the animals displayed varying degrees of wild enthusiasm. Another van, from the El Paso shelter, showed up with some three dozen dogs. (The shelter began its flight-transport program in 2src18 and now sends a plane of dogs to the Pacific Northwest every three weeks.) Many of the dogs were bound for Portland, where they’d already been assigned to foster families. “They’re off the plane, direct to the adoption center to meet their families,” Juli Zagrans, the executive director of OTAT PDX told me. “They’ll be home by lunch.”

Two hours before dawn, a small blue Cessna touched down on the tarmac. It was painted with the logo of Dog Is My Copilot, a nonprofit that has transported more than forty-three thousand animals in the past twelve years. The volunteer pilot, a Wyoming physician named Brent Blue, told me that there’s usually not too much barking unless there’s a cat on board. The volunteers stacked crates in the cabin. For a moment, it seemed like they might not all fit, and Hall began consolidating puppies. “Sixty-four dogs are going on that plane,” she said.

Sometime before 5 A.M., the small plane buzzed into the sky. Zagrans headed to the commercial airport to board a flight to Portland, where she’d reunite with the dogs a few hours later. Hall headed home; on Monday, she had twenty-five kittens and a puppy scheduled to fly from Marfa to Austin on a family’s private jet. Later that day, I watched on Instagram as dozens of dogs were uncrated in Portland, looking baffled but enthusiastic at the strange turn of events. A message was written on a wall in large blue cursive letters: “Welcome to the good life.” ♦