Adopt a Dog With a Southern Drawl – NYTimes.com

IF I could be reincarnated as anyone, I’d pick my dog, Landon. He leads a charmed life. Most mornings he gets scrambled eggs for breakfast, which he prefers to hard-boiled. Every afternoon, he takes a long run. Landon sleeps with my husband and me — he’s a 60-pound retriever mix, but seems to expand to five times that size in our bed. In summer, we take him on vacation to Maine, where he frolics on the beach. Not that he cares, but his picture has appeared in the online edition of Vogue.

Landon’s cushy existence belies a precarious beginning. Three years ago, at 8 weeks old, he was hours from being euthanized in an animal control facility in Tennessee. Someone — we’ll probably never know who — saved him, his six littermates and their mother, and brought them to Bideawee, a Manhattan shelter. We adopted Landon a few days later.

In the last decade, hundreds of thousands of dogs have been transported north from overcrowded facilities in the rural South. Much of the infrastructure for getting them from one state to another was put in place in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina left more than 250,000 pets stranded.

An estimated three to four million cats and dogs are euthanized in American shelters each year. People don’t love their pets any more or less because they live in one geographic region or another. But kill rates spike in high poverty areas with limited access to affordable veterinary services for spaying and neutering. In the rural South, unsterilized dogs are often allowed to roam outdoors. Many counties have weak or unenforced leash laws. Shelters in such areas are overrun, with kill rates ranging from 50 to 95 percent. Even where adoptions are encouraged, low population density makes them rare.

Many of the dogs that are routinely euthanized in Southern states — healthy Labs, hounds, shepherds and others, including puppies of various breeds — are in high demand in the Northeast, where low-cost spay and neuter services are the norm, kill rates are down, and there are exponentially more potential adopters. In 2011, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals started its animal relocation and transport program, which connects overcrowded shelters with those in regions where space is available.

via Adopt a Dog With a Southern Drawl – NYTimes.com.