Joanne (not her real name) is a real person and this is a true story. It was told to me by Joanne’s mother a month ago and I was able to confirm it in several different ways. It is a small story in some ways, a powerful story in others, emblematic, like the New York Carriage Horse controversy,  of the great confusion and failed good intentions of people who say they love animals and wish to grant them rights but have lost all balance and perspective.

I am sorry to say Joanne’s mother tried to tell me this story a dozen different times before she got my attention, the truth is there are just too many stories like it now.

As always, the loser is the animal, in this case, a loving and sweet Lab, and also a good person. In this story, the person is a brave young woman who is intelligent and ethical and is a great animal lover. She has risked her life for her country and for some foreign dogs but was not deemed humane enough to adopt a Lab she loved in North Carolina because two slats in a  fence post in her back yard was loose.

The story begins five years ago in Afghanistan. Joanne was there on behalf of a military branch of the United States government. She was stationed in a remote village in Hellman Province, which is an especially dangerous part of that troubled country. Her mission was to support and protect the schools that educate young women, many of whom risked severe punishment or death if they tried to go to school and educate themselves.

Joanne risked her life many times, was under fire, injured slightly in a frightening roadside bombing, shot at several times while driving, decorated for bravery, assaulted more than once by men who were enraged at her presence and mission. She is a passionate dog lover, she has owned dogs her entire loved and missed them so much in Afghanistan that she adopted three different starving strays, animals caught in the crossfire there.

Her dogs actually shared a barbecue with the then President of Afghanistan, and an Army vet said she saved the dogs lives, and   ultimately managed to ship all three of them back to the United States for adoption when she decided her mission was too dangerous for them to stay with her.

The Taliban kills  the dogs of Americans there, also.

Joanne was in Afghanistan for four years, she returned to the United States in 2014 and was  re-united with a black Lab named Ginger who had been living with her mother while she was away. Last year, Ginger died of cancer and Joanne went to a well-funded local animal rescue group to adopt another dog.

She was asked for three references. First, she was told the shelter required references from two different vets and two different people who were not family members. She was asked to submit proof of financial resources and solvency – they wished to see bank statements and tax returns.

She also had to show proof of employment and certify that she was healthy and able to exercise dogs.

Joanne saw on the group’s website that Sandy, a four year old female Lab whose owners had moved away, was available for adoption. She sent the group all of the forms and references they requested.

She thought their demands were extreme, but she had a powerful feeling about Sandy so she complied.  Sandy had been injured by a car and had some orthopedic issues with a rear leg. That made Joanne want her all the more, she saw so many dogs in Afghanistan with similar injuries. The rescue group said they first had to make an on-site inspection before they would even consider the application for Sandy.

Two people from the shelter came to her house – she had a free-standing single family home with a fenced-in yard on a quiet street in a suburb of Charlotte, Joanne is now married with a young daughter.

The shelter workers went through her house room-by-room and carefully inspected each of the three orthopedic beds she had purchased for Ginger, who had lived to be 15. She said they were professional and somewhat cold, more like police detectives than animal people.

They also inspected the very expensive organic food that Joanne fed her dogs. She had purchased some for Sandy and wanted them to see it. It grated on her, her mother said, to have to try to prove her worth to the shelter workers in such detail, but she had always gone over the top for her dogs, and she was committed to adopting Sandy, who had sweet and soulful brown eyes.

One of the rescue workers walked the length of the white picket-fence in Joanne’s back yard.
“After careful inspection,” said her mother, who was present, “the rescue people said that two slates on the fence looked loose. They could not let her adopt a dog with a back yard like that, they told her.”

Joanne was stunned. Her mother said she told the rescue workers she didn’t know the slats were loose, there had been no dog there for more than a year. She said she would be happy to tighten the slats right there while they watched, or they could return to make sure she had done it. She said she never left her dogs in the yard if she wasn’t present.

Too bad, said the shelter workers, she didn’t quality and could not adopt Sandy or any dog from the shelter.

“I could not believe it,” her mother said, “they just kept saying she didn’t qualify. That poor lab lost the best home it could ever have had.”

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Joanne did not wish to be identified for security reasons, because of her work overseas.

She did confirm the story her mother told me. I called the shelter. They said they couldn’t discuss specific applications, but they did say that loose fence posts were on their checklist of reasons to deny adoption applications. They said the Lab named Sandy had been adopted. Perhaps it was adopted by a friend of Joanne’s, perhaps the story does end happily.

There are somewhere between ten million and 12 million animals in shelters in America awaiting adoption. In recent years it has become both more difficult and expensive (Ginger would have cost $325 plus fees to adopt) to adopt dogs and cats. People are routinely denied adoption because they work full-time, are old, are poor, or have loose fence posts (or no fences) in their yards, even if they are always walked.

Countless animals languish in crates for years because good people who would love to have them do not meet the very new and increasingly irrational and stringent standards set by our twisted idea of animal rights, were animals frequently suffer or are even killed rather than find their way into the lives of human beings who very much want them.

It would be hard to find a more deserving or worthy applicant for a dog than Joanne, who has demonstrated her love of animals, her integrity, her commitment to decency in every possible way. This is a system that is broken, and that has lost all perspective.

References from vets or friends are not guarantee of a good life for dogs, and I know many wonderful dog owners who do not have fences, but walk their dogs several times a day (like every dog owner in New York City does.)

I hear these stories all the time, so, I’m sure, does almost everyone reading this.

A New York carriage driver was denied the right to adopt a dog in Long Island because the shelter said he was an abuser of animals. A young man in Illinois was denied a dog because he had a full-time job. An elderly woman was refused a dog because she was confined to her home and couldn’t walk it several times a day. She would have loved a small lapdog to keep her company.

This is wrong. We need an animal welfare system that brings people and animals together, not one that keeps them apart or removes them from one another.

We need a wiser understanding of animals than this.