On the southern tail of the Appalachian Mountains, many people are attached to multiple pets but cannot afford to sterilize or vaccinate them.
SELMER, Tenn. — Phillip Swetman is an accidental owner of 13 dogs. Most, Mr. Swetman said, came from “drive-bys.”
“They hear a dog bark and they throw theirs in the ditch,” he said. “Then for us, it’s either let them starve or get hit by a car, or take them in.”
Midnight dumping of unwanted dogs is common here on the southern tail of the Appalachian Mountains, where large numbers of poor people are attached to multiple pets but cannot afford to sterilize or vaccinate them, and where impoverished county governments do not maintain animal shelters, require licensing or enforce requirements for rabies shots.
The combination of pets and poverty, veterinary experts say, brings similar results to many rural areas: unhealthy conditions for oversized animal populations, desperate efforts by often-overwhelmed individuals to help and a lurking threat to human health.
Dr. Bob Sumrall, a veterinarian in nearby Henderson, in Chester County, estimated that more than 75 percent of the thousands of dogs in the county alone have not had rabies shots. “This poses a definite health risk,” he said.
Excess animals, dropped on dark roads that wind through oak and pine forests and cornfields here, tend to end up in the care of people with bigger hearts than bank accounts. People like Mr. Swetman and his wife, Alicia, who have a hard enough time paying their own mortgage and gasoline bills on what Mr. Swetman earns as a machinist at a bathtub factory but have ended up with a large menagerie nonetheless, mostly because of abandoned animals and unplanned births.
The Swetmans live on a back-country road near Finger. They keep two dogs in their cluttered concrete-block house, two tethered to trees and the rest in three wire pens. They somehow eke out $26 a week to buy two 50-pound sacks of dog food.
“I’d do without food myself before they do,” Ms. Swetman said. But they say with some despair that veterinary care, which can run $100 a year per animal for vaccines and $100 or more for spaying or neutering, is far beyond their reach.
“A lot of poor people here end up with lots of dogs and they get a feeling of hopelessness, they don’t know what to do,” said Sherrye McKinney, who works for pet-rescue groups in the region.
So the Swetmans were grateful to get an appointment at a temporary free clinic for their latest two puppies, even if there were no slots left in the oversubscribed five-day program for their eight older unspayed females.
The clinic was set up in Selmer’s National Guard armory in mid-June by Rural Area Veterinary Services, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that sends volunteer veterinarians and students to Appalachia, Indian reservations and other areas to sterilize and treat pets whose owners live in poverty.
“With every animal we prevent from having a litter, we’re making a difference,” said Tammy Rouse, Appalachian coordinator for the volunteer service. Inside the hall, three veterinarians and 28 veterinary students spent 15-hour days sterilizing up to 50 dogs and cats a day and provided vaccinations, deworming and other treatments.
But the volunteer service faces a Sisyphean task, Ms. Rouse said.
“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing artery,” she said. “Spay-neuter has to go hand in hand with education and legislation.”
Tina Churchwell, head of the humane society in McNairy County, where Finger and Selmer are situated, calls 12 dogs her own and has set up a makeshift shelter at her home, kennels holding 22 other dogs she hopes might be adopted. The society is searching for money to build a proper shelter on land the county has offered, but community support is lacking, Ms. Churchwell said.
Lacking money for the normal accoutrements of pet care, some people improvise. James Cotner, 64, and his wife live on $9,000 a year in a wood-heated, tin-roofed house. Fifteen cats wander the grounds and the Cotners have three dogs, the latest taken in after being found dumped on the road. “I tried to give her away but nobody wanted a big dog because they eat too much,” Mr. Cotner said
Buying feed at Wal-Mart has stretched their budget, he said, and he was grateful for the free clinic, which sterilized the dogs and provided rabies shots. “I’ve been afraid they’d bite somebody and I’d get sued,” he said.
To fight fleas and ticks, he has used a folk remedy. A tobacco chewer, he saves the juice and sprays it on the lawn.
Janet Stanford Brown, 28, took two cats to the armory for spaying and one of the four dogs her family now keeps. The brown mixed-breed, Punkin, had an infected wound on her shoulder, probably a bite, Ms. Brown feared, from a young pit bull they had recently taken in.
“I’d take her to the vet if we had the money,” Ms. Brown said as Dr. Lydia Love, chief veterinarian at the free clinic, examined the nasty wound and made arrangements for treatment. “Punkin is my son’s dog and if it came to that, I’d borrow the money to get her cared for.”
Her husband, an apprentice electrician, does not earn high wages. Their animals feed on table scraps and hunt for food, dragging in rabbits and other creatures.
Each evening of the clinic, as the staff finished long hours of surgery and hands-on comforting of animals groggily recovering from anesthesia, owners, many pacing with the anxiety of relatives in a human hospital, waited to pick up their pets.
Alicia Swetman looked especially anguished because she learned that one of her puppies, the one with one blue eye and one brown eye, had a health problem that made surgery too dangerous. To Ms. Swetman’s relief, as the puppies were brought out, their tails wagging furiously at the reunion, Dr. Love said it was probably a curable worm infection.
“I’d happily give these two away to a good home, where they’d be loved,” Ms. Swetman said, not entirely convincingly, as she hugged the afflicted puppy.