When Wright first approached Hall, Hall was nervous about working with the shelter. “A place that housed eight hundred dogs with twelve kennels and one employee?” she said. “I was afraid I would be sad as hell.” Hall lives off the grid on a dirt road in Terlingua, on the edge of Big Bend National Park, about two hundred miles south of Pecos—a place so remote that she sometimes calls it “the worst place in the world to rescue a dog.” At the time, she worked for a public defense association and rescued dogs in her spare time. “I used to throw twenty-five dogs in my car and drive them to Colorado,” she said. In 2019, Hall began working with a shelter in Presidio, Texas, which is just across the border from Mexico. Hall sent the dogs to two rescue centers she had become familiar with 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 rather than in kennels; there they will be socialized and happier, which means they will be easier to accept. Previously, the Presidio shelter euthanized about eighty percent of its incoming dogs; that year it did not euthanize a single healthy pet.
Hall has a reserved demeanor that belies her ability to trap people in the gravitational pull of her mission. Last year, she left her job in public service, opened a West Texas chapter of One Tail at a Time with seed funding from elsewhere, and devoted herself full-time to dog rescue. Last year, thanks in part to funding from Best Friends, YOU ACCEPT — West Texas has officially partnered with six shelters spread across an area the size of South Carolina. Many lived even worse than 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, police departments operated the shelter; Van Horn was too small for the 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 death in shelters. But the moral message is less clear, according to Katie Bissell, founder of the Bissell Pet Foundation, a nonprofit that supports shelters and rescues. Firstly, shelters, as municipal services, bear a certain responsibility to society, but rescue services do not. “Just because it says it's a rescue doesn't mean it's going to save that animal's life or that that animal is going to be better off because I can tell you what I saw and it's not good,” Bissell said. “We've rescued so many dogs from failed rescues that for a while I thought, 'That's all we do.' People start out with good intentions, they want to save lives, and then they get overwhelmed.”
Some rescues focus on finding homes for the most adoptable dogs — “young dogs, cute dogs, small breed dogs, dogs of varying looks,” Hall said. “But when you go into a shelter and take out all their Chihuahuas and poodles and leave them with all the pit bulls and German shepherds, you're actually hurting the shelter.” Hall said her job was about building the capacity of the regional shelter system, not just rescuing individual animals. YOU ACCEPT – West Texas provided shelters with staff, medications, veterinary supplies, microchips and animal tracking software. He taught them to make lists of animals on YOU ACCEPT adoption portal and facilitated transportation. Within a year, all six shelters were considered safe. “If you put the resources and effort into it, you can turn things around quickly. You don't have to plod along for a generation like public defense – man, I've been doing this for twenty-five years, and I don't even know if we're in a better place than when we started, to be honest. But to be able to go into these shelters and just make a difference…” 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 worker 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 simple but clean, and the dogs pressed against the metal bars in front of the kennels, eager for attention. The former euthanasia room is now a treatment space; There is a small refrigerator full of vaccines in the corner. Feral cats used to be immediately euthanized because there was no room for them in the shelter; there is now a special room for cats, where Wright joined us. “We brought in eleven cats last week,” she said.
