'Despair solves nothing': How pilots in tiny planes are saving dogs from death
Petra Janney nimbly climbs in and around her tiny 1973 Cherokee Piper airplane, preparing the crates inside to hold 17 dogs. She's confident and clearly in control — she's flown dozens of flights like these to save dogs from being killed in overcrowded shelters, but she has to move fast.
It's 9 a.m. in late July at Meadows Field airport in Bakersfield, and already it's pushing 90 degrees. The heat isn't good for her canine cargo, and it will probably be hotter still when she flies back to Whiteman Airport in Pacoima to turn the dogs over to Laura Labelle, co-founder of the Labelle Foundation rescue in Los Angeles, to provide them medical care and nurturing foster homes until they can be adopted.
She's in Bakersfield because California has a huge unwanted pet crisis, and Bakersfield feels like the epicenter. Other states have lots of unwanted pets too, especially Florida and Texas, but California has the most dogs and cats coming into shelters — more than 162,000 a year to date — and the highest "non-live outcomes" in the nation, according to the national database Shelter Animals Count.
That's the nice way of saying that around 19% of those animals — more than 30,000 so far this year — died in custody in California, some from illness or injury or despair but most is a case in point. This year, it's been euthanizing 200-plus dogs a month, according to Director Matthew Buck, just to make room for the 150 new dogs coming in every week.
