rescue, we think about abandoned pets looking for a new home.

But today's guest chronicles the work of one woman in Los Angeles who challenges us all to understand that animal and human suffering are connected.

She's Carol Mithers, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright rousing music) (bright rousing music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller also at Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Carol Mithers, a writer whose new book is "Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America's Forgotten People and Pets."

She joins us today from Los Angeles, California.

Carol, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you.

It's great to be here.

- So your book, "Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America's Forgotten People and Pets" has received wide critical acclaim.

What drew you to writing about rescue animals and their owners?

- Kind of circumstance.

I had gotten intrigued with the idea of the existence of rescue hoarding, which I read about in the local paper, and I was looking for people who had experience with that and a friend introduced me to Lori.

And suddenly I met this person who had this other story and I was amazed by it.

And the more I talked to her, the more complicated and deep it got.

And so I wrote the story on hoarding, but meanwhile, I started talking to Lori.

I had originally thought she was gonna have a pretty simple rescue story, which was this amazing person who worked in downtown LA dealing with unhoused people and their pets.

But as I spent time talking to her, I realized the story was much larger than that and so I kind of fell down a rabbit hole.

- Well, we're gonna get to that bigger story in just a minute but let's talk a little bit first about the animal rescue movement and its genesis, because it wasn't always that there were these armies of people out there thinking about the welfare of animals.

- Yes and for a long time, there weren't those people.

I mean, back in the '70s, not that long ago, there were something like 24 million dogs and cats being put down in the United States every year because they were unwanted, they had no homes.

So in the late '80s and into the '90s, there was an effort began to address that huge sea of death and help domestic pets and try to find a way to change this.

And a lot of spay and neuter, which became popular in the late '70s, helped, but by '96, '97, the movement that we now sort of call "no kill" had really taken hold and asked us to think about why so many eminently adoptable animals were dying in the shelters and what could be done to save them.

- So can you elaborate for people who may not have animals or pets understand what was no kill and what is a no kill shelter?

- Well, that's actually a complicated question.

But no kill is the notion, and this definition has been the subject of some debate, but as easily as I can say it, no kill means that a shelter has a live release of about 90% of the animals that come into it.

Some animals that go into a public shelter are gonna die.

They're gonna be vicious.

They're going to be ill.

They're not really adoptable.

But if 90% of the animals that are taken in in a public intake shelter, which means a shelter that has to take anybody that comes along, that calls it no kill.

And the idea is basically you do everything you can.

If those animals come in, you do everything you can to find them new homes.

You make yourself accessible to the public, you advertise the animals, you clean them up, you get them ready to go to new homes.

- So what about people living in poverty then and now in terms of their animals and their pets?

They stand in stark contrast to people, affluent people, people of means who have a different attitude regarding their animals and we're gonna get into that too.

But one of the key context, one of the key issues you address is that inequity, the poverty inequity.

And your book is based in LA but it's a national situation too.

Anyway, I'm going on and on.

Maybe you can, if you remember, and answer the question, thank you.

- The primary inequity is that shelters in neighborhoods that are struggling economically tend to have more intake than those in more affluent areas.

And animals that belong to people who are in poverty tend to be less often spayed and neutered than those in more affluent areas.

And animals that belong to people in poverty tend to be surrendered to shelters, actively surrendered more often.

And the question is, why is that so and what be done to change that?

I mean, there's kind of two sides to this question, which is it's really good to talk about how you get animals out of the shelter once they're there.

That's really important.

But it's also important, and this is what I think Lori started to address when other people did not, which was how do you stop them from going into the shelter in the first place and how does poverty connect to that effort?

- So why do people living in poverty surrender their animals?

I'm guessing it's not because they want to get rid of them.

There must be other factors as well.

- Right.

Let's be clear that not everybody living in poverty is a wonderful person who's a great pet owner.

I mean, there are jerks in every socioeconomic class.

But there are a whole lot of factors, mostly about economics that make it more difficult to hold onto a pet.

One of them is housing.

And a lot of landlords, people in poverty tend not to be homeowners, they're usually renters.

And a lot of of landlords, including some subsidized housing landlords, do not accept pets.

And so if you are a person who can only afford a certain amount of rent and you're looking for a place, there's not a lot of low income housing to start with, and you have a pet, which means another strike against you.

And if you have a chance to put your family somewhere and the way to do that is to give up the pet, you might be doing that.

There's also fees often that are required before you can reclaim an animal if it gets out.

Animals get out all the time.

Somebody leaves a gate open, a fence is no good.

When the animal is picked up by animal control, there's a reclamation fee.

If you can't pay it, you don't get your pet.

And then there's the cost of vet care, which we can go into and talk about a lot because I think everyone in this country, including those with money, are aware that vet prices have gone through the roof.

Recently in the last 10 years, they've climbed 60% more than the cost of human healthcare, which is not a bargain either.

There's been a huge amount of corporate consolidation and private equity takeover of the veterinary industry.

Prices are up.

So if you are a low income person, a low wage worker, and you suddenly have an animal that needs a big operation, it ate a sock, it broke its leg, it tore its cruciate ligament, it's thousands of dollars.

And the question is, what do you do then?

- So enter the dog lady Lori Weise.

You mentioned her previously, but she sees the same phenomena that you're describing here and she imagines a different course, a different avenue.

Talk to us about Lori.

- Lori fell into this too.

Lori loved animals and dreamed for a while as a child of being a veterinarian.

But she fell into it.

She was working Downtown.

It was a new job.

And Downtown back in the mid '90s was a pretty gritty place.

And she saw animals, stray animals all around her on the streets.

And she and a coworker who was another dog lover decided they were going to try to help these animals.

They feed them, sometimes they took them in and took them to the vet and paid out of their own pockets to get them sterilized because they saw the animals breeding and raising puppies in really terrible circumstances.

After a time, they realized and learned that these animals were not actually strays, they belonged to some of the unhoused people living around them.

And through Lori's friendship with a man who lived in an alley near where she worked, she met some of these people and began to help them get the care for their animals that they were not able to provide for themselves.

She paid for vet care, she persuaded everyone she could to sterilize their animals, she helped place puppies.

And so the thinking she finally had was, "Why not help these people, rather than criticize them for being lousy pet owners, help them?"

They couldn't take care of themselves, help them take care of their pets.

And from there, it grew to helping people who are not unhoused, but the merely poor.

And she said there was a widespread thinking that people who were poor would not sterilize their dogs, they would not take care of them, they didn't care.

And the answer was if you made it possible, if you understood the circumstances in which they lived, IE there was no money, maybe there was no car to get to a vet, of course they would do that.

She would have a community clinic.

She would sponsor mass spay and neuter days and people were thrilled to get the help.

- Carol, Wayne asked the question earlier about the numbers of dogs that die and the socioeconomic disparities.

I wanna approach that question maybe a little bit differently.

- [Carol] Okay.

- What do people, whether you're affluent or you're living on the street, what do you gain by having a pet?

- Oh God, unconditional love.

I don't know if you have dogs or cats, but they love you, they need you.

And I think that as wonderful as it is for those of us who live in homes and come home from being gone for five minutes and see something leaping off the ground, all four paws.

But if you are homeless, there are a lot of people that won't talk to you.

You may be alone a lot of the time.

You have a very formless life.

You don't have a job to go to.

You don't have places you need to be.

They impose structure.

You have somebody to answer to.

You have somebody who needs to be fed, needs to be walked, who is thrilled to see you, who is your companion when you're living, maybe alone in a tent.

There's a sociologist named Leslie Irvine wrote I think the first book about unhoused people and their pets.

And it was pretty clear that the pet was the most important being in this person's life.

It can be a really powerful connection.

Again, not everybody is like that, there are some people on the street who have addictions, who have mental illness who can't be that caring pet owner.

But for those who love their pets, my God, it's probably twice as important as for you and me.

- So what you say is so totally true.

And you mentioned coming home and your dog jumps up and is happy to see you.

And so I'm gonna give a shout out to our loving dog, Sophie.

So when Sophie watches this, she'll know we're talking about her.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, my family lost our dog only a month ago so it's very- - I'm so sorry.

- Oh, I'm sorry.

And that's very difficult, you know, as any pet owner who has lost a dog can certainly relate to.

So I want to turn to a little bit of a different topic here.

During Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Ida three years ago, you've observed that some people were more focused on rescuing animals in the wake of these hurricanes than in helping people.

Can you elaborate on that?

- It was actually pretty shocking to me when I found out this.

I remember all of the terrible things that happened during Katrina and the people who had ended up being sort of marooned in Astrodome.

But during Katrina, there were people who were taken from their homes, which was by far mostly New Orleans' poor people.

I mean, the people with money had cars and could evacuate and could take their animals with them.

The people who got left behind, who got marooned, who had to be rescued, were mostly told to leave their animals behind.

The Astrodome wouldn't take them, the Coast Guard wouldn't take them.

So people felt really upset and then as pictures of these marooned, and in some cases, drowning and starving animals filtered through the rest of the country, rescuers got really agitated and a whole lot of rescue people descended on New Orleans and they did great work.

They went out in boats, they smashed through attics and they pulled out dogs and cats.

But those dogs and cats ended up getting taken out of New Orleans while the people were left behind.

And there were, first of all, not many of them were rescued.

It was a feel good story that all of these animals had been saved, when in fact, it was only a small percentage of animals that were saved.

Many animals died during Katrina and so many were left behind that.

In 2006, George Bush signed a bill to require FEMA and emergency efforts to include animals in the future, which they are now.

But the animals that were taken out, often left on air conditioned buses, on planes, they were taken to more affluent homes in other states.

And later when some New Orleans people tried to get their animals back, these more affluent rescuers did not wanna give them back.

- So we are taping this in early October and it may be too soon to even get an assessment on that, but Hurricane Helene devastated Florida and then a lot of inland areas in the aftermath as well.

Do you have any sense of, has the same thing taken place there or is it really too early to- - I think it's too early and I think things did change after Katrina 'cause I remember when Hurricane Harvey hit and flooded, Houston was flooded, there were pictures of people evacuating carrying their animals.

And so there's been a larger sense that you should not require people to give up their animals and animals need to be included.

- So Carol, coming back to Lori Weise, the impact of her work in Los Angeles, how far does it extend and what model does it provide for other rescue movements across the country?

- She's decided to stay in a very distinct area.

She took on South LA, which is a historically minority redlined, ignored, underserved area.

And she's made herself a resource in that area.

Has she fixed everything?

No.

LA right now has got shelters jammed with pets just like everywhere else does right now, for a whole lot of different reasons.

It's really horrible.

But she's known now as a resource.

When she has her community clinics, they are filled with people.

They're lining up out the door.

She's now serving cats as well in a community cat clinic.

She just bought a mobile veterinary van and is setting up a veterinary hospital in the small city of Maywood, which is not too far from South LA where people can come and get care.

She hired a vet.

She's always finding new ways to sort of serve the community.

Two other efforts like hers started.

There're not run by her, but there by people who learned from her in two other shelters in Los Angeles.

I can't say she's directly responsible for it, but what she did certainly did get noticed.

And at this point, there are smaller efforts to help people in poverty all through the United States.

And that's a really good thing.

We see food pantries and subsidized vet care.

Is it enough?

No, it's not enough because nothing that these individual efforts do can fix income inequality.

- So at one point in the book, animal welfare Advocate Andrew Rowan, who's had a distinguished career focused on promoting the wellbeing of people and animals, is quoted as saying, "The oppression of people becomes the oppression of animals."

Can you elaborate on that?

What was he saying there?

- It was Andrew Rowan and Arnold Arluke, who's a professor who's written a lot about animals.

And it means that if you are in a area that is low income, you're probably gonna have certain things, or not have certain things, like in South LA there's no trees were planted.

It's hotter than the more affluent west side.

There were no grocery stores, no vets, no doctors, not a lot of jobs.

And that's the same thing is true of pets.

If there's no grocery stores, the chances of a Petco or someplace selling pet food is not there either.

There's no veterinarians.

So that means that people who need help with their pets have to get on a bus or borrow a car or take time off work.

So all of the services that don't get given to people don't get given to pets.

- As I'm thinking about this, it seems to me that we're talking about social justice, but it's not just about social justice for human beings, it's also about social justice for our animal companions as well.

Am I overthinking that?

- No, I think it's for animal companions and I think in a larger sense, it's for animal companions as part of our families.

Because if you love your pet, most surveys show that most Americans call their pets part of their families.

So if you think of your pet as part of your family and your pet is suffering, that hurts you as a person too.

If you have to give up that pet because you can't afford to treat it, it's horrible.

If you are a parent and you have children who love that pet and you already feel like a little bit of a failure because you don't have the money to give your children what you want to, and then you lose their pet as well, you're causing them pain.

So it's systemic.

It's systemic grief.

It's not just people, not just pets, but all of us together.

- So, so far we have correctly focused on Los Angeles and the efforts there, but keeping in mind that we're a national TV show, coast to coast and everywhere in between, what can individuals watching this now do to help this movement for both people and pets?

- Well, they can look into whatever's in their community that is helping people and pets.

And that's maybe looking for some code words if you're Googling or looking around, shelter intervention, pet food pantries, groups that subsidize veterinary care or make it possible for people to afford veterinary care.

The issue is, again, pet retention is another good word.

It's not efforts to help pets in the shelter, although those are worthy, I wouldn't say they're not and it's not adoption, it's community.

It's community groups.

And you know, you can do something really small, which is if you know someone who is struggling to pay for a pet, you can pay for it.

If you are at the vet and you ask if somebody coming in that doesn't have money to pay the bill, contribute toward the bill.

Even little individual efforts are helpful.

- So we just have a couple minutes left here.

I wanted to get into a little bit more of your very distinguished work.

Tell us about "Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War," which you co-wrote with Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee.

- Gbowee.

Yes.

- Gbowee.

- She is an amazing human being, a Liberian peace activist who was a subject of a wonderful documentary called "Pray the Devil Back to Hell."

And she led a group of women in Liberia during the country's second of several brutal civil wars to pressure warlords into making a peace agreement to stop the fighting.

And she is a force of nature and a great speaker, and continues, now, our book was written in 2011, so a long time ago.

And she's still working out there making speeches and talking to groups and trying to bring peace to the world through the power of women.

- Carol, the breadth of the things that you write about is really sort of remarkable.

How do you find this diverse array of topics?

- Well, Leymah came to me through a mutual friend.

That was luck.

And Lori, I was introduced to Lori by a junior high school friend who is a dog rescuer.

So you gotta maintain your friendships with people 'cause you never know what worlds they're gonna lead you into.

- That's absolutely remarkable.

Are you working on anything now?

- I'm just trying to get this book read and then desperately thinking at three in the morning, "What am I gonna do now?"

- Spoken like an actual writer, I could relate to it.

- Well, we thank you for spend- - You'd think you would feel good, but that lasts for about five minutes and then you're- - You get five minutes out of it?

God bless you.

- Carol, we thank you for spending some of that time with us today and congratulations.

"Rethinking Rescue," it's a great read.

That is all the time we have this week but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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