HERO DOG AND PROBLEM-FIXING PEOPLE

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1999:

Inspired by Hero, the mangy
street dog who saved 18-month-old Lexee
Manor from a rattlesnake bite in June after
surviving shooting by a sheriff’s deputy, the
Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office o n
November 4 announced that deputies will no
longer shoot strays “unless emergency
action is warranted” or unless “humane considerations
require an immediate end to suffering.”
Hero was shot under an old policy
which presumed that dogs eluding capture
might be rabid and/or a threat to livestock.

Wounded, Hero found porch space with
Renee Manor, of Sand Spring, who fed
her but already had four dogs indoors and
could not bring in another. After Hero won
her name by springing off the porch to take
the snakebite directed at Manor’s daughter
Lexee, she received emergency care from
Animal Aid of Tulsa; was adopted by Tulsa
resident Melba McFerran, and won the
September Lewyt Award for Heroic and
Compassionate Animals from the N o r t h
Shore Animal League.
Three years after Paul Berry
put the Southern Animal Foundation’s
Spay/Neuter Intervention Program
mobile van on the road in August 1996, it
has fixed more than 6,200 dogs and cats in
Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, bringing a
reported 22% decrease in the numbers of
dogs and cats killed at the Jefferson Parish
Animal Shelter.
Celebrating 10 years as executive
director of the Michigan Humane
S o c i e t y, Gary Tiscornia cites as his top
achievements raising the MHS adoption rate
50% and the neutering volume 86%. MHS
will have fixed 13,000 dogs and cats by the
end of 1999, Tiscornia told supporters in
the MHS 1999 Holiday Season newsletter.
Holding $7,000 in unclaimed
neutering deposits, the city animal control
shelter in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, dedicated
the funds to subsidize free neutering
from October 1 to December 1, or until the
money ran out.