Should you adopt a dog from Mexico?
In which Jill considers the price of a sad story.
On a recent Monday afternoon, I found myself at Urgent Care, the cause of which was a dog bite (more on that later). The doctor who was treating me asked where I’d incurred the bite. “At the shelter,” I replied through clenched teeth.
“At least you’re not one of those people who brings dogs here from Asia,” the doctor remarked, blithely irrigating a puncture wound. “We’d be prepping you for rabies treatment.”
Stories of importing dogs from other countries abound on the internet. Heart-wrenching videos set to music (cue the string section) show nighttime footage of humans furtively loading crates of bedraggled dogs into airplane cargo holds.
The “rags to riches” video is a familiar trope, and one that we rescues use liberally to show how sad homeless dogs can become happy family members. And what does it matter where a dog comes from, anyway? After all, suffering knows no borders.
The argument, of course, is: With our local shelters overflowing with animals and few adopters showing up for them, why bring more dogs into what’s essentially a saturated market?
I thought about this the other day when reading an email from a shelter supervisor. Defending the decision to euthanize a dog for space, the supervisor blamed rescues for importing dogs. “Some of these rescue organizations are bringing animals from other countries and cities instead of helping the local dogs,” he wrote.
This ups the ante. If an L.A. shelter manager is verbalizing it, chances are it’s been a topic of discussion up and down the chain of command. And whether or not there’s a basis for blaming imported dogs for an increase in local euthanasia, it’s a convenient pretext to continue killing. And it raises questions about the rescues bringing dogs in from afar.
Take dogs from Mexico. Buses of them enter the U.S. weekly, headed for the Pacific Northwest to satisfy the demand for smaller dogs that aren’t as plentiful in local shelters. Rescues transporting these dogs cite the need for breed diversity, arguing that the Shepherd-Pit-Husky trinity so prevalent in California’s animal shelters will never sate a constituency hungry for cuddly little furballs.
The email fresh in my mind, I called my friend Meredith Nolan. Meredith is the founder of Portland-based Agave Dogs Rescue, whose original mission was to save dogs exclusively from Mexico. Agave Dogs has pivoted in recent years, for some very good reasons.
“When we started rescuing dogs from Mexico, we saw some pretty horrific cases,” Meredith tells me. “We were seeing dogs chopped up by machetes, eyeballs popping out of heads from blunt force trauma, some of the most severe cases of mange and starvation—really terrifying stories. We saved 88 dogs that first year. But through that experience, we learned some hard lessons about diseases and behaviors that free-roaming street dogs in Mexico can bring with them to the U.S.”
Meredith cites severe cases of distemper and other diseases, including TVT (Transmissible Venereal Tumor), a sexually transmitted cancer that is rare here, but common among Mexican street dog populations. “We’ve rescued dogs who have turned out to have TVT,” she says. “It requires a number of expensive chemotherapy sessions, otherwise it can spread to other dogs and can be fatal.”
Every individual animal entering the U.S. requires a health certificate, proof of vaccination, and a USDA permit. Rescues and private citizens importing dogs from other countries can be unaware of these requirements, or even knowingly flout them. One southern California rescue is notorious for loading dogs from China onto private planes with little to no documentation.
Then there are the behavior concerns. “The very behaviors that help a street dog survive—including resource guarding, food possessiveness, and flightiness—can often make a dog challenging to place in American households,” Meredith says. “Sad story or not, adopters can struggle.”
And that brings me back to my bite. I was standing in the play yard of a local shelter, reviewing notes on a few long-term stay dogs we’d planned to video. Out of nowhere, a dog latched onto my leg. The dog was on a leash, being held by a trainer, and there was absolutely no warning or provocation. The dog had been in the shelter system for over a year. He had no outlet for his trauma. In that pocket of time between the bite and the pain, I felt the dog was trying to tell me that he was done.
Are dogs in crowded local shelters inherently better than dogs from other countries? No. I still believe that suffering has no borders. But the dogs languishing in L.A. shelters all have sad stories. They just have nobody to tell them.
