When Wright first reached out to Hall, Hall was nervous about working with the shelter. “A place that was managing eight hundred dogs with twelve kennels and one employee?” she said. “I was afraid that I was going to be super fucking sad.” Hall lives off the grid on a dirt road in Terlingua, at the edge of Big Bend National Park, around two hundred miles south of Pecos—a place so remote that she sometimes calls it “the worst place in the world to run a dog rescue.” At the time, she was working for a public-defense association and saving dogs in her spare time. “I used to, like, 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 dogs to two rescues she’d come to know 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 instead of in kennels; there they’d be socialized and happier, and therefore more adoptable. Previously, the Presidio shelter had euthanized around eighty per cent of dogs that came in; that year, it didn’t euthanize a single healthy pet.
Hall has an understated manner that belies her ability to catch people up in the gravitational pull of her mission. Last year, she left her job in public defense, started a West Texas branch of One Tail at a Time with seed funding from the other locations, and devoted herself to dog rescue full time. Last year, thanks, in part, to funding from Best Friends, OTAT - West Texas formalized partnerships with six shelters spread across an area the size of South Carolina. Many were even worse off than the one 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, the shelter was run by the police department; Van Horn was too small for a 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 doom in shelters. But the moral accounting is not quite so clear, according to Cathy Bissell, the founder of the Bissell Pet Foundation, a nonprofit that supports shelters and rescues. For one, as municipal services, shelters have some level of public accountability, while rescues do not. “Just because it says it’s a rescue doesn’t mean it’s going to save that animal’s life, or that animal is going to be better off, because I can tell you what I’ve seen and it’s not great,” Bissell said. “We have moved so many dogs out of failed rescue operations that, for a while, I was, like, That’s all we do. People start with good intentions, they want to save lives, and then they get overwhelmed.”
Some rescues focus on finding homes for a shelter’s most adoptable dogs—“young dogs, cute dogs, small-breed dogs, different-looking dogs,” according to Hall. “But, when you go into a shelter and you pull out all their Chihuahuas and poodles and you leave them all their pit bulls and German shepherds, you’re actually hurting the shelter.” As Hall saw it, her job was to build capacity in the regional-shelter system, not just to save individual animals. OTAT - West Texas provided shelters with staff, medications, veterinary supplies, microchips, and animal-tracking software. It taught them how to list animals on the OTAT adoption portal and facilitated transportations. Within a year, all six shelters qualified as no-kill. “If you throw resources and effort at it, you can change everything quickly. You don’t have to plod along for a generation like public defense—man, I did that for twenty-five years, and I don’t even know if we ended up in a better place than we were when we started, to be honest. But to be able to go into these shelters and just change things . . .” 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 employee 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 basic but clean, and dogs pressed themselves against the metal grates at the front of the kennels, eager for attention. The former euthanasia room is now a space for medical treatment; a small fridge full of vaccines sits in the corner. Feral cats used to be immediately euthanized, because the shelter had no space for them; now there’s a dedicated cat room, where Wright joined us. “We flew eleven cats last week,” she said.
