I had the opportunity recently to ride along with an individual participating in a transportation of multiple rescue dogs from kill shelters to no-kill shelters across the country. This was done by average people living in the areas between where the dogs are rescued from and where they are going, with people opting to drive small twenty to thirty mile legs of the journey before handing their grateful canine companion off to another person for the next leg of the journey. This is done, so I am told, to make it more accessible for regular people to get involved to help in the transport.

I met with the person whom I would be riding within the late morning and drove with them to a large parking lot in which we were to pick up the dogs. While I had been given a bit of information on what to expect, said information primarily consisted of being told how the organization works and how widely experiences can vary from one instance to the next. This is to say, I was not fully prepared for the scale of which I came to realize these transports took place on.

I would have to estimate that there were at least twenty cars present, each transporting one or two dogs a piece depending on the size of the canine passengers themselves. Moreover, the other drivers grumbled amongst themselves at how small the turnout on that one occasion actually was. I was also struck almost immediately by how calm and relaxed all of the dogs were. Sure, some were excited by leaving a sometimes cramped car and immediately being surrounded by a bunch of new smells and people, but there was no animosity between any of the dogs. No barking at one another, no lunging and most importantly given their circumstance, no attempts to avoid a dog or human interaction. Considering that all of these dogs had only recently been taken out of various shelters and likely any number of different environments prior to that, all of these behaviors would have been completely justified and forgivable, yet all of the dogs were the very image of docile and cooperative as far as I saw.

After meeting the two puppy siblings that we were transporting (named Peanut Butter and Jelly), and getting them both situated in the car after a short walk to allow them both to drink some water and relieve themselves, I remarked on how calm all of the dogs were to my human travel companion.

“I think they know that we are doing something to help them,” was her response.

She went on to recount to me a story she had heard on her first trip through the shelter transport which had happened sometime earlier. A man was given a dog large enough that it could comfortably sit in the front seat with him for the duration of the trip. The entire way from where the man picked the dog up to where he was to be handed off to someone else on the way to its destination, the dog sat with its paw on the man’s leg and would often stare up at him for long periods of time as if it was fully aware of what this man was doing for it. When the man did get to his meeting point with the person who would be taking the dog on the next stretch of its journey, he knelt down to say goodbye and his furry travel companion proceeded to put a paw on either of the man’s shoulders, as if to hug him, to thank him for his part in getting it to a better place. The person whom I was riding with said it was stories like that, and the overall feeling that she was making some difference in the lives of the dogs she helped, that made her come back to these shelter transports whenever she could find the time.

Feeling that they are making a difference in the lives of dogs was exactly the kind of sentiment that drives Leslie Hael, the person responsible for pulling dogs from kill shelters and finds alternative rescues and no-kill shelters across the Upper Midwest. As of the time of this article she does this primarily on her own with only the aid of one other person to coordinate drivers for the dogs and, of course, the drivers themselves to actually make the trips to relocate the dogs.

For my part, just being able to see a small portion of the effort was touching both because I got to be part of a bunch of dogs being given a chance for a better life as well as because I had an opportunity to see the dedication of all of the people that chose to commit a decent chunk of their Saturday to making that better life possible for them.