If you doubt the ability of municipal architecture to stir souls, walk with Judy Ladebauche through the new Metro Animal Services building on Harding Place. At $3 million, it costs roughly the same as the local tax breaks Gaylord Entertainment gets annually from Metro. At 20,700 square feet, it is a third the size of the Green Hills Kroger, to say nothing of the current or proposed convention centers. Still, to Ladebauche, who will run it, and to the people on her staff, it is the New Jerusalem.

“This is the cat feature room,” she says, pointing to a round room with a floor-to-ceiling circular staircase cats can lounge on while potential adopters look them over. She beams at it because in the facility it replaces—the Bordeaux shelter that has served the city for 30 regrettable years—there was a time when cats were stacked in cages in rooms the size of closets.

There is a “dog get-acquainted room” where people wanting to adopt can sit quietly with the dog without a lot of noise or distractions. There are spacious kennels with stainless steel cages, dog and puppy feature rooms, windows for natural light, and floors designed for easier cleaning. There are 11 areas served by seven distinct air exchange systems, aimed at keeping down the spread of diseases that any new dog or cat could bring in the door. It is a triumph of form and function born of hard-learned lessons. Every pen, every office, every wall, every window replaces something substandard, something that carried the twin burdens of age and neglect, and made an already difficult job that much tougher.

Ladebauche, hired as director of Animal Services in June 1999, can be tough or matronly. She is both a knowledgeable, experienced professional and a steel-willed political animal. She picked up a love of animals from her mother, and a knowledge of the turf wars and pissing contests that can erupt on the human end of this business during her days with Williamson County Animal Control. In a stint that won her both friends and foes, she helped turn the Williamson program from a neglected department housed in a trailer to one of the best in the country. Every step she takes through the new shelter, set to open shortly, is infused with the hope that the citizens of Nashville—people who often avoided the Bordeaux facility if they knew it existed at all—will embrace it, will call about strays, or turn them in rather than turning them loose on the roadside. Most importantly, she hopes they will come here to adopt healthy, spayed, or neutered dogs and cats, and that as a city we might slow the stream of animal suffering and need that flows through it.

If ever a new facility could be said to involve literal blood, sweat, and tears, it is this one. The building it replaces was notorious for housing the nation’s worst animal control program. It made headlines over and over for the filth, neglect, and disease it housed, and it often reduced the average and the famous, elected officials and citizens who’d lost pets, to tears of helplessness or outrage. It spawned activists and volunteer groups who demonstrated, attended meetings, and kept public and private pressure on Metro officials and on the Health Department, which is charged with overseeing animal control, until both were dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into a new day.

There is, at the moment, optimism—some of it quite cautious—that the very real strides of the recent past will continue, that the city is indeed dedicating itself to modern animal control services, and to doing for abandoned, neglected, and abused animals and the people who care for them what it has done for those who market and watch sports or country music. “The good news is that it’s light-years from where it was,” says Laura Turner, an animal advocate who was a longtime critic of Nashville’s efforts. “Things have changed and you can trust it. That’s the message I’d love to see the community start embracing.”

Metro Council member Janis Sontany, who fought a lonely battle for years simply trying to get the rest of the Council to see the problem, says, “I think the program is on the right track. Judy is definitely someone who cares, who knows how to work within the system to get things done, and [Metro officials] seem very committed to making this program work. I feel more comfortable each time I talk with them that the program is definitely headed in the right direction.”

Even the man who co-authored the notorious and scathing 1998 report that blasted the facility is on board. John Mays, of the National Animal Control Association (NACA), a nonprofit professional group based in Kansas City, Mo., says, “I can’t recall the last time we’ve had a complaint about Nashville at our office. The things I hear have been very positive.”

There have indeed been heartening changes. Adoptions, which were negligible in number just a few years ago, have reached more than a hundred a month. Staff members are excited about the program and the new facility—three paid their own ways to a recent national conference on the physical and psychological well-being of sheltered animals—and the department’s payroll is about to jump from 17 to 28.

The optimism among observers and critics, though, is still very cautious. First, there is the nature of the business. The facility exists because too many pets are expendable; Nashvillians dump them by the tens of thousands every year. Some are abandoned to the streets or dropped off on rural roads. Over the long haul, those face almost certain death from disease, animal attacks, automobile accidents, poisoning, or starvation. Those brought to the Metro shelter have better odds—currently a one-in-four chance of adoption and a better life. (The national average is about one in seven.) The rest are euthanized.

Then there is the department’s history. For decades, the Metro Animal Control facility on County Hospital Road had been a nightmare of design problems, shortsightedness, neglect, and inefficiency, which wouldn’t matter so much if it warehoused old vehicles. What it housed, though, were animals able to feel heat, cold, pain, and emotion. This was a corner of government overlooked by officials and the public for decades, and its legacy leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of many of those wishing it well today. They hope that after decades of horrible news stories, devastating studies, and sniping between critics and officials, the new facility will indeed symbolize a new day.

Susie Aisner regularly faces people who beat and torture animals. She busts dogfighters. She deals daily with people who keep their dogs on short leashes (it’s called “cruel confinement”) or their horses in cramped stalls for months on end, or who don’t feed or water their animals enough. A wiry, no-nonsense woman, she’s a tough courtroom presence with a growing record of convictions. And the first time she walked into the in-progress shell of the Harding Place facility, she was moved to tears. Aisner reserves her soft spot for the animals, and she is convinced this building means better days for them.

Aisner, hired last November after a highly successful stint in Alabama, is the city’s first on-staff cruelty investigator—the Nashville Humane Association used to handle such cases. She and her courtroom success (17 guilty verdicts on 29 counts of cruelty to animals and one count of intentional killing of an animal) are both highly welcome commodities. “I can’t say enough wonderful things about having a professional cruelty investigator who is intelligent and articulate,” Turner says.

Ladebauche is no less impressed. “We needed a dynamo,” she says, “and Susie is one. The most important thing about this job is to get the right people around you, and she’s the right people.”

Much of Aisner’s job deals with lack of compassion and common sense—educating people about “passive cruelties” like inadequate food, water that’s been kicked over or frozen, lack of shade on a hot day. “Some people welcome my concern and some people don’t,” she says. There was, for example, the young man whose dehydrated rottweilers were tied to trees, with a piece of scrap metal as their only shelter. She gave him a copy of the state and Metro animal codes, and he laughed at her. “He refused to be educated,” she says, “and we took him to court.”

The rest of the job deals with active cruelty, from dogfighting to plain torture. A store clerk in Rivergate badly beats a possum with a golf club savagely enough to break its bones, then tosses it alive onto a sidewalk outside the store. Men intimidate their wives or children by threatening and abusing their pets. The trainers of fighting dogs use smaller animals for “practice.” The losers of such fights are left in yards or alleys to suffer, their wounds festering. Aisner carries a thick folder of cases to follow up on and a thicker folder of complaints to check out, and the calls just keep coming. If there is a problem with Aisner, it is that there’s only one of her, and it’s something critics blast away at as a sign the city still has a long way to go.

“To me, it is ludicrous that a town this size only has one cruelty investigator,” says animal activist and Southern Alliance for Animal Welfare president Laurie Green. It is a sentiment shared by many. Aisner’s caseload is astounding, and she is pretty much always on duty. On the three nights prior to a recent court appearance, she had gotten to sleep at midnight, 1:30 a.m., and not at all.

Critics also charge that District Attorney General Torry Johnson has not been eager to prosecute animal cruelty cases. “He’s got bigger fish to fry,” Sontany says, “which is understandable, but if you don’t go after these cases, you can’t make a dent in the problem.”

For her part, Aisner says several people in the district attorney’s office “genuinely care and have gone to bat for me and worked hard to get convictions.” In fact, six of her convictions have been prosecuted by assistant district attorneys in General Sessions Court.

Still, she, like Ladebauche, would welcome a greater willingness to prosecute. Both were disappointed that a thoroughly prepared case of felony dogfighting was plea-bargained by the district attorney’s office to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty without consulting them. “Allowing a case like that to be pled down,” Aisner says, “sends a message that such activities will be tolerated in Davidson County.”

Citing the staffers who have tackled cruelty cases, Johnson counters that “we have gone out of our way to demonstrate our interest. It’s just that we do not always agree on how serious a case is or the way it should be handled. Sometimes we don’t have the facts to back up the charges they speculate might have happened, and we try to keep these things in perspective with all the other cases we handle.”

While court is not Aisner’s first priority (“If I can educate, I’d rather do that”), it is frequently important, she contends, because of a link between animal abuse and violence against humans. The Humane Society of the United States calls animal cruelty by young people “a clear signal that either a family is already suffering from violence or a youth may someday turn aggressive and violent toward humans.” Almost half of 36 imprisoned multiple murderers interviewed by the FBI in the late 1970s said they had killed or tortured animals as adolescents, and 13 said they had done it as children. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Oregon high-school killer Kip Kinkel, the Boston Strangler, and many others had histories of animal abuse. “If you don’t deal with the serious cruelty—a person who takes a tire iron and beats a dog to death—you’re going to deal with them later and the victim will be a human being,” Aisner says.

More often than not, she and other Animal Control officers take their cases into Environmental Court, a division of General Sessions Court with exclusive jurisdiction over violations of Metro Codes. It is, in essence, “decriminalizing animal cruelty,” Aisner says, but it does allow offenders to be fined up to $500 and/or enjoined from owning animals. Many of those cases come before General Sessions Court Judge Gloria Dumas, who is impressed with Aisner’s work. “She’s great,” Dumas says. “When she brings someone in, it generally means she’s done her homework and that it’s something that needs to be brought in.”

In Tennessee, laws dealing with animal cruelty are often opposed by hunters; farm groups; breeders of walking horses, hunting dogs, and fighting chickens; not to mention owners of rodeos, circuses, and the like, unless the laws are stripped by lobbyists of language affecting them. For five years in a row, state Rep. Ben West sponsored legislation that would make animal cruelty a felony. The fifth time, he says, “we got it down to where the farmers were satisfied, and it passed the Senate, but failed the House on the last day of the session. At that point, I said, ‘Dogs and cats, I love you, but no more.’ ”

A bill sponsored two years ago by Rep. Mike Williams of Franklin would have defined animal torture, permitted courts to order psychological evaluation and treatment upon conviction, and mandated the contacting of protective agencies if the person convicted lives with minor children or elderly individuals. Opposition was heavy, and it worked. Williams’ bill was buried in the Agriculture Resource & Industry subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee. He, like West, let it go. “This is very important to people who are animal advocates,” Williams says, “but you get to the point where there are other things that are more pressing.” (There is an animal cruelty bill before the Legislature this session.) The victories are often small.

“Last legislative session,” says Vicky Crosetti, executive director of the Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley, headquartered in Knoxville, “was the first time in a long time that a law had been passed that really benefits the animals.” Two laws mandated that people adopting animals from shelters agree to have them spayed or neutered, and allowed a pet owner to recover non-economic damages for the loss of a pet under narrow circumstances.

It is obviously not the ideal climate for those looking to protect animals.

It would be hard to exaggerate just how bad Metro’s Animal Shelter was a few years ago. The stench was incredible. Dozens of dogs were crammed into gang cages that were often filthy, wet, and cold—some were actually killed in fights over food and water. Controlled drugs were left lying around. Dogs and cats that came in injured were sometimes not treated for days. Sick animals were adopted out, in a few cases to be brought back dead by distraught children and their parents. A dog froze to death after a water pipe burst. There were reports—never proven—that fighting dogs were being given or sold to people who fought them. In 1996 and 1997, of the more than 9,000 animals impounded, a scant 129 were adopted. Nearly as many—88—were sold for research, a figure that had fallen from 848 in 1992 and 1993. (The practice of “pound seizure” is now illegal here.) Nearly 7,700 were euthanized.

When Ladebauche’s predecessor, John Seales, was hired in 1998, he called the place “a bona fide disaster.” Ladebauche says she was “dumbfounded” on her first visit. “There was certainly a lack of caring and concern for anything that was going on behind that front door. The fault for that has to go all the way to the top of Metro government at that time.” Judy Torchia, a veterinarian who volunteered tirelessly at the facility, called it “by far the worst center I have ever seen in my career, and I’ve seen a lot.”

Mary Metzner, president of the board of NACA, and one of two inspectors who produced NACA’s 1998 report, says, “Employees were sitting around in the lobby. The officers we spoke with didn’t wear badges. They didn’t look professional. They were not trained. There were no detergents and no disinfectant used in the kennel for the whole week we were there. We saw the same food in the same pans the whole week—stuff was growing on it. It was just deplorable. I was in shock. It was frightening. Either the people didn’t know any better or they didn’t care. That was the scary part.” The department was woefully underfunded and understaffed—there were, says Health Department director Dr. Stephanie Bailey, “limitations on obtaining and retaining enough qualified staff willing to work under extremely stressful conditions at the salaries being offered.”

Several of the employees had been hired, NACA said, “with no previous animal control/care background” and without pre-employment tests or criminal background checks. The agency found problems everywhere, and made more than a hundred recommendations that boiled down to this: Start over. Larry Cole, who ran the facility for a decade before Seales’ arrival, is, by most accounts, a good man who spends a great deal of time volunteering in the community, working particularly with athletic programs for children. To this day he says, “Each day we were doing the best we could with what we had. I was satisfied with the outcome.” Yet on his watch, thousands of dogs suffered, shivered, got illnesses, and died, sometimes wretchedly, in often appalling conditions.

Seales, who had known Cole before replacing him, says, “I just couldn’t understand why someone like Larry Cole would allow that to go on. I don’t think he had the drive to really make the changes that were needed, and I think he just kind of settled into a status quo.” Some observers say he was simply playing the hand he was dealt from above, from his boss, Paul Bontrager, the former director of environmental services for the Health Department, or Bontrager’s boss, Bailey, who succeeded Dr. Fredia Wadley in 1995. Both Bontrager and Bailey developed solid national reputations among their peers regarding most traditional Health Department concerns, but both were considered locally to be defensive, slow to change, highly territorial, and often intractable in the face of criticism when it came to animal control.

Then there was Mayor Phil Bredesen. He knew the department was in bad shape, but also knew it was just one small part of an agency dealing with STDs, drug dependency, infectious diseases, air pollution, immunization, sanitation, restaurant inspections, rodents, insects, and much more. Bredesen and the Metro Council faced a burgeoning murder rate, schools with decaying infrastructures and poor test scores, and various needs and problems in the police, fire, and other departments. What’s more, the Health Department budget was decreasing yearly, although under Dr. Bailey the animal control budget was rising slowly. The animal facility had been the victim for many years of plain political neglect. Dogs and cats don’t vote or contribute, and the people who do generally called their Council representatives only when stray dogs weren’t being picked up. Otherwise, there weren’t many complaints, and as one former administration official says, “People got about the department they demanded.”

“It wasn’t anyone’s priority,” Sontany says. “It was a dumping ground where they put people who didn’t perform well in other parts of Metro.” Former at-large Metro Council member George Armistead says it was “a totally neglected stepchild of Metro government,” and admits he was symbolic of the municipal blame, since he’d been a Council member for a decade before he ever visited the facility.

It is axiomatic among activists, though, that the real blame lies with the people who abandon these animals or let them run loose or breed unchecked. The employees are simply the people hired to deal with the problem. Poor training and supervision, and a lack of community oversight, did the rest. No one can claim the warning signs weren’t there. “Your animal shelter is still operating in the 1960s,” Mays wrote to then-Mayor Bredesen after a visit in 1995. “The facility is in poor shape, poorly designed, understaffed, and the lack of employee training was very obvious.” The Health Department’s own 1996 advisory group urged a shift in direction, citing a need to show concern and compassion for the animals brought to the facility.

There had been small pockets of criticism for years. Laurie Green was an early and persistent critic. “You go into a city and you expect city services,” she says, “fire, police, paved roads, clean water, and animal control that is professional and humane. You don’t expect to be knocked down by the smell, and continually hear they’re doing the best they can. No, they weren’t.”

Green quickly gained a reputation for being confrontational. “We learned being nice didn’t get us anywhere,” she says. “We wouldn’t go away and we wouldn’t shut up. There’s a time when it comes to social change that you can’t be nice. Animals were dying horrific deaths, and we were going to show up at every Health Department meeting and be rowdy, because they won’t listen to us when we’re nice. In the long run, we paved the way for other organizations to be able to say, ‘We’re going to work with you.’ ”

Sontany came on board as a critic when she saw a dog dying in one of the runs in 1995, her first year on the Council. “Nobody was even doing anything about it,” she says. “I’m an animal lover myself, and I just felt like that was something I needed to bring to everyone’s attention.” Most of the rest of the Council paid little attention to her, dismissing her as overly sensitive. In fact, often it seemed to activists that no one was listening.

“Even if you think your critics are wackos,” says local animal advocate Calina Cook, “you’ve got a responsibility at least to check out what the wackos are saying is happening. After all, they are taxpayers.”

John Seales headed a facility in Hot Springs, Ark., when he was interviewed about heading Animal Control. During an early visit in the summer of 1998—not long after the NACA report was released—he and Cole walked outside to get away from the smell and noise, and as they did, a fight broke out between employees arguing about who did a better job picking up dogs. Seales turned the job down, but then, after conversations with Sontany and Bailey, he changed his mind and accepted. Among the problems he faced, he said, were bad employee morale, a dirty building, and a tight budget. He would review the employees, he said, and implement training programs.

“These were basically good employees,” he says, looking back. “They just had no leadership, no training, no correct guidance.” The shelter “just needs a good general cleaning, some basic elbow grease, love, and care,” he said at the time, and the program needed “responsible pet ownership” and “positive public relations.” He would get the elbow grease, in large measure from volunteers, but he would face disastrous public relations. Both started a few weeks after he took the job, when writer Calina Cook and photographer Karen Will Rogers walked through the door. They were working on a book called Music Row Dogs and Nashville Cats, about country singers and their pets. They had seen a report that two dogs picked up by the facility had died after being in the back of a hot van on a 90-degree day, and another about Seales’ hiring. They came to photograph animals and offer some of the book’s proceeds to the facility, and they, like many people before and after them, were stunned.

“It was devastating,” Cook says. “I didn’t know things like that existed in this country. It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen in my life.” She and Rogers brought singer Lorrie Morgan, who was being interviewed for the book, to the facility, and she in turn brought a host of friends, including Barbara Mandrell, Connie Smith, Sammy Kershaw, Heather Kinley, Gary Chapman, and WKRN-TV’s door-kicking investigative reporter Michael Turko.

There followed a number of tear-stained photo-ops, pleas to the mayor, and a demonstration on the courthouse steps. “We basically pitched a public fit,” says Rhonda Tallent, current president of ACT Now, the organization Cook founded with friend Hilary Hines in the wake of her first visit to improve the plight of the animals. The group recruited volunteers, and Seales threw the doors open to them. They cleaned cages, walked dogs, and did light repair work. Judy Torchia, who became an ACT Now member, invited other veterinarians to donate time and drugs.

For all the good that was accomplished, though, it was a move fraught with problems. The employees did not always welcome volunteers. They were, after all, untrained and working with sometimes vicious or diseased dogs. Many had complained to the press about conditions and employees, and the employees often didn’t appreciate the scrutiny and headlines that just kept coming. Early in 1999, Torchia bluntly titled one portion of a seminar for employees, “How to tell if an animal is dead,” after a volunteer found a puppy moving in the incinerator, where it had been piled with others for later cremation.

The employees were largely working-class black males, and many of the volunteers were upper-class white women, and the two did not always mix well. Volunteers could be self-righteous and discourteous, and employees could be surly.

Finally, ACT Now issued standards of conduct to its members, urging them to be courteous and positive, and to refrain from communicating with the media unless authorized by officers or board members. Meanwhile, relations between critics and the Health Department hadn’t improved either. Cook and other animal activists admit there were some on their side who were highly difficult, and the heightened criticism had done little to lessen at least the public intractability of officials. “The most vocal people ended up being those who were more interested in staying angry than in finding solutions,” says one person involved in the process. In a scenario common to many municipal issues, the most argumentative often came to overwhelm the debate.

The political atmosphere was as chaotic as the facility’s, and Seales took the heat. Health Department spokesman Brian Todd calls Seales’ hiring “the biggest mistake we made,” and Green termed him “a disaster.” Seales admits he was in over his head. “I walked into a mess,” he says, “a political nightmare.” Various groups vied for his attention and his loyalty. “I was hired by the Health Department, but I thought I was really working for the mayor and local Humane Society. It was very confusing. A lot of people wanted me to come in and just clean house, but you can’t do that legally. These are civil service employees. You can’t just walk in and say, ‘You’re fired’ and ‘You’re fired.’ You have to document things and issue warnings, and I had a plan, but I was never able to do that.”

When it comes to people and turning points, many observers see the January 1998 naming of Brent Hager as director of the Health Department’s Bureau of Environmental Health Services, which oversees Animal Control, as key. While many of the worst PR fiascoes occurred on his watch, he’s won a number of fans. “The big change happened when Dr. Hager came on,” Turner says. “As much a role as politics plays in this, it’s having somebody on the inside willing to go to the mat on something, and he’s gone above and beyond the call of duty. This was the pivotal point where the going nowhere, the being lost at sea, was replaced by some movement.”

“People don’t realize how many volunteer hours he put in, the calls he took, the headaches he took on,” Torchia says. “He’d say, ‘Whatever medical supplies you need, we’ll take care of it.’ He’d come out there if we needed him. We had trouble with the air conditioner one day, and he was out there in 20 minutes and fixed it.”

Hager was able to broaden the agenda from the strict parameters of disease control and animal control to a more comprehensive animal program, says Steve Majchrzak, who chaired Mayor Bredesen’s 1999 Advisory Board on Animal Care and Control. “He understood there were other considerations to making a well-run, well-respected facility, and he was willing to put the effort behind doing that.” It was still slow going, though. There always seemed to be another disaster, another headline, and it was often hard to see any progress at all. It would take two more years of missteps—including Seales’ tenure—and acrimony before the city and its critics could get a handle on many of the problems.

Side issues complicated matters. The Health Department became responsible for animal control in 1947. Until then animal control had been, as it still is in much of the state, the responsibility of law enforcement or private groups such as the Humane Association. In fact, until not long before Aisner was hired, cruelty investigation had been the bailiwick of the Nashville Humane Association. The organization had handled it since 1988, after it became apparent the Metro Police didn’t have time to investigate such cases. When the association asked for more financial help from the city in the mid-’90s, Bredesen said they had begun investigating animal abuse “by their own volition,” and that it wasn’t the city’s responsibility to fund their efforts. At the same time, he admitted that the Police Department would not consider such investigations a priority should the Humane Association drop its program. In late 1997, Metro proposed that the Humane Association take over the entire Metro Animal Control program, but the group decided against it. In January 1999, citing both cost and liability, the shelter stopped cruelty investigations altogether.

As with any big municipal project, action on the new building came when the political will freed up the money. In July 1998, Mayor Bredesen committed to making a standing Health Department request for a new facility part of a bond package. That happened because the arena, the stadium, the schools, and the libraries had all received attention over the past few years.

“You have $400 million going to the school system, police precincts being built in outlying areas, and a new hospital being built,” Majchrzak says, “and finally it came around. The backlog got unjammed, and somebody could finally stand up and say, ‘We need $3 million for a new animal control facility’ and not look crazy. The dynamic had changed.” That package was formalized in March 1999, when Bredesen also announced the formation of an advisory board that included representatives of the Health Department, Council members Sontany and Armistead (both of whom had become ACT Now members), Torchia, Cook, and a representative from the Humane Association.

It was, says Majchzrak, an attempt to give both sides some breathing room outside the media spotlight. “For too long,” he says, “there were minute-by-minute reactions to headlines or TV footage, instead of a focus on the long-term. That’s what the advisory board was designed to give us.” The group urged Council approval of the bond package, the hiring of a cruelty investigator, a new fee schedule, a spay/neuter program, a continued volunteer program, moving Animal Control from the Health Department (which never happened), and a review of policies and procedures, among others.

The Council approved $3 million for the facility in April 1999 and urged the state Legislature to allow Metro to remove Animal Control from the Health Department, which was still under fire. Then, the following week came another firestorm. More than 300 dogs in the facility were euthanized during a parvo outbreak, and Seales, citing politics, resigned. The former development helped prompt new disease-prevention measures that further modernized the facility, and the latter opened the way for Ladebauche, who had been sought before Seales was hired but had declined, citing, among other things, her opposition to the policy of selling animals for research. With a bill introduced by Sontany, Metro Council stopped that practice in August 1999.

Those changes, coupled with the improvements begun under Dr. Hager, were evident when NACA came back for a Metro-requested follow-up look at the facility. “The Metropolitan Health Department should be commended on its dedication to improving the Animal Control program,” NACA’s October 1999 report said. Saying the facility remained underfunded and understaffed, NACA also reported it was “surprised and pleased” at improvements. Mays, who was again part of the study, said recently, “Of all the evaluations I’ve been a part of, my second visit there was as much of a surprise to me as I could have imagined.”

With the turnaround under way, even bad news could have positive results. It happened with what Hager calls “that horrible truck incident,” a scandalous episode in which Animal Control actually played a heroic role. Last May, officials found 147 puppies in the back of a truck that had broken down en route to pet stores. The driver was charged with animal cruelty, and Ladebauche wrangled an out-of-court settlement with the owners, a kennel in Missouri, that awarded the surviving puppies (three died of heat stroke and one from parvo) to Metro in exchange for dropping the charges. It was, oddly enough, “a good thing for us,” Hager says, since people concerned by the incident donated more than $16,000 to the Metro facility. It also helped heal a few of the wounds from the activist-Metro squabbles, as volunteers, including some with longstanding disagreements with Ladebauche, volunteered time and energy to help out during the episode. “She had mellowed out,” one volunteer says, “and we did get to be friends.”

Dr. Bev Hollis is standing in the euthanasia room at the old facility in Bordeaux— waiting for No. 119. “Come on in, boy,” she says, coaxing him in the door. “Good dog.” He is chestnut red and shorthaired, standing by the door, his tail wagging slowly. Martha Bickley, an Animal Control officer assisting Hollis, is standing near him.

“I think he’s afraid of the stick,” says Bickley, who is wearing high rubber boots, tan slacks, and a green sweater. She sets the handling stick—used rarely on tough-to-handle dogs—aside and the dog walks in. He walks over to another dog in the 14-by-10-foot room and begins the age-old process of sniffing its back end. Only the dog he’s sniffing, like the two next to it, is dead.

“They’re just sleeping,” Bickley says, rubbing his head. She lifts him onto the table, which is actually an old bathtub with a grate clamped on top and a blanket over that. Hollis drapes her upper body over the dog’s back to hold him steady. Bickley is holding a syringe filled with Fatal-Plus, which is manufactured by Vortech Pharmaceuticals in Dearborn, Mich., and which Metro buys by the case. It contains sodium pentobarbital.

“I won’t let you get bitten, Martha,” Hollis says as the dog squirms. “You never have,” Bickley says. She holds the dog’s left front leg, finds a vein, and slides the needle in. The dog’s tail stops wagging, and his head lolls slowly to one side. His body goes limp, and the women let him slump to the table. Bickley, in a practiced motion, lifts him by the scruff of the neck and by loose skin at his haunches, and hauls him from the table, placing him on the floor by the others. She goes to get another, from a long list Hollis prepared at the start of the day after looking over the scores of dogs in holding pens.

This one is a friendly chow mix. He sniffs a dead dog’s feet. They put him on the table, and again, Bickley is preparing to slide the needle into his leg. She finds the vein and injects him. The dog recoils and gives a little yip, and then another. In a few seconds, he weakens. They lay him down, and that quickly, he’s dead.

“When I make the selections,” Hollis says, as Bickley goes to get another dog, “I look at adoptability. I look for obvious health issues, and at temperament. Does it look like someone’s dog, or has it been running the streets for months? Smaller dogs have more adoptability. Very few people come in looking for a large dog unless they want a guard dog.”

Bickley walks in with No. 11, another large male. “Hey, buddy,” Hollis says. She is writing in the logbook next to a radio on a Formica table that runs the length of the long wall.

Bickley had been working in newspaper graphics and hoping to make a living as a painter. “The minute I walked in the shelter here,” she says, “that came to a screeching halt.” She was an ACT Now volunteer before being hired at the facility. Hollis, a former ACT Now board member, had her own veterinary practice but thought a shelter “might be a place where I could make a difference.” She is the first full-time staff veterinarian the Metro shelter has ever had.

“This was obviously someone’s pet,” she says, looking at the dog’s collar. “If there would have been ID tags on him when they picked him up, the owner would have him right now.” When the dog slumps over, she takes the collar off and tosses it into a wash basket with scores of others. Classically, the person euthanizing the dogs might use a stethoscope to make sure the heart has stopped beating. It’s not an exact science, though, and so after putting the dog on the floor, Hollis or Bickley slides an empty syringe into its heart and leaves it there for a few moments. The needle’s movement can alert them to any heartbeat.

The next dog is female, a shepherd/rottweiler mix, a stray picked up in Woodbine. The dog is a little shaky, sick with an upper respiratory infection, common among strays. Bickley has trouble hitting the vein. The dog whimpers, and they switch legs. Still no good, and the dog whimpers again. Sometimes it’s tougher to hit a vein in dogs that have been on the street awhile. They try a back leg and finally, after a little squirming, the dog collapses.

The chocolate lab Bickley brings in next is an enthusiastic tail-wagger. She lifts it onto the table and it reaches up and licks Hollis’ face. “You’re very smart to kiss me,” she says. The dog nuzzles her, looking for a hug. “Sometimes,” she says, “you’ll see one that you just know could be adoptable, and they get a second chance.” She rubs the dog’s neck. “What do you think? Do you wanna stay?” She looks at Bickley. “Take this one back.”

Next up is a homely brown dog showing signs of kennel cough. “You’re going to be very sleepy,” Bickley says. “You haven’t felt very good, have you? No you haven’t, but you’ll feel better now.” The jab is quick and the dog goes down.

They speak matter-of-factly between dogs. After hundreds of times, this is just another day at the office, or as close as it gets when you start with wagging tails or soft meows and end up with carcasses in a pile. “I don’t cry a whole lot anymore,” Bickley says. “I have shed an ocean of tears already. There are times I will cry and feel upset and want to go home, but there’s still work to be done,” she pauses for a moment, “...doing the dirty work for irresponsible pet owners.”

The euthanasia room in the new facility will have a side room where someone can go just to be quiet, to think, to forget, to cry, without having to explain it to anyone.

“We try to be realistic,” Hollis says, “with people who might bring a dog in and say, ‘She bit two neighborhood kids, and I can’t deal with her anymore. You will find a good home for her, won’t you?’ That is not a dog that’s a great candidate for placement.” For anyone who thinks that turning them loose is a more humane solution than bringing them here, Bickley adds, “There is no doubt in my mind that these animals are not able to fend for themselves on the street, and we do not do them a service sticking them in any home we can find or leaving them on the street. We’re the ones who have to see them when they’ve been burned, beaten, or shot, when they’ve got broken bones or their jaws hanging by a little skin, or they’re paralyzed or have some of their hide torn off.”

Next is a dalmatian with a bad upper respiratory infection, then a chow mix whose owner was notified but simply never came to get it. A rottweiler. A yellow lab mix. There is another. And another. And another. There are three people at the facility qualified to oversee euthanasia, and three others who help. Someone is in this room for two or more hours nearly every day, killing anywhere from 30 to 50 dogs and cats. Nationwide the annual figure is 4 million to 5 million. Euthanasia is the leading cause of death of dogs and cats, ahead of illness, car accidents, old age, and everything else.

“My ultimate goal in the new facility,” Hollis says, “is to have the time and the people to temperament-test every animal, so we can give those adoptable animals every chance possible. I don’t want to put a dog down just because it has an upper respiratory infection, but then again, I’d like to know that if I treat it, it will have a good chance to get adopted.” Both are anxious to get to the new facility. They knew the old one when it was much worse, and they know what they want for the animals.

“These are living creatures we deal with,” Bickley says. “I think the taxpayers want to know that people do provide quality care. This is not a luxurious place, by any means, but my feeling is we owe these animals, whether they’re owned or not, the basic necessities—fresh water, fresh food, clean accommodations, and, if they’re not adopted, a humane death.” The needle in the cocker spaniel’s chest pulses almost imperceptibly with the last soft heartbeats. The scent of urine rises from a puddle spreading from the penis of the yellow lab mix and running toward the drain in the center of the floor. The others lie beside him, mute testimony against anyone who’s ever let a dog run loose in the neighborhood or abandoned one on the side of the road.

Bickley picks them up, one at a time, and puts them in a rubber wheelbarrow for transport to the incinerator. There have been dozens today, and it’s barely enough to keep up. As they leave the room, Hollis says, “We about broke even today.”

“We don’t have an animal problem,” John Seales told The Tennessean midway through his troubled stint with Animal Control. “We have a people problem.”

Whatever their past or present differences, virtually everyone concerned with the welfare of animals in and around Nashville agrees that the solution is simple, although, given human nature, it is anything but easy. It lies in responsible pet ownership. Overall, that includes adequate food and water, veterinary care (including vaccinations), and confinement that isn’t cruelly restrictive. Most importantly, when it comes to strays and overpopulation, it is spaying and neutering. “Adoption saves one,” says Turner. “Sterilization saves thousands.” As long as dogs and cats breed unchecked, even by people who are sure they’ll find “good homes” for them, the problem will continue, and Metro money and buildings won’t turn the tide.

“You can have the best program and the best facility in the world,” Hager says, “and if you have irresponsible pet owners that don’t spay and neuter, this is the reality.”

There are calls for higher fees and penalties, and for differential licensing, which would charge more for pets that had not been spayed or neutered, but tougher laws and stronger enforcement of existing laws is an immediate concern.

“MADD realized educating people on the horrible drinking-and-driving problem was getting nowhere,” Green says, “so they started lobbying for more stringent laws. There are some people out there who will be educated. They’re not the problem. It’s the people who don’t want to be educated, who consider the animal cruelty laws a joke, and the only way to control them is strict, aggressive, animal control. They’re not going to care until somebody makes them. That’s why animal control has to be in the community.”

There is no guarantee that the Health Department can fill the 10 or so new positions with qualified people, but Hager says they’re actively seeking applications for field, shelter, and office positions. In the meantime, it’s clear the department is looking to build on the trust it is slowly gaining.

“The staff we have now is devoted to making this program work,” he says. “We have a good program for Nashville, and we want to do what is proper for the animals, to serve the community in a vital function that is not always very pleasant.”

The new facility will provide for spaying and neutering of all adopted animals, but it will still be euthanizing far too many animals if the rest of the community doesn’t do likewise. Ladebauche is also working to structure a new volunteer training program. While community animal activists are wishing the program well, knowing it means the difference between health and sickness, life and death for many animals, they urge community oversight as well as cooperation.

“We can’t assume that because a program is run by the government that it’s going to necessarily be run properly or be considered a priority,” Cook says. “As citizens and taxpayers, we have not only the right but the responsibility to keep an eye on how these programs are run.”

“The program requires the vigilance of citizens who will never let go of their concern for animals,” Turner says. “I would hope the more enlightened this program gets, the more community support it gets so that it won’t ever be able to slip back over that dark precipice.”