Kauai dogs
have an angel
on their side
Julia McGovern has found
By Anthony Sommer
a way to help dogs that
badly need homes
Kauai correspondentLIHUE -- If you're a tourist from Denver, San Francisco, or Portland and you're on Kauai and a nice lady tugs on your sleeve and asks if you want to be an "Aloha Angel Escort," it's probably Julia McGovern.
McGovern admits she's "shameless" in approaching visitors asking them to fly her dogs to the mainland. She waylays them on the beaches, ambushes them at restaurants and pounces on them in hotel lobbies.
Once she explains the program, a surprising number are willing. In the past few months, she's shipped about 50 dogs east with tourist volunteers and Kauai residents heading to the mainland on vacation.
Her record, so far, is seven dogs on one flight.
"We've got to stop the killing," she said. "There are homes on the mainland waiting for these dogs if we can get them there."
McGovern is the shelter manager for the Kauai Humane Society, where at least 12,000 of the 15,000 stray dogs taken in every year are killed because no one wants them.
Then one day, almost by accident, the Humane Society discovered tourists are willing to "escort" dogs as excess baggage.
A Kauai resident moving to the mainland had booked a cheap flight on an airline that didn't take dogs and needed to get his pet across the ocean. It would have cost more than $500 to ship the dog as cargo. But as a volunteer tourist's excess baggage, the cost was $150 and was paid for by donations to the society.
And, impossible as it may seem on an island virtually overrun by homeless Chihuahuas, there are waiting lists of people on the mainland who want small dogs from animal shelters.
As far as anyone can tell, Kauai's "Aloha Angel Escorts" is unique in the world, a sort of high altitude underground railroad for mutts. The best part, McGovern said, is the escort really doesn't have to do anything except claim the dog as luggage.
She meets escorts at the Lihue Airport and checks-in the dogs and their airline-approved crates. A representative of a humane society from San Francisco, Denver or Portland meets them at the other end of the flight and collects the dogs.
"In the best of circumstances, the new owner is there, too. The dogs already are adopted before we put them on the plane," McGovern said.
McGovern is even working on price breaks from the airlines. So far, she's convinced Hawaiian Airlines to fly the society's crates back from Portland for free after the dogs have been delivered.
The Kauai Humane Society has forged agreements with the MaxFund Shelter in Denver and the All Critters Shelter in San Francisco. Both have waiting lists of people who want to adopt small dogs. More recently, they've been working with shelters in Oregon.
Dick and Karen Childs, former volunteers at the Kauai shelter, moved to Oregon and Dick Childs, a retired special agent with the Naval Investigative Service, now heads the Florence Area Humane Society.
When Childs heard of the Aloha Angel Escort program, he decided to find some homes in the Florence area for the unwanted Kauai dogs. He was especially interested in small dogs, because they are most in demand at the Florence shelter.
The first shipment of three small Hawaiian dogs arrived July 6 at the Portland airport.
The dogs were all escorted by a woman who was moving from Kauai to Oregon. She was met by the Childs, who drove the dogs back to Florence.
The dogs didn't enjoy the trip.
"It was their first airplane ride. All these strange sights and sounds. And it's colder here," said Karen Childs, who rotated the small dogs from their kennels to her lap on the long drive to Florence.
Those adopting the dogs paid a standard $55 fee to cover the cost of spaying/neutering and a vet checkup. The Childs also requested and received a $50 donation to be sent to Kauai to cover the cost of air transport.
Right now, McGovern is readying a batch of dogs for new owners who are already waiting for them in the Bay Area -- which means she's out stalking tourists.
"Do you know anyone flying to San Francisco next week?" she asks.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
