Warm heart, cool head
Posted on Tuesday, February 5, 2008
“How can you do this ?” animal lovers ask Kay Simpson, abuse investigator and director of the Humane Society of Pulaski County.
As in how can she bear to regularly witness the results of human indifference or outright cruelty to animals. As in how can she function rationally when faced with a horse with a bleeding stump in place of one foot and a mule whose hooves were ground down almost 2 inches after it was dragged more than 1, 000 feet behind a truck by its owner.
“People say, ‘I don’t believe you don’t cry. How can you do this ?’” says Simpson. “That’s the No. 1 question I get.”
She does cry, she admits. Seeing the conditions in which some animals live is tough, as is finding animals dumped at the door of the Humane Society shelter. All the bad — it tears at her heart. So her work requires a shift in perspective.
“You can’t work with your heart,” Simpson explains. “You’ve got to work with your head or you lose whatever you’re doing.”
Simpson, 58, has worked for the Humane Society in two stints for a total of 14 years. To Arkansans accustomed to seeing her in the media rescuing animals, seeking funds and supplies, and pushing for a state law to make cruelty to animals a felony, she’s the voice and face of the Humane Society of Pulaski County.
But, while she’s in the news, she’s not the news, she says. It’s all about the animals. Simpson considers herself fortunate to be doing work that she loves and that makes life better for creatures great and small.
Before entering the animal-welfare field, she tended bar at various venues for 23 years. Segueing from bartending to animal-tending wasn’t difficult, she says. In fact, the two jobs overlapped at first because she worked at the shelter part time during the day while continuing her full-time night job.
“Tending bar was what I did until I fell in love with the fourlegged animal instead of the two-legged. I got sick of the twolegged, so I pretty much went with the four-legged.”
Getting a “day job” — a work classification the mention of which elicits a throaty chuckle from Simpson — didn’t make her life easier. That wasn’t her objective anyway.
On a normal week, Simpson says, she devotes at least 70 hours to working at the shelter. But she’s on call and available 24 hours a day — for the Humane Society, as well as for other organizations needing advice or other help — so sometimes she’s working a case in the middle of the night.
“My cell phone is always on. I don’t really have any set hours.”
Recently, she was housebound for two weeks while recovering from pneumonia. The illness she could handle. But staying home, being out of action: “It like to have killed me. I’ve got to know what’s going on.”
That she does. Even while ill, Simpson was on the job, says Desiree Bender, Arkansas director for the Humane Society of the United States. Simpson called her several times to discuss a case involving 36 pit bull dogs confiscated Jan. 3 during two raids of suspected dogfighting and training facilities in Saline County. “She’s nonstop go,” Bender says of Simpson. “She devotes her whole life to helping animals. She’s just a force of nature.”
RESCUE RUSH Simpson began her Humane Society career cleaning dog kennels, progressed to taking care of the cats, then became an abuse investigator after earning credentials from the Association of Certified Cruelty Investigators. For the past seven years, she has operated the society’s no-kill animal shelter on Colonel Glenn Road in Little Rock while continuing her investigative pursuits. As cruelty investigator, she has been all over Arkansas — and twice to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — to lead or assist in rescues of all kinds of animals.
“It’s a big rush saving them,” she says. “There’s nothing that feels any better that I’ve ever found than the satisfaction and reward of saving something.”
Simpson is hard-pressed to describe her most satisfying rescue, but she recalls a “puppy mill” raid she organized in December 2002. She had visited the facility in Searcy two weeks before the raid on the pretense of buying a puppy. There, she saw dogs living in outdoor runs and in cages hanging from the ceiling of an unheated cinderblock building. The place stank of urine and feces. Some of the dogs were missing toes or had chewed ears, and some were sick and malnourished.
“For two weeks, I had to deal with what I saw until I could make arrangements for a place for the dogs to go,” Simpson says. Her heart ached because the dogs were suffering, but she had to go with her head. She knew she couldn’t take any action until she had places to keep the dogs — the chronically overcrowded Humane Society shelter couldn’t take in 77 animals at one time.
She had to line up law enforcement officials in White County and animal-welfare workers to accompany her. She had to make sure there were enough crates to hold the dogs and enough vehicles to transport the crates. Simpson let her head rule throughout the day as they examined the dogs and readied them to be moved. Her heart took over afterward, when she climbed into her SUV packed with 18 occupied pet taxis. “I remember getting into the vehicle I was driving,” she says. “I remember all of a sudden thinking how quiet it was in there. I kind of looked around — the animals were all asleep. They weren’t whimpering, not one was crying. “ I just lost it. I started crying. It’s like they knew they were safe.”
HOME, HORSES Simpson, who is divorced and has two daughters and four grandchildren, describes herself as “just an old grandma.” She lives in the country with three dogs and two horses, all rescues.
Pepperann, possibly a rat terrier / Chihuahua mix, had been dumped in a vacant lot with three puppies. Lady, a 13-yearold collie, was a stray. Elmo, a sable-and-white Boston terrier, is the baby: “He was a puppy mill dog. I brought him home for the night and he never went back. He’s my clown.
“ Sometimes it is hard,” she says about overcoming the urge to adopt more animals. “I fall in love with all of them. But you just have to play with them and love them at the shelter. You get them into good homes and you lose that ‘ I want it’ feeling.”
Her horse Cinnamon (named for the color of his coat ) was near death when he was rescued. Only a year old, he had to be fed formula from a spoon, then a bottle. Now 5, he’s healthy and strong. Sheik Abdul Jabar, rescued from a horse farm near Hot Springs about two years ago, also needed special care to recover from starvation.
Simpson says she has assisted with more and more horse rescues during the past couple of years. In 2007, there were 50 to 55 horses needing new homes; the Humane Society currently has about 50 horses available for adoption.
One reason for the horse rescue boom, she explains, is that people get horses without first investigating the expense and time involved in their care. They may mean well, but they don’t realize they have to spend more than $ 1, 000 a year just to buy grain and hay for feed, worm the horse and have its hooves trimmed every six to eight weeks.
EMPOWERMENT Arkansas law empowers cruelty investigators such as Simpson to take an animal from its owner if the animal is mistreated, neglected or in danger of dying. Even with such authority, she says, she never goes on a rescue without a law enforcement representative. There’s always the potential for a situation to become ugly. Also, sometimes they find evidence of drug manufacturing or other illegal activity during a rescue operation. Many of the cruelty cases occur in rural areas. In the past, she was the one contacting county sheriffs for help. Now they’re often the ones contacting her, a circumstance she attributes to their increased knowledge of the animal cruelty law and procedures for enforcing it. So far, Simpson has worked with sheriff’s offices in 16 counties. Bender attributes the increase in calls from county officials to Simpson’s efforts and her demeanor. “She’s on their level and she doesn’t offend people. She doesn’t act like she’s any better than them.”
HEARTBREAK As much good as Simpson, the Humane Society staff (Simpson frequently mentions her appreciation for the shelter employees ) and others do for animals, the work isn’t without disappointments, the lack of a felony anti-cruelty law ranking high among them. Currently, cruelty to animals is a misdemeanor and Arkansas is one of only six states without a felony law. During the 2007 legislative session, two versions of a bill making cruelty a felony were proposed. Both proposals failed.
“We need the cruelty law,” Simpson says. “My God, look at some of the things that have come to light with the cruelty cases — flat-out horrible things. I don’t think it should be a felony for people who are not educated on how to care for animals and get educated and do better. I’m saying when you skin a dog alive or barbecue one on your grill, it should be a felony. There’s no justification for that except pure ol’ meanness.”
Along with the disappointments come some heartaches. Usually, they come after she and the shelter staff have gotten their hopes up about an animal’s recovery from illness or injury. Among those was Maebelle, a dog rescued last year from a puppy mill in Van Buren County. The Chihuahua had been bred with a larger dog. “She had a C-section and delivered three puppies. They were big puppies. She got an infection and died after the C-section. It broke my heart. I guess losing animals that you think are going to be OK is the hardest thing to deal with for me.”
GOOD SAVES How does she do this ? people ask.
It’s simple: Because among the heartaches and headaches, there is the knowledge that an animal’s life has been improved or saved. Case in point: Lovey, the horse with the missing foot.
In June 2007, Sheriff Reed Haynes of Franklin County called Simpson and asked for her help with several horses he was concerned about. Among them was Lovey, whose owners told Simpson that the horse had injured her leg on a wire, so they put PVC pipe over the leg to brace it. Inside the pipe, the leg became infected and self-amputated. Lovey would have died without care, Simpson says.
Eight months later, Lovey lives comfortably in a warm stall as her leg heals. The Humane Society hopes to eventually get a prosthesis that will allow Lovey to stand on all four feet.
Hazel, the mule dragged behind a truck, has also recovered. “She’s in great shape,” Simpson says.
When she was younger, she says, she believed she could save all the animals needing help. “It took me a long time to come to the reality — and it’s a hard one — that you can’t save them all. What you do is save one at a time. You have to look at it that way.”
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