Shelter dogs find pilots have wings

Puppy love is reaching new heights.

Pilots are donating their time, planes and fuel to transport dozens of dogs a month from crowded shelters – where they face almost certain death – to rescue groups and shelters several states away.

The mission-of-mercy relocations are flown by general-aviation pilots who have signed on with the recently formed Pilots N Paws, a Web-based message board where pilots can access information about animals in need.

Once the electronic connection is made, dogs plucked by rescuers from death row – most of them in the South, where sterilization rates are low and pet overpopulation is rampant – are loaded onto small planes and flown one, two or six at a time to rescue groups and shelters that have space.

“These are wonderful dogs that simply had the bad luck of winding up in a place where there are too many pets in shelters,” says Pilots N Paws co-founder Jon Wehrenberg of Knoxville, Tenn.

The retired manufacturing executive and weekend pilot has flown scores of dogs from high-kill shelters this year. Last month, his mission involved six small mixed-breed dogs from Knoxville’s Young-Williams Animal Center.

The happy half-dozen had a smooth-sailing, 90-minute flight to Greensboro, N.C. There, they were met by radio station executive Jennifer Hart, head of Animal Rescue & Foster Program, who had arranged foster care.

“Pilots N Paws has given about 20 of our animals a second chance,” says Tim Adams, executive director of the Young-Williams shelter, which euthanizes 70 percent of the animals that land there.

“Twenty animals saved may not sound like much, but every one of them matters.”

Pilots N Paws started operating in February, soon after Wehrenberg offered to fly a Doberman in Florida to his pal Debi Boies of Landrum, S.C., who is a retired nurse, horse breeder and longtime rescuer.

He began asking questions about the rescue world and learned about the passionate underground railroad of animal lovers who orchestrate days-long road journeys to save some of the 4 million to 6 million animals destined for euthanasia in U.S. shelters annually.

“I’d had no idea of the number of animals being euthanized, and the ordeal people and animals were going through in transports,” Wehrenberg says.

“Pilots love to fly. I believed that if we created a means for them to discover situations where they could fly and also save animals, many would do it.”

He and Boies joined forces to spread the word, and within months, 85 pilots had signed on. Nearly 200 dogs have now been flown from several shelters and rescue groups to welcoming arms hundreds of miles away.

“For most of these dogs, the next walk they would have taken would have been to death’s door,” says administrative assistant Dawn Thompson of Falconer, N.Y., who for 18 years has taken in, nursed, socialized and found homes for more than 100 dogs a year from various high-kill areas.

In recent months, 30 have arrived via Pilots N Paws, and she has learned that the ones that arrive by plane rather than ground transport “don’t have the stress that two days on the road creates, and that makes them almost instantly adoptable.”

Each flight costs the pilot hundreds of dollars in fuel alone, not including routine maintenance and other operating expenses.

Boies and Wehrenberg are working to gain nonprofit status for the group so pilots could declare the fuel costs a charitable contribution. But the pilots aren’t exactly agitating for that.

“Doggy kisses are worth the $6 a gallon,” says Westminster, Md., businesswoman and small-plane pilot Michele McGuire.

The animals are almost always remarkably calm about the adventure, pilots report.

“It’s almost as if they understand that this is their chance for life,” Boies says.