Most Likely to Take a Dog Home: Susan & the Four

On her Friday shelter team, Susan has a reputation. Most likely to take a dog home. She has four. And she's not quite done arguing that four is good too.

The long-awaited one

Susan's first solo dog was a malamute-husky-wolfdog she nearly didn't get to keep. She'd been travelling — Alaska — and told the friends in Flagstaff who had both his parents not to save him for her. "But if he's still with you when I get back…" He was. She named him Kayin — long awaited beloved one. He'd already been returned once. "So it was meant to be."

He was her heart-dog, and loving him is what did it. "It made me want to give some of my love to those dogs less fortunate." Kayin and Lobo — a one-year-old husky she took off a friend's hands — had a proper life of it: beach, desert, back to the beach whenever they could afford it. Kayin lived to 14, Lobo to 17.

Somewhere in those years, back in Tucson, Susan started washing and walking dogs at the Humane Society. Then a dog-walker at PACC, the big county shelter. Then, when friends opened Tucson Rescue Now, she was there too. "It seems like forever that I've been volunteering with dogs."

An ordinary Friday

A shift at Tucson Rescue Now starts before the dogs even arrive. Some are dropped off by their fosters; the rest come in on the van from PACC. The volunteers prepare breakfasts, fill water bowls — every dog has its own spacious kennel, "complete with couches, beds, toys, food and water" — and read the bios of the new arrivals, while Bonny, the director and "wonderwoman," fills them in on the back stories.

Then the van arrives, and they line up to receive the dogs. The first-timers are nervous, unsure what to expect. The returners are joyful — because they know exactly what's coming. From Thursday to Sunday, these dogs get walks, hugs, snuggles, and someone to sit with them almost nonstop.

"To call it spa days or a staycation is not an exaggeration." — Over 600 dogs adopted out, in just a couple of years.

The part people don't see

Susan laughs before she answers. "Maybe the cleaning up of poop and pee accidents?" The dogs strong and untrained enough to pull you clean across the parking lot. The mopping. The cleaning. The tears when one of the beloveds leaves for a forever home. And the quiet fact underneath all of it: TRN has no employees. Every single hand is a volunteer's.

What everyone gets wrong

Two things, fast. "First, they are not all pitbulls. Second, pitbulls and staffies are wonderful dogs." If she could correct one belief everywhere, it would be that one.

George Clooney

Ask Susan about a dog who stays with her, and it's George.

TRN fights for its dogs — none of theirs, she notes with quiet pride, has ever made the euthanasia list. But George was different. Two years old, and already nine months in the shelter. Pulled from an overcrowded home — too many dogs, too little care. As a puppy, he'd lost half an ear and all the vision in one eye. He lived in constant pain until PACC, at Bonny's pressuring, finally removed the eye. And then, at last, "he became the puppy he'd never been able to be."

Still, no one adopted him. It took Susan months to admit the truth: no one was going to step forward for this baby. So she did, just before Christmas.

She knew the 3-3-3 rule, and he hit every mark like clockwork — the first few nights tucked into a bed in her open closet, and now confident, at home, gorgeous, and "so eager to please." Two successful beach trips already. He knew his name was George, so she kept it. But she added one word.

"I added Clooney, so he'd feel handsome and mischievous. Not damaged or ugly in any way."

The four

George Clooney came straight from this world. The others found her in their own ways.

Star — Ziggy Stardust — she scooped up feral and scared from under a huge bush by the lake near PACC. Four months old then, three now. Susan didn't mean to keep her. She's "certainly not leaving."

Cash — Johnny Cash — is her "only true child," brought home at seven weeks on the first night of the Covid lockdown, "when it felt like the end of the world was coming." She calls him her child because raising a puppy from that age is a huge thing: "to know that you are his everything, from the day he left his mama to the day he takes his last breath." For Cash, like for Kayin before him, she is everything. "I will never disappoint him."

Rider, her fourth, is already 14 — an escape artist with four previous homes on record, a dog no one could contain. He "inexplicably stopped jumping and running" when she brought him home. That was eight years ago.

What it gives back

Susan works full-time as a real estate agent, and finds it rewarding. But Fridays at TRN are what she looks forward to.

"This is my soul's work, my heart's happiness."

In so many ways, she says, dogs are simply better than people. She leaves at the end of a Friday "replenished, refreshed, loved and appreciated. It's everything."

Just a Tuesday

From the outside, people are incredulous — four dogs, and all big ones. (Rider is 123 lbs, Cash 95, "the little two" about 70 each.) "Not a chihuahua or tiny dog person, at all." From the inside, it's just her family.

Four is good too

She wore the This Is Enough shirt to the shelter on purpose. "I want visitors to feel peace, to sense the comfort a dog can bring to a woman's life. To anyone's life. And I model that truth."

And she loves the joke buried in it. The shirt is clearly Cash. It says he is enough. She has four.

"But if you have the heart, the time, the resources… four is good too."

On any given Friday, Susan is at Tucson Rescue Now — reading a new dog's bio, filling a water bowl, crying a little when a beloved leaves for good, and being, reliably, the one most likely to take a dog home. Ten of them, over the years, she has — and six hundred more have found their people through the shelter she gives her Fridays to. She's still the safest bet on the team.

With love to Kayin & Lobo, and to George Clooney, Star, Cash & Rider.