SHELBY, Mont. — The collie in Pen 171 carefully nudges her gleaming steel food bowl just enough to tip some of the kibbles to the ground. She noses the nuggets into a small hole in the dirt floor and pushes wood chips over them.
"A lot of the dogs bury their food as soon as we feed them," Barb Mercer shouted over the cacophony of 170 dogs celebrating the arrival of breakfast in the cavernous 4-H building. "They hadn't been fed in so long, they want to save it."
This is Camp Collie, and Mercer is one of the army of volunteers who have cared for these animals since Halloween night, when U.S. Customs officials discovered them crammed into a reeking truck-trailer at the nearby Canadian border crossing. The animals were soaked in urine and feces.
With animal cruelty charges pending against the dogs' owners, this town of 2,800 has the difficult task of caring for the dogs, mostly collies, and 11 cats. But what could have been an expensive, unpleasant legal obligation has turned into something else in Shelby, a farm community on the wind-swept High Plains -- a point of immense pride.
The townspeople, and many others for hundreds of miles around, brought food. They brought straw for bedding. They sent cash. And they came in droves -- day after day, week after week, for more than three months now -- to walk, feed, groom and clean up after the collies.
"It's for these guys. I love these guys," said Kerry King of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, looking out at a sea of collies. She makes the 100-mile one-way drive four times a week to help out.
Customs officers were shocked when they opened the trailer belonging to Athena Lethcoe-Harman, 40, and her husband, Jon Harman, 49. The animals were filthy, cold, emaciated, dehydrated, sick and cowed, officials said. One dog was dead.
Lethcoe-Harman, a nationally known collie breeder, told officials that they were moving her operation from Nikiski, Alaska, to Arizona. Border authorities referred the Harmans to county authorities for prosecution under state animal cruelty laws. They now face 181 misdemeanor counts. Responsibility for the dogs, as evidence, fell to the county sheriff.
The stench and filth were so bad that crews wore hazardous materials suits the next day to unload the animals' cages at the fairgrounds.
