By now she had Paddy happily licking drops of water off her fingers in the back seat as her husband drove.
Still, she found Paddy's odyssey a little puzzling. "I do wonder why somebody in California would want to bring this dog all the way across the country. Quite frankly, I'm sure I could have found an animal I loved right here in Tennessee. Why wouldn't you search your local area? But they must've seen something in this pretty fella."
As she spoke, about 250 dogs needing homes were being housed at the shelter in Orange County. Most would end up euthanized.
Many groups limit the distance they will allow animals to be transported.
"Just because you can do a multi-state run doesn't mean you should," said Peg Banks of Anchorage, who for eight years headed the original online Canine Underground Railroad, on which many other groups pattern themselves. "I'm absolutely certain animals get moved into places where it might not have been necessary."
But transporters say there are many reasons for far-flung adoptions. People sometimes can't find a certain breed in their region, so they look farther afield. Finding homes for older or disabled animals can be difficult within a small range. And there are sharp regional disparities in the number of available pets.
"We have some areas of the country now where we've done enough spay and neutering that you really don't have surplus puppies and kittens," said Annette Rauch of the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. In other parts of the country, she says, things are grim.
She and others pointed to the rural Deep South as a region short on publicly funded animal control of any kind. Transports, she said, are a way to address "excess breeding that was leading to euthanasia of perfectly healthy 8-week-old puppies."
But Kate Pullen, director of animal sheltering for the Humane Society of the U.S., says transports can actually aggravate regional disparities by allowing officials to evade responsibility for strays in their area. She said people's energy would be better spent pushing for spay and neuter programs.
For Sescilla and other transporters, the policy debates take second place to what they see as a compelling need. "If you've tried locally and [finding a home is] not happening, then you do whatever you need to do to save that dog," she said.
A Road Buddy
