Shelters bring dog, human back together
Domestic turmoil separated woman from her canine companion
SANTA FE — After taking her toddler and fleeing domestic turmoil two months ago, Nina Malone was desperate to get back the 13-year-old dog she had to leave behind in Florida.
They had been through so much together. In the 10 years since she had adopted the Rhodesian ridgeback mix in Bellevue, Wash., they’d moved to the Chicago and San Francisco Bay areas, back to Seattle, then to Florida.
When Malone was pregnant with her son Kelly, who will be 3 at the end of this month, Sadie the dog would lie with her head over Malone’s stomach, as if looking after the life within.
This week, after a lot of telephone calls, emails and tears, animal shelters in two states brought the dog and her humans back together.
“I felt this is right — this is the way the world is supposed to work,” said the exuberant Malone in between ball tosses for Sadie outside the Santa Fe Animal Shelter on Thursday. “I’m so happy.”
Malone’s separation from her canine companion came after the move to Florida, where changes in her domestic life prompted her to get out of the state.
“I had to leave,” she said. “I had no friends or family down there. I was feeling not safe.”
With emergency relocation money from a local program,
she had to leave within 48 hours. She said she arranged for people she knew in Florida to take care of Sadie, while she came to Santa Fe, where she had lived 15 years ago while learning massage therapy and where she still has friends.
The arrangements for Sadie’s care didn’t work out, and Malone’s attempts to find someone through Craigslist who could drive the dog to New Mexico failed. Initially without Malone’s knowledge, Sadie was dropped off at an animal shelter in West Palm Beach.
But Sadie had a microchip, and Malone still had the same cellphone number. Su Jackson Ross with the Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League in West Palm Beach called, Malone said, initially frosty, but professional, under the impression she had simply abandoned her dog. Then Malone tearfully poured out her story.
Some photos Malone sent the shelter of better times together and a presentation from staff to the Florida shelter’s board resulted in a decision: They’d fly Sadie to New Mexico.
The shelter coordinated the transfer with the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, whose executive director Mary Martin drove to the Albuquerque airport to pick up the dog on Tuesday.
Malone and Kelly are staying at an emergency shelter for women and children in Santa Fe, but she thinks she has found a foster home that will take Sadie by this weekend. And Malone said she has a job possibility that would eventually allow them to live together again.
“Either way, I’m just really blessed,” Malone said. “I’m just so grateful for Su and her compassion — all of them, all the people who worked with her.”