ANIMAL ADVOCATE OPENS HOME, HEART
Award-winning writer, husband have seven dogs, a cat
Award-winning writer and her husband have seven dogs and a cat in their Four Hills home.
Matt, a black Lab with graying snout, 14 years old and better than 100 pounds, is snoring softly nearby on a floor of Kate and Wally Kuligowski’s roomy Four Hills house. Kate rescued Matt near an Albuquerque grocery store on a fiercely hot day just this past June, but he’s so at peace you’d think this had always been his home.
Holly, a small, black-and-white Chihuahua-rat terrier mix, also about 14, is snoozing on a love seat, cosily wedged between a visiting reporter and the backrest. The Kuligowskis got Holly this past Christmas Eve
after responding to a call from a
Valencia County woman who needed to place some dogs she had rescued.
M’Lady, a coalblack dog with long, glamorous ears, 13 to 14 years old, a cocker spaniel with perhaps some Saluki blood, is stretched out in repose on a couch next to Kate. M’Lady was in the euthanasia room of an Albuquerque shelter when Kate and Wally got a call asking if they could take her in and save her from her fate.
“Cocker spaniels were once the honey heart of the dog world and then people just started throwing them away,” Kate said. “At one time we had eight cocker spaniels. We’ve always had a lot of dogs — maybe 13 or 14 at most.”
There are seven dogs living with the Kuligowskis now. “We also have a cat upstairs,” Kate said. “We rescue cats, too.”
Writing for change
In February, during ceremonies in New York City, Kate, 80, received a Maxwell Medallion, presented by the Dog Writers Association of America, founded in 1935, for her column, “The Integrity of Our Words,” which appeared in Ruff Drafts, the DWAA newsletter. The column attacked the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to purge from its website documents that alerted the public to abuse by dog-breeding facilities and biomedical animal laboratories. The column also challenged dog writers to use their platforms to prompt reinstatement of vital information on the USDA website and push for legislation protecting animals from abuse.
This was Kate’s second Maxwell Medallion. She received the award in 2015 for her book “Our Most Treasured Tails: Sixty Years of Pet Rescue.” Her book “Let’s Git Outta Here,” about the Valencia County Animal Shelter, was a finalist for this year’s Maxwell in the rescue and adoption book category. Her 2016 book “Goodbye Bad Guys,” about the Bernalillo County Animal Cruelty Task Force, was a Maxwell finalist as have been two articles she wrote.
Her books are self published and available through theguyspublishing.weebly.com. All proceeds go to New Mexico rescue organizations.
Although very much gratified by the awards, Kate said the reason she writes is to make things better. And sometimes she feels that winning national awards is easier than changing things.
“Our state has so many rural areas and no spay and neutering,” she said. “Our shelters don’t require veterinarians. It’s just like we want to keep killing (euthanizing).” She wants her readers to get involved by combating animal cruelty in any way they can and by holding their legislators responsible for their votes on animal issues.
“Become involved,” she said. “We need good spay and neuter laws. And you can’t have a dog without chipping it (implanting an ID microchip).”
Dogs for me
Kate has had a deep and abiding love for dogs since she was just a few years old and her father brought home Sinbad, a debonair black-andwhite Boston terrier he had rescued from a burning trash barrel in a Borger, Texas, alley. Easy to see where she gets her rescue instinct. But she also shares an appreciation for dogs with her late maternal grandfather.
“My grandfather always believed that dogs were God’s gift to make us better people,” she said. “But when I was little, I didn’t want to be a better people. I wanted someone to love me. In the beginning, I clung to dogs. I needed dogs for me.”
Now, it’s more like she needs to be herself for dogs. Kate, who is from Clovis and a graduate of the University of New Mexico, found a kindred spirit in Wally, a New Jersey native she met while he was stationed at Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis.
It was Wally, 83, a retired dentist, who found Bear, a chow-Shar-Pei mix, about 9 years old and one of the seven dogs in residence. In this case, a rescue dog came right to their door.
“I went out to pick up the morning paper and there he was,” Wally said. “He was hardly more than a puppy. I picked him up and brought him in. We put ads in the paper, but no one answered.”
Bear has permanent swelling in his left rear leg and ear problems that impair his hearing. He’s shy but happy.
Being happy is a challenge for Jake-O, 5, a fawn-colored pug with a black mask. But no wonder.
“We get a call (from a shelter) saying, ‘We’ve got a dog just for you.’ That means it has big health and behavioral problems,” Kate said. “He had been stabbed in the back and had Clorox sprayed in his eyes. This dog was violent. He was biting all the kennel workers. After surgery, he had all these tubes hanging out of him.”
At the Kuligowski house, the little pug bit all the other family dogs and went after Kate and Wally.
“We named him Jake-O, like mako shark,” Kate said.
Jake-O is more relaxed and friendly now. For the most part.
“The smell of Clorox makes him go wild,” Kate said.
Respect life
While Wally practiced dentistry, Kate taught high school in New Jersey and New Mexico. And for a 10-year span she was a volunteer education director, first for the Animal Humane Association of New Mexico and then the Watermelon Mountain Ranch animal shelter. Accompanied by dogs that were often blind or deaf, she visited classes K-12 in schools around New Mexico, teaching youngsters proper respect for and care of pets.
“If you can respect life, you can respect yourself,” she said.
She and Wally found Burn, about 10, a black-and-brown German shepherd-hound mix, along the side of a road as they drove from Albuquerque to Edgewood. He had been badly burned, perhaps from crawling under a truck that was low to the ground and hot. Burn still needs a little space, so on this day he was in a room upstairs.
But Oscar, a 6-year-old black-andwhite Boston terrier, the seventh dog in the Kuligowski household, strolled in to check things out. A neighbor’s daughter found Oscar wrapped in a towel at a Gallup rest stop when he was just a puppy.
Can’t say no
Kate named Oscar after her gallant-hearted father, the man who saved the Boston terrier named Sinbad from a burning trash barrel. Her father died when Kate was 4 and Sinbad was the dog she clung to in her loneliness and despair. But an uncle abruptly killed Sinbad after the dog bit the hand of a cousin who had kicked it.
It was an early and terrifying introduction to animal cruelty and the reason that all these years later there’s always a lot of dogs at the Kuligowski home.
“You can’t say no,” Kate said. “Because it means the life of a dog.”