‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’
Organization rescues 10,000th animal, says demand still unfulfilled; Pittsburgh Aviation Animal Rescue Team only sees the need growing
Willow, a nervous, 7-month-old terrier mix shelter dog, was supposed to make the trip from Kentucky to Pittsburgh last week so that a rescue group here could find her a home.
But Willow was still recovering from a coyote attack that had landed her in a shelter in Kentucky, and her two-hour flight to Pittsburgh was delayed a week.
That unfortunate delay turned fortunate for Willow. She became the star attraction Saturday afternoon when she landed in the Pittsburgh Aviation Animal Rescue Team (PAART) plane with five other dogs that flew in from a small airport in Morehead, Ky., to the Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin, greeted by a half dozen reporters and television news cameras there to mark the moment, complete with champagne.
Willow was the 10,000th animal — the overwhelming majority of them dogs, but also cats, guinea pigs, sea turtles and one butterfly — that PAART has transported to a better life since the nonprofit’s founding eight years ago.
“It’s a special moment for our organization,” said Jonathan Plesset, co-founder of PAART and the owner of the Shadyside Inn.
His co-founder and longtime friend, Brad Childs, owner of The Dog Stop Upper St. Clair, said while hitting 10,000 animal transports by plane and truck is important: “We’re just getting started.”
“We’re at the tip of the iceberg. We have plans for bigger planes, bigger trucks, more volunteers,” he said.
While PAART has gotten attention in recent years for some of its more dramatic transportation trips of animals from hurricane zones, or to escape slaughter for meat in South Korea, or overwhelmed shelters in the Carribbean, Willow’s rescue was actually a much more typical transportation from rural Kentucky.
After being taken from her crate from the small plane, she was given to Krystal Soukup, a volunteer with Bridge to Home Animal Rescue, based in Eighty Four, which will first place Willow with a local foster family, and then select from applicants to give her a new home.
In all, between the plane and a PAART truck, 21 dogs were brought to the airport to be given to one of five rescue groups that would find them homes. Four of those dogs, including Willow,
would go to Bridge to Home, which only started in 2017 and helped rescue 500 dogs in just its first year.
“There’s so much need,” Ms. Soukup said.
Having PAART provide a connection and source of animals for them “is great,” she said, “because there are a lot of shelters out there on their own that can’t find homes for all the animals they have.”
PAART, whose headquarters are at the airport, is part of a word-of-mouth system that has evolved in the United States over the past decade-plus that connects overwhelmed and underfunded animal shelters — many of them in the rural South — with better funded shelters with more potential pet homes, largely on the East Coast.
Serving as the link between them is PAART, which uses some of its 120 volunteers and two employees to either drive a truck or fly a plane stuffed with animal crates to a shelter with more animals than it can handle, pick them up and deliver them to a shelter or foster rescue group that can find them new homes.
Mr. Plesset said that PAART is probably one of just four similarly sized animal rescue transportation organizations across the country that are “bigger than just one guy with a plane.”
That one-guy-with-a-plane model is sort of how PAART got started.
“It was really kind of an accident,” Mr. Plesset said. “We took flying lessons [together] on a whim in 2004. Brad called me after he saw a sign advertising the lessons and I said, ‘Sure.’”
Mr. Childs said the two longtime friends had been going through a phase of trying more and more extreme sports, from snowboarding, to mountain biking, to skydiving – “Basically trying to kill ourselves,” he said with a laugh.
Animal lovers, they made their first animal transport of a dog in 2006, and started doing a few on their own over the next few years, finally getting serious about it in 2011 and officially registering PAART as a nonprofit in 2013.
From there it has grown exponentially to the point where, thanks to successful fundraising and grant writing they were able to hire a full-time executive director, Mary Kennedy Withrow, in 2017.
Last year, they hired a “land captain,” Dennis Bayne, who oversees pick-ups and deliveries by truck, which make the up the majority of their “missions” or trips to pick up animals.
The growth has allowed them to greatly increase the number of animals they rescue, rising from that one in 2006 to a couple hundred a year five and six years ago, to nearly 3,000 animals transported last year.
The pace is picking up even more this year, Mr. Plesset said.
In February, PAART had 12 missions by land and air, transporting 290 animals by driving 130,000 miles and flying another 1,200 miles.
“We could be running multiple missions a day and still not be meeting the demand,” Mr. Plesset said.
The recent increase is being driven largely by the organization’s decision to actively seek out cats to transport as well, not just dogs and the odd exotic animal with a special need.
Of the 500 animals transported so far this year, for example, about 150 of them have been cats, said Ms. Withrow.
Though the demand is there, and PAART has managed through hard work, fundraising and grant-writing to make it all work, Mr. Childs said they still continue to get the same question over-and-over from people who find out what they do with their free time.
“Why don’t you help people instead of animals?” Mr. Childs said they are asked.
Mr. Plesset said what he and Mr. Childs have long realized is that animals “impact peoples’ lives in real ways.”
“This is helping people. But the conduit is through animals,” he said.