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Seven thousand feet over Central Illinois, a chocolate lab puppy rests its head on the shoulder of pilot Pete Tobin, seemingly lulled to sleep by the hum of the plane’s engine.
“On every
rescue there’s about one dog that stands out,” Pete says through the
headset, “one that makes it special and makes it all worth it. This
little guy is the most special one on this trip.”
Just hours
ago, this special little guy was in line to be euthanized at the Wayne
County Humane Society. Instead he and 16 other dogs, plus six cats, were
taken to the Fairfield Municipal Airport, where they were loaded into
the back of a small, single-engine Columbia 350. A plane that normally
seats four humans is now flying 22 strayed, orphaned and unwanted
animals to Chicago on a flight path towards a brighter future.
Pete and his
wife, Karen Johnson, are part of a growing corps of aviators who
volunteer their weekends and their personal planes to support rescue
flights posted on an Internet forum called Pilots N Paws.
The
organization was founded in 2008 and serves as an online meeting place
for animal rescue groups to coordinate with more than 2,500 general
aviation pilots willing to use their personal airplanes to transport
shelter animals to towns where they could be adopted.
According to Pilots N Paws,
more than 4 million unwanted pets are euthanized each year because of
overcrowded and underfunded shelters in mainly rural locations. The
pilots are able to save these animals by flying them to no-kill shelters
or to adoptive families, often located hundreds of miles away. The
pilots spend their own money to pay for the flight, which in the case of
a Columbia 350, costs $400-plus for a tank of gas.
“I’ll take as
many as we can,” says Karen, who spends her day job working as the
president of a concrete cutting business based out of Morton Grove. “The
alternative is they drown them, they take them out back and shoot them
if it’s a puppy mill, and if it’s animal control they just euthanize
them.”
For many of these animals, a rescue flight is their only chance of survival.
“Once you get
in the air they mellow out quite a bit,” says Pete as he glances back
at two puppies sleeping in the back seat. The Glenview couple says they
stopped counting once they reached 50 animals carried aboard their plane
on trips across the Midwest and the East Coast. But the record for most
in one flight was on this day when 22 animals flew from Fairfield to
Chicago.
A pair of
beagles sit in one crate, while another contains a mother West Highland
Terrier and her four babies. Only one dog was unable to fit safely
aboard and had to be left on the ground to wait for a truck to carry him
on the five-hour journey north.
“Sometimes
it’s so stressful,” Karen says about carrying the animals by truck.
“They’ve had animals die being transported from Tennessee all the way to
Chicago because it’s so much stress and so many more hours on the
ground.” The rest of the pets enjoyed a smooth one-and-a-half hour
flight.
After the
Columbia 350 gracefully touches down at Chicago Executive, Pete taxis
the aircraft alongside a van marked ARFMOBILE, where volunteers from
Animal Rescue Foundation – Illinois are waiting to pick up the precious
cargo. One by one, the cats and dogs emerge from the plane. Their next
stop is the no-kill shelter where they are spayed or neutered before
being put up for adoption.
“They don t
know that they need to be happy,” says ARF Illinois President Ann
Persenaire, carrying a crate full of cats off the airplane. “They don’t
know that life’s gotten good.”
If you would like to support these organizations, or adopt one of the animals, go to the following sites:
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