Photo: Mrs. Long Beach Kym Cloughesy, with Delaney Cloughesy
Kymberly Cloughesy is in training for her new job position 11 hours of the day, four days a week. She spends numerous hours more volunteering as an animal rescuer and advocate; has two grown children, one of whom lives at home; and manages to have a loving marriage of shared interests to Phil Cloughesy, a Long Beach Police Department officer whom she describes as “a saint.” Like Justin Rudd, founder of Community Action Team (CAT), she either manages on three hours of sleep a night or has a clone.
Kym has volunteered and worked in several capacities for the Long Beach Police Department for most of the past 15 years, with three interim years spent in the PR department of Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Most recently, she was the East Division Police Service Specialist until her position was eliminated because of budget reassignment. She’s now in training as a public-safety dispatcher. On Nov. 4, Kym was awarded her latest title, Mrs. Long Beach, at a ceremony sponsored by CAT at the Grand Ballroom. She handily passed the swimsuit and evening-wear competitions as well as the interviews, but Kym feels that what she does outside the ballroom weighed heavily in her winning the title.
“I think part of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been volunteering for at least the past seven years—maybe even longer than that,” she said. Kym’s involvement includes community work with the LBPD, the Police Officers Association, Community Action Team events Friends of Long Beach Animals and Friends of the El Dorado Dog Park. But her work with Best Friends, a national animal welfare organization centered in Kanab, Utah, that mentors community programs and especially working toward no need for shelter euthanasia is where her red carpet takes her heart, soul and spirit.
The National Geographic Channel show Dogtown introduced Best Friends to Kym and Phil. The show is a no-holds-barred animal-rescue program set at Best Friends’ headquarters shelter in Utah. It presents seemingly hopeless, horrible animal-abuse situations and the tireless work done by veterinarians and pet behaviorists to attempt to reverse them. “I’d sit at home and watch—it piqued my interest and taught me a lot,” Kym said. “Then I heard that there was a Best Friends superadoption in Los Angeles, so the husband and I decided to go out on Date Day with no intention of adopting. I then made the decision to be a volunteer with Best Friends.”
“No intention of adoption” aside, the Cloughesy household includes not only a cop of Irish descent but also four good-size dogs with a Gaelic lilt to each of their names. They were all adopted from different shelters: Murphy from spcaLA, Delaney from Best Friends, Guinness from SEACCA in Downey, and Dublin from Agoura Hills. Kym says that the first adoption came from seeing the need during a Santa Paws delivery one Christmas.
“We’ve always been animal lovers, but we never had the opportunity to have dogs in our household since Phil and I were together because we were renting,” she said. “Shortly after moving into our house five years ago, we made a decision that we were going to get a dog. The first place I went was to the Pitchford Companion Animal village, and I adopted from the spcaLA side.”
The Cloughesys have volunteered at the L.A. shelter for the past two years, and Kym worked for six months there while she was still working at the LBPD. She served as a dog caregiver and an instructor for the dog-handling class that new volunteers are required to take. Besides the schlep to L.A., she and Phil also do transports for Marley’s Mutts in Tehachapi, sometimes at 3 a.m.; help the Red Nose Lucy Foundation in its shelter assistance efforts, and are training for disaster relief at Best Friends. The organization recently transported pets from shelters in Staten Island, Long Island and New Jersey that were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Both Cloughesys said that they’re ready to use their vacation time to go in the next catastrophe.
“Although local support is very important, you have to think globally,” Kym said. “You can help more this way.”
Kym represents Mrs. Long Beach and Best Friends at a special pet fair at Recreation Park honoring Kait and John Seyal (at left, with their dogs Grace, Jenny and Max) at the final two and four legs of their Dog Walk Across America. (Want to read a great blog? Click here.)
That’s a big part of Kym’s Mrs. Long Beach platform: working toward realizing Best Friends’ humane no-kill mission (click here for a brief overview). Looking at our shelter population and the number of dogs, cats and rabbits abandoned to the streets and born in them, this seems like an impossible dream. But Kym’s no quixotic windmill chaser—she says that there are four ways to do it: educate, adopt, spay/neuter and volunteer.
This is one of Best Friends’ No-Kill L.A.’s billboards, which to the uninformed may appear to be an ad for designer jeans for cats.
“The ultimate goal is to reduce the number of animals in shelters—I believe it’s a five-year goal to bring the numbers down,” Kym said. “I believe that one of the biggest things that our city of Long Beach needs to tackle first is education. People need to understand that they’re not going to get a ‘higher-quality animal’ from a breeder. Just because an animal is in the shelter doesn’t mean that it did anything to get into that situation. Animals get lost, animals get relinquished, people just don’t have time or a home for them, people overbreed animals. People go to pet stores and purchase animals for 12 to 15 times the cost of getting a rescued animal—and these pets come from puppy mills. My personal belief is that there should be litigation on the books that says that pet stores cannot or will not sell cats, rabbits or dogs that were purchased from breeders. I encourage anyone who makes the decision to go into a pet store to go to a shelter first. Think about the decision you’re making by purchasing or breeding an animal, and then think about which animal in the shelter you would make the decision to euthanize.
“And we need to encourage people to adopt from our shelters. Long Beach has a good platform, and many people, especially high-profile ones in the city [Mayor Foster and his wife, Nancy, are famously fond of ACS adoptee Noah], have adopted from our shelter. Anyone who has a voice needs to step up and share the message because if you don’t step up and rescue an animal, how are we going to convince other people to do it?”
Not spaying or neutering a pet is a big, big factor in shelter euthanasia. The littermates who weren’t given away, dumped alive in trash cans or unceremoniously killed by the owners wind up in shelters where they’re euthanized if homes aren’t found or an already overburdened rescue pulls them out.
“There are approximately 6,000,000 animals who die every year in shelters across our country,” Kym said. “There is no shortage of animals, nor will there be one any time soon. Everything I’ve heard from veterinarians and everything I’ve read [about spay/neuter] contradicts anything else I’ve heard about it being bad for an animal. It lessens the chance of testicular cancer, the animal is less likely to stray from your house—people seem to believe that it changes pets’ personalities—if anything, it calms them down.
“And I am sick and tired of hearing people tell me, ‘I just want my children to see an animal have one litter.’ [With that one litter], we’ve brought six to 10 more into the cycle that we now have to try to find homes for. And if you manage to give them away, do you know if the people you gave them to will give them good homes—and did you bother to get them spayed or neutered before you gave them away? People need to realize that this uses their tax dollars. Local government has to pick up the cost of those animals who were brought into the system.”
The fourth element, volunteering, is walking the talk, and sometimes the dog. “If I can get people to get their butts out of their houses and do something, I’m going to do it,” Kym said. “If you can’t adopt, foster. If you can’t foster, volunteer. If you can’t volunteer, donate—and I encourage people to donate locally as well as globally. If you can’t donate, share stories on Facebook. If you can find two hours a week to spend with an animal that’s in a shelter, you’re going to possibly make a difference in that animal’s life—you can actually share with someone else the true essence of an animal you’ve worked with and say, hey, this is the personality I’ve seen. This dog likes playing ball. This cat likes rubbing up against you. If you can share these stories with potential adopters, we’ll get more people into our shelters.”
And if, in five years, there’s still shelter overpopulation and mass euthanasia of animals?
“Then we’ll continue on our mission, because if something can be done at that level to bring the numbers down in the city of L.A., it can be done anywhere. This is our planet, these are our animals, and we have the responsibility to care for them.”
The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
~ Jane Goodall
Virtually Pets
Found Animal Foundation’s 12 Pets of Christmas
“On the second day of Christmas, I gave all my true love
To two cats a-purring
And a grinning pittie, silver as chrome.”
Hulk and Radio, males, about 5 months old. Need to be adopted together. Ask for ID# A482087.
Beautiful Ava, about 9 months old. Had a rough start and needs a soft spot. Ask for ID#A479085.
The Found Animals Foundation is offering coupons for $30 off cat adoptions and $40 off dog adoptions at shelters throughout L.A. County up to Dec. 23. Hulk, Radio and Ava are available on the shelter side at Long Beach Animal Care Services, 7700 E. Spring Street, and there are a whole lot more than 12 in there as well as on the spcaLA side. Click here for information.
Pet Projects
Operation Santa Paws, through Dec 22
Haute Dogs’ Santa Paws is again coming to town to give all good shelter pets—which means all of them—treats, attention, love and possibly forever homes to anyone who simply can’t resist them. Visit the Santa Paws website or find them on Facebook for the wish list that includes everything from toys to cleaning supplies, the locations of the drop-off boxes and shelter drop-off instructions.