Sherri Stankewitz, the founder of the Long Beach nonprofit West Coast Animal Rescue (WeCARe), is accustomed to the heartaches and headaches that go with extreme animal rescue. She’s so used to it, in fact, that when an officer from the PET Investigation Foundation drove into the Seaport Marina Hotel parking lot, a frequent host of WeCARe’s adoption events, and interrupted the biggest adoption event that WeCARe had organized, all she said was “Damn.”
The officer said that she was over the limit in dogs (there were around 30 of them at the event) and needed to clear them out in about an hour. Worse, not a single person had come to even look at the dogs.
“It was blistering hot, and we had all these dogs!” Stankewitz said.
WeCARE had its beginnings with several rescuers who met eight years ago in Long Beach. Stankewitz had been the sole manager of South Bay rescue Sparky and the Gang, and the reorganization promised to help dogs find homes in a huge way.
“Everybody became a family,” she said. “We do things together, even go on vacations together. It’s about the animals, but we’ve created an amazing group of friends.”
The amazing group of friends recently spent several months planning an elaborate prank called “All Dogs Must Go!” on their founder through Prank It Forward (PIF), a nonprofit charitable organization that may have been conceived when Queen for a Day got together with Candid Camera and put steroids in their offspring’s formula. Nominations of worthy recipients are submitted to the website, and a winner is chosen from tens of thousands of entries (click the link and enjoy the heartfelt supergags they created—they’re wonderful). The producers then team up with a brand partner—Barefoot Wine & Bubbly joined them for “All Dogs Must Go!”—and create a scenario that spans a few weeks and results in the lucky victim receiving life-altering rewards for his or her good work.
“I had actually seen some of their stuff online and I thought it was so amazing—I like to pay it forward, and I love pranks,” said Tee, a WeCARE volunteer since the beginning. She submitted Stankewitz’s nomination and was overjoyed when PIF picked it out of 20,000 submissions.
As part of the prank, Tee and another volunteer, Louise Montgomery, sprang an impromptu rescue event on Stankewitz, and there was no accompanying publicity to bring in their usual crowds. Stankewitz had no idea what was going on, and she was on her last nerve by the time Pet Investigative Foundation showed up.
“Kimy had said, we’re going to have this big event!” she said. “And I said, why? There are no flyers, nobody knows about it—and you want me to bring 30 dogs? Meanwhile, Louise was letting all these dogs go to foster homes instead of the adoption event. Where’s the money [from adoption fees] going to come from? And Louise says, Oh don’t worry about it. And I say, I’m worried about it! I gotta pay the rent!”
Even if she’d thought of it, Stankewitz had no time to Google “PET Investigation Foundation,” and she wouldn’t have found anything anyway. It was way under an hour when the officer drove up again and gave the dogs marching orders.
“Hang on a second—I want to show you something,” he said ominously. He walked over to a covered vehicle hitched to his truck and pulled the cover off to reveal a brand-new trailer. It was donated to WeCARe by the Airstream corporation and decorated with the organization’s name, its logo and dog-related graphics. Stankewitz put both her hands over her face in disbelief.
“Then all these people started coming out—they were coming out the front, they were coming out the back, like sardines—and I started crying,” she said.
“All Dogs Must Go” is without doubt a 10-Kleenex production. It was over a year in the making and expresses more about Stankewitz, the volunteers and the dogs than words ever could, but I’ll give it a shot.
WeCARe goes above and beyond what most rescues do. Many of the dogs that Stankewitz pulls from the shelter or goes after to save are pets that are considered unadoptable. She and the volunteers don’t believe in that word.
“I’m like one of the old-school people in rescue—I’ve been around for 18 years, and I found that you’re supposed to rescue injured animals,” Stankewitz said. “When I went to the shelter, I would go right to the back room where all the injured dogs were. Sometimes, a leg has to be cut off because it’s so damaged, but it’s better for the animal, and they do get adopted. They do get adopted! He’s still a normal dog even if he’s missing a leg, an eye, half a tail, or mange, which is completely treatable.”
Stankewitz and the crew also have made a contact in Tijuana, where they’ve gone several times to rescue the hardest of cases. There was Rosarita, apparently hit by a car and ill with mange. WeCARe fixed her up to be beautiful and found her an adopter.
Rosarita shows what a lot of love and care can do. Photo courtesy of WeCARe.
Little TJ had been found covered in mange, dirt and excrement and living in a trash heap. He’d been attacked by a larger dog, leaving his back legs paralyzed. He’s now been adopted and trots in his little wheelchair to WeCARe events. The worst case was Cheyenne. All four of her legs had been sawed off. The veterinarian whom Stankewitz entrusted with her surgery fell in love and adopted her.
Can you believe it’s the same dog? TJ’s new life is thanks to the rescue efforts of WeCARe. Photo courtesy of WeCARe.
Tee’s nomination and a look at the WeCARe website where many success stories are featured motivated PIF’s supervising producer, Casey Casseday, to single out Stankewitz’s nomination.
“The story stuck out,” Casseday said. “We did research and read articles that had been posted about her.”
Stankewitz marveled at the planning, ingeniousness and outright cunning that went into the project, as well as the ability of the volunteers to keep a secret.
“They had to have a cover,” she said. “[Before the adoption event], some people came into the kennel and said that they were going to make a ‘dog-umentary.’ So I said, oh yeah, whatever, come on in and film it. I’d just done another TV show, and I thought, great—more publicity!”
Meanwhile, there was a lot of cloak-and-dagger by the volunteers to find homes for the 30 dogs that were in the kennel or staying with fosters, including vetting potential dog parents to make sure that the home they offered was a good one. They eventually found adopters for all of them, including eight senior dogs who went to Muttville, a San Francisco-based senior-dog-rescue facility that had homes waiting for them.
“It was more work than my own job!” said Tee, who is the founder of an at-home care assistance company for human seniors.
Most of the people pouring out of the Airstream were the adopters come to take their new family members home. Casseday himself adopted a dog, whom he named Stinky. The first person out was Susan Hemmerich-Wetmore, a close friend and fellow rescuer who had moved to Texas and hadn’t seen Stankewitz in quite a while.
“When he opened the door and I saw Susan, that’s when I knew it was a prank,” Stankewitz said. “The trailer, OK—but what was Susan doing there? You know, when you’re pranked, you think people are going to go crazy, but you’re kind of stunned!”
Casseday then popped the champagne provided by Barefoot Wine & Bubbly and presented Stankewitz with additional gifts: a vacation for two to Aruba, which she can certainly use, and a donation to WeCARe to pay their expenses for a year.
“This covers a lot of our bills!” Stankewitz exclaimed “And a trip to Aruba! Seriously?”
From left: Sherri Franklin, Muttville volunteer; Stankewitz; Tee; Heather Rowe, Muttville volunteer; and Hemmerich-Wetmore. Photo courtesy of Louise Montgomery.
Casseday was delighted with the entire production, which he called the “big get of the year” (PIF produces pranks on smaller scales).
“Anytime we do one of these things, there’s no second take,” Casseday said. “We try not to do anything too mean—we want to ride that emotional roller coaster. It all comes down to that one moment, and we were thrilled at her reaction. She cries at the drop of a hat—she’s an amazing human being!”
“Everyone thinks I’m a hardass, but I am a baby—I really do cry.” Stankewitz said.
So, what makes Stankewitz cry? Of course, the inhumanity she sees on an almost-daily basis accounts for a lot of the tears. And, like any animal rescuer worth the name, she wears out.
“No matter how hard you work, you’ll still have animals to save,” Stankewitz said. “It’s like putting your finger in a dike when you’re only doing what you can. And people don’t realize how much work it is. I could sit in the shelter with dogs all day, clean up their poo, and be totally happy—but the truth is, animal rescuers aren’t machines and aren’t getting by on a cloud of love and passion. It’s hard, and so many rescuers want to quit. An animal rescuer often doesn’t think of the self in balance—they want to save the entire planet, and even if they just stick local, it feels like that’s what they’re doing.”
There’s also the paradoxical nature of volunteering—they’re a huge blessing and a lot of work for the organizers . Volunteers who stick with organizations like WeCARe through literal hell and high water—also literal, if you’ve experienced a busted water pipe at a shelter—are worth more than their weight in grain-free pet treats. WeCARe has a sizeable cache of jewels, like Henna Lee, who has walked the rescue’s dogs on a regular basis since her niece, volunteer Nadith Schuster, prodded her to come along.
“I went to walk one dog for one day,” Lee said. “Three years later, here I am.”
A shared passion and a willingness to work hard can take a load off an organizer’s back, but there are still thorns in the side.
“Volunteering is a responsibility, not just for the volunteers but also for figuring out where and how to use them,” Stankewitz said. “You find positions for the volunteers, schedule them, bring provisions to the shelter, do the laundry, washing the leashes when they get dirty, doing adoptions, washing the cages out after adoptions—not always just a fun part. That’s where we lose volunteers sometimes—they just want to do one particular something.”
There’s paperwork, too—lots of it, and more than what’s used in puppy training. Yeah, there’s that, too.
Success is often described as making something extremely difficult look easy, the way the adorable cats and dogs at adoption events make it look.
“We are the biggest rescue group in Long Beach, and we place probably 800 animals a year in great homes,” said Montgomery. “We love the support of Long Beach and its surrounding communities. The problem with rescue, though, is that it’s 24/7, and you can’t always drop everything to show a puppy that somebody wants as a birthday present.”
Stankewitz is grateful for those 800 annual bright spots as well as for the supernova that PIF brought in.
“Thanks to Prank It Forward, there are no vet bills this year, and I want to say, those guys were really awesome,” Stankewitz said. “They were into their job—they’re really helping people and making a difference.”
Yes, she is.
Donate to WeCARE, apply to volunteer, and look at the stories of TJ and Rosarita here.
Above, left: Stankewitz enjoys cuddles with her rescue dogs and her own Bobo, who takes up most of the space on the left. The signage and shelter furnishings were donated by Save Our Shelter. All photos by Kate Karp unless otherwise indicated.
“If people knew how hard I worked to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful.”
~ Michelangelo, artist