Watson is not only alive but free from certain death.
The 10-year-old English Setter was held in limbo at the Denver Animal Shelter, his fate undecided. It’s great news for the dog and for his many fans.
Watson made headlines as it looked like his time was up Sunday at the city’s municipal shelter where his family had taken him after biting their toddler. Dog rescue groups and dog lovers have been hounding the shelter with emails, calls and social media postings, including children holding “Save Watson” signs.
It worked. On Monday afternoon, Watson was released to a volunteer from Southwest English Setter Rescue, which rescues and rehomes dogs in eight states, including Colorado.
“We really beat them down,” explains the rescue’s president Susan Dunlap, who was elated on the phone Monday afternoon. “It shouldn’t have had to be this difficult.”
The white and brown speckled dog will undergo a full health assessment since current records show he has dental issues and be placed in a foster home with behavioral assessments and supports but without young children.
Watson’s high-profile case should make shelters across the state rethink their adherence to rigid policies on when to kill a beloved family pet. I use the word “kill” because I dislike euphemisms. Dead is dead.
Rescue efforts hit a wall last week when according to the family, the city shelter had promised to give the dog back if a good home without children was not found, and then it reneged.
The shelter dug in its heels, saying the surrender was permanent, and they had the documents to prove it.
Team Watson stepped up, however, with protests and social media shares, including from No Kill Colorado, which says too many animals are needlessly killed in our shelters. Denver’s MaxFund and Southwest English Setter Rescue of Texas promised to find a home for Watson, one without small acrobatic and unpredictable children. English Setters can live 15 to 18 years old, and Watson has a lot of years ahead of him.
The Denver Animal Shelter’s once-rigid resolve proved malleable, showing that people can, when the situation calls for it, do the right thing.
The truth is, our city-run and publicly funded animal shelters have discretion over subjective life-and-death decisions, and the lines they draw are often arbitrary as they depend on outside factors, such as overcrowding and lack of funding.
Denver Animal Shelter saw a 120% increase in the number of owners surrendering their pets in the last year for a variety of reasons, including housing instability. So did other metro area shelters.
A good example of arbitrary lines drawn happened when my friend Clay took a small black cat he found to the Humane Society of Boulder Valley to find out later this cat had been killed because she wouldn’t let anyone pick her up. The shelter was overcrowded, and this cat was labeled unadoptable.
As a longtime dedicated volunteer at this shelter, my friend was so infuriated he had a “Come to Jesus” meeting with the director, who to her credit, made it so that people who relinquish an animal can sign a piece of paper and be notified if that animal is later labeled unadoptable and reclaim the animal before being killed.
I’ve benefited from this policy myself, having reclaimed a black lab mix I helped rescue, who after two weeks gave a “hard stare” at staff and was thus labeled too aggressive to adopt. This dog is now living with an outdoorsy family in Parker who says Louis is the perfect companion; he just needed to find the right humans to love and the space to thrive.
Dogs are sometimes labeled unadoptable in other ways. Clay told me a heartbreaking story about an English bulldog who wouldn’t receive a life-saving surgery because of limited funding, and it became a choice of saving several younger, healthier animals or this one dog. The dog lost.
Watson was labeled unadoptable for being unsafe based on information of prior aggression toward the young child, the shelter reports. This was the first and only time he bit, the family says.
Michael McNutt of Oklahoma is an expert on English Setters, having rescued them for 25 years and currently has three, including Bart, who turns 10 July 26, and who had once bit a family member before McNutt took him in.
“English Setters don’t usually bite and are not aggressive dogs,” McNutt says. A shelter in Utah was set to kill Bart but chose to release him to the Texas Rescue. “Bart is a big sweetheart, and I walk him twice a day every day. He sees kids in the park and sits to let them pet him.”
In Watson’s case, we have a sleeping senior dog with some dental issues and likely pain, startled by a tiny person who jumped on top of him. It’s reasonable that Watson didn’t even realize he had bit a family member.
This is the whole point. Every dog and every situation is unique, and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to dogs and humans alike.
Julie Marshall is national communications coordinator and Colorado director for Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy, based in Washington. She is a Colorado native, former opinion editor for the Daily Camera. She won first place for her columns on mountain lions and bison of the West from the Colorado Press Association 2021. She is the author of “Making Burros Fly,” a biography of Cleveland Amory, media personality and animal advocate.
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