Sadie has a new home — for now, at least. The previous one didn’t last.
She has neighbors on both sides, separated by cinder-block walls topped with chain-link fencing. Her bed somewhat resembles a small trampoline, with stiff fabric suspended within a plastic frame. It’s durable, probably because they expect her to try to rip it up — that’s not uncommon around here.
Sadie and about 100 other dogs live here, at the Durham County Animal Shelter, which is managed by the Animal Protection Society of Durham. APS has run the shelter for 36 years and takes in almost 4,000 animals each year—dogs, cats, guinea pigs, goldfish and, at the moment, a suckerfish kept inside a glass tank, which is inside a metal enclosure next door to some rabbits.
Sadie is a 10-year-old mixed breed who was surrendered by her former owner. The laminated blue sheet clipped on the chain link door says that she’s easy-going and adaptable. Each dog is assigned a color—blue, pink, green or orange—that corresponds to their temperament, kind of like a Hogwarts House but for homeless animals.
The Sorting Hat
The “Sorting Hat,” then, is run by several people at the shelter. First is the behavior team, a group of specialists who test incoming cats and dogs for their reactions to various situations. For example, specialists use a fake plastic hand to gauge aggression, particularly as it relates to guarding food. To judge curiosity or fear, the specialists introduce novel objects like dolls to the animals.
Apart from the analysis by the behavior team, volunteers, medical staff and animal care staff log observations from their interactions with the dogs with Megan Whitney, APS’s Behavior Manager. Whitney synthesizes the information in a short blurb about each dog, posted outside their kennel and on the APS website. Nelly’s online profile promises that “If you’re looking for someone who greets every morning with all the wiggles and a curious spirit, I’m your girl.”
This information and the results of the behavior team’s tests determines the color each dog earns.
Orange dogs are energetic and active. Green dogs are shy and sensitive. Puppies are rated pink because the behavior team cannot confidently place them into a personality category just yet. And blue dogs like Sadie are right in the middle: playful and versatile, recommended for first-time dog owners and a wide variety of households.
Sadie’s blurb also says that she has an old soul but a “young heart,” despite her heartworm diagnosis. Heartworm can be treated with injections, but exercise has to be limited. As a result, Sadie is not allowed to take long walks or play in the yard. Still, she seems sharp. Her eyes, ringed with white fur, attentively follow anyone who walks by.
There are a lot of people walking by on any given day. Volunteers arrive as early as 7 a.m. to take dogs outside. For the next 10 hours, an assortment of high school students, young children who come with their parents, adults and retired folks perform odd jobs at the shelter. They walk dogs, dangle feathery toys in front of cats, take candid photos of the animals for the adoption page and refill medications for the veterinarians.
“They all love animals in some different way,” Director of Development and Marketing Carolyn Wiley said of the volunteers.
Veterinary staff walk by, too, on their way to their office. Separated from the rest of the shelter, the vet office is the quietest place at the APS. On the counter, a small device resembling a see-saw gently rocks two medicine bottles back and forth, back and forth. On the opposite wall, a metal cage holds two cats recovering from upper respiratory problems. They take long, slow blinks as if resisting sleep.
Once you step outside the vet office, though, you’re hit with a wave of sound. The dogs are easily excited by the traffic in the hallways, so it pays to be quiet. Passersby are encouraged to reward silent dogs with treats, taken from a tiny bucket clipped to the chain link fencing and tossed into the enclosures. Old dogs, new tricks.
Soda bottles, scent gardens and other enriching things
Chester Cheeze wants the one thing he can’t have. He smushes his snout against his kennel door and longingly stares at the enrichment area a few yards away. He’s five months old, named for his penchant for, well, cheese. Typically, puppies are coded as pink by default, but Chester was already orange: highly energetic.
Despite this, he is (temporarily) banned from enrichment—specifically, running, jumping, rough-housing, playing, swimming and walking because he is recovering from being neutered
For medically cleared dogs, however, there’s no shortage of enrichment. In the shaded area next to the kennels, one particularly strange object stands out. The structure resembles a hurdle made of PVC pipes, but a metal rod pierces through four empty soda bottles, suspending them at roughly snout-height. When treats are dropped into these clear bottles, dogs are encouraged to nuzzle them to remove the snack. Judging from the massive dents in each of the bottles, some dogs take the game more seriously than others.
There’s also the Becky Heron Memorial Play Yard, named for the former Durham County Commissioner, where a husky runs laps around a bemused volunteer who squints down at him in the sun.
Further out on the property is a trail where volunteers can walk shelter dogs. The winding path is shady thanks to a canopy of trees above. The trail itself is perhaps the most visible evidence of the shelter’s volunteers. It begins with a scent garden, a raised bed with mint, chives and other aromatically interesting herbs planted by Girl Scout Troop 21. Just a few days ago, one community member came by the shelter to install a birdhouse he had made: a replica of Snoopy laying on his red doghouse. It dangles from a tree overhead.
Just a few more days until Chester Cheeze can see it for himself.
The Cottages
Longer days and warmer weather mean it’s the beginning of the breeding season for cats, so APS can expect an influx of kittens any day now.
As a county-owned shelter, the APS is legally obligated to admit any animals brought to its door, regardless of their condition. So when the shelter is stretched too thin, the staff then have to make difficult decisions: who is most likely to be adopted? The more difficult animals—feral, aggressive, sick or injured—may be euthanized to ease the burden of overcrowding.
Wiley said that finding homes for large or stereotypically “aggressive” dog breeds is the hardest. Take The Viscount, for example (and yes, his name is The Viscount). He’s a 70-pound, 7-month-old German Shepherd mix that would require a large, fenced-in yard. Or look at Sunflower: a pitbull mix who just likes to sniff, but whose buff appearance may deter insurance companies or HOAs.
“That’s one of the hardest things […] knowing that there’s not going to be a space for everybody,” says Wiley.
Kitten season is especially challenging for the shelter. That’s why the APS encourages neutering and spaying procedures—the fewer fertile stray animals roam the streets, the fewer puppies or kittens dropped off at the APS in the spring. All cats and dogs at the shelter are spayed or neutered, and the procedures are available at discounted rates for Durham County residents.
But when The 9th Street Journal visited in early spring, the APS had some vacancies. One of the shelter’s two cat “cottages–” small rooms where cats can freely roam, play and sun-bathe—was empty. In the other, an orange cat named Tony meowed insistently while his roommate, Rufus, snoozed in a cardboard box.
The other cat kennels are emptier than usual, too—a pleasant surprise that Wiley attributed to rising rates of spays and neuters that decrease the shelter’s intake of new cats, and rising popularity of cats due to their low-maintenance lifestyle compatibility. Apartment dwellers who work long hours are increasingly converted into cat people, it seems.
In Loving Memory
The shelter’s customers aren’t simply either dog or cat people. There also are fish people.
Wiley recounted a tale of a woman who surrendered 70 freshwater fish to the APS a few weeks ago. The fish belonged to her recently deceased father, and she could not keep them herself.
Leah Santelli, the Shelter Operations Manager, asked nearly every patron she encountered at the shelter if they were interested in taking home some fish. One day, a customer took the bait (pun intended) and left with 40 of them.
“It was wild,” says Wiley.
A dog person, Wiley first encountered the APS in Aug. 2011, when she and her husband adopted their beloved pitbull mix Baloney. The couple stayed in touch and attended their galas—Wiley felt indebted, in a way, to the place that gave her Baloney. She formally joined the APS three years ago and leads their donor stewardship efforts. She finds comfort in seeing the shelter’s impact on animals in need.
“For the time we have them, they’re getting the care they need […] some of these animals have never really had a lot of concern or care given to them, so we’re able to make sure that we’ve met those needs,” she says.
Baloney died last fall, but like so many other animals, she left a legacy.
Update: Sadie was adopted on April 23, 2026.
Photo at top: Sadie, a dog in the Durham animal is coded blue because she is mellow and happy-go-lucky. Photo by Lila De Almeida – The 9th Street Journal
Lila De Almeida
