by Andy MacAlpine
Animal lovers descended on a Mauckland, Ind., puppy mill near the Kentucky border in early June to rescue 240 dogs from lives of confinement. Among them was someone with an unusual resume: six terms as a legislator in the Indiana statehouse.
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Rep. Lawson was the driving force in the Indiana legislature to push through a law to protect dogs from mass breeders.© The HSUS |
Wearing a yellow animal rescue T-shirt, Rep. Linda Lawson helped move dogs from their cages onto trucks that would take them to a a nearby emergency shelter. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to alleviate their suffering; Lawson had spent the past year fighting against
puppy mills in a different arena--pushing for legislation to make it harder for these mass breeding facilities to operate in Indiana.
A 2007 recipient of The HSUS’s Humane Legislator Award, Lawson has a history of effective advocacy for animal bills, and H.E.A. 1468 was no exception. She showed pictures of puppy mill dogs on the House floor and fought hard as puppy mill interests tried to weaken the bill. Signed into law in May, the legislation took effect July 1.
“If we had anyone other than Representative Lawson as a sponsor, this all would have been dead a long time ago,” says Anne Sterling, Indiana state director for The HSUS.
It wasn’t long after the victory that Lawson got a visceral reminder of why she has worked so hard to help dogs trapped in puppy mills.
Ground Truth
When Sterling invited her to join The HSUS’s convoy to southern Indiana on June 2, the legislator jumped at the chance. As she worked, Lawson saw large groups of dogs living in igloo-shaped plastic shelters with a single point of entry and breeding dogs stacked in cages kept inside the house.
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Anne Sterling holds the now-named Sugar Bowl when she was rescued earlier this summer. The HSUS |
One of the dogs handed to Lawson was a Pomeranian. “When you walked up to her cage with the door closed, she would be jumping and smiling and trying to get to you,” Lawson says, “but when you opened the cage, she would run to the back and stand there and shake. [The dogs] thought it was feeding time. But holding on to her, she just clung to you.”
Lawson held the dog a second time later that day while her picture was taken, and she kept track of her the rest of the time she was there. Before she left, she told Sterling that she would like to see the Pomeranian go to her local shelter, the Humane Society Calumet Area in Munster.
A Happy Ending
Later that month, Lawson took her 7-year-old granddaughter, Genavive, to the shelter to adopt a dog. It wasn’t long before Genavive spotted the Pomeranian. The two met in a nearby room, and the dog immediately started licking the little girl’s face. Soon memories of the Pomeranian imprisoned at the puppy mill came rushing back to Lawson.
“Genavive said, ‘Grandma, I think this is the one!’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Thank you, Lord. It is the one!’”
When they were thinking of what to name the dog, Lawson mentioned that she looked like sugar. Genavive liked it and even added a unique middle name.
“I thought she was going to say Sugar Baby, or Sugar … something. But she said Sugar Bowl,” Lawson says with a laugh.
Sugar Bowl is more than 300 miles and a lifetime away from the nightmare of her earlier days. At just two years old, she’d already had two litters and was pregnant again when Lawson first saw her.
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Sugar Bowl loves the safe arms of Rep. Lawson's granddaughter, Genavive.© The Lawson Family |
Now spayed, caught up on her shots, microchipped, and regularly groomed, Sugar Bowl wears a pink diamond collar and sleeps in a pink bed. And every day, instead of suffering the isolation of a cage, she shares her home with a 15-year-old Dalmatian and gets to play with four other dogs in the neighborhood.
“This is a little girl who was afraid for you to grab her and pull her out of a cage, and [now] she just wants to be held. And she just runs around the backyard like a wild goat,” says Lawson, who visits Genavive’s family often.
“She’s a lucky little dog, and we’re lucky to have her.”
Learn how you can fight puppy mills»
