Volunteers - Caring for Animals

People come to causes in all sorts of ways.

In 1973, Carmen Lasar was 47 years old and raising a family here in Alameda when she realized that a Peking duck on the lagoon outside her Water View home was injured. On closer inspection, she discovered that the duck was actually very badly injured: Someone had pinned its wings to its sides with hatpins, probably to prevent it from flying away.

Lasar called the city's animal shelter-which at the time was a shack with just one employee and a wood-burning stove-for help. "He said, 'Lady, if you want that duck, go get it,' " the elfin-featured 80-year-old says now with a chuckle. "So a neighbor took me out in a paddleboat, and I threw a towel over the duck's head and brought it back. The poor thing was so immobilized it hardly struggled."

Lasar took the duck to a local veterinarian, who ended up amputating the wing because it was so badly infected. Lasar took the duck under her own wing for several weeks, keeping it in a back bedroom until it was well enough to be taken to a chicken farm in Sebastopol, where it could live out its years.

Lasar's friend Nina Franck (the wife of Russell Franck, whose family's music store stood on Park Street for 75 years) had already started a small organization devoted to helping the city's tiny-and very under-funded-animal shelter. (Franck, too, had been inspired originally by a duck-one that was being "pecked to death" on a lagoon near Grand Street.) And Lasar was on the board of the Oakland SPCA, so she understood how animal welfare organizations operate. Together, the two women hatched a plan for a novel humane society: one that would support the municipal animal shelter, rather than running its own rescue and adoption services.

"At the time, the city's animal shelter was receiving a lot of criticism," Lasar says. "But we thought it didn't need criticism as much as it needed help." Adds Franck, "We wanted to create a group for people who cared about and wanted to help animals. We started small but really grew."

Indeed, since those early years, the Humane Society of Alameda has shepherded the shelter from a wood stove-heated shack run by the city's Department of Engineering to a full-fledged urban shelter under the aegis of the Police Department. HSA paid for all the office equipment and furniture to furnish the new shelter, which was built in 1983, and also developed the shelter's spay and neuter program, which subsidizes the cost of alteration for all animals adopted from the shelter. The society also has provided grooming equipment, animal carriers, feral cat traps, dog leashes, a washer and dryer, night receptacles and other supplies to the shelter-in addition to a free vaccination clinic for cats and dogs each year in Littlejohn Park, veterinary care for shelter animals and free adoptions, via the Patricia Ide Adoption Fund, for Island seniors on fixed incomes.

"It's just so sad when lonely elderly people come into the shelter wanting to get a companion and can't afford it," explains Marion Holt, who has served as the society's president for 23 years.

Most important, HSA initiated and fully supports the police department's canine unit. "In 1993, the police department called me and said they needed a police dog," Holt says. "The dogs cost $7,000 and have to be shipped from Europe. We used funds from a special bequest to pay for it." Since then, HSA has bought the department eight dogs-as well as the dogs' bulletproof vests and the barriers for the police cars.

"Marion Holt is a godsend," says Harry Guillen, the dog trainer for the department's K-9 unit. "She has provided us with dogs, ballistic vests, special carriers to keep them safe in our cars, even remote door openers, so if officers are in trouble, they can let the dogs out of the cars to help. If it wasn't for HSA, we wouldn't even have a K-9 unit, as the city's funds are so tight right now."

Now in its 33rd year, the organization-whose board consists almost entirely of women in their 70s and 80s who don't always agree on the society's history, mandate, or future-is looking for both new money and "new blood," notes Leslie Carter, one of the newer, younger board members. "We definitely need young people with fresh ideas and energy, and we need some new ideas for fundraisers."

That challenge in no way diminishes the society's very real accomplishments, however, especially in the eyes of co-founder Franck. "When I get blue, I think of how the organization has grown over the years and how much we've accomplished," she says "I feel so blessed by God and the many people who have helped us help pets over the years."  _

Contact HSA at P.O. Box 1571, Alameda, CA 94501, or by calling (510) 337-9457. Annual memberships are $20 per year; a life membership is $100.