Country Roads Transport

~ BY SARAH ELKINS

It’s transport day at Country Roads Transport and Rescue. That means Valerie Colella is up before the sun. She and one of her board members are making the trek to a high-kill animal shelter in the coalfields of southern West Virginia. They’ll be transporting nine dogs just shy of their euthanization date to a rescue organization in Hagerstown, Maryland. Foster homes have been prearranged for each of the dogs being rescued. If not for today’s transport run, all these pups will be put down next week. 

It’ll be a long day of driving. Not to mention, Val could use a couple extra hours of sleep. She was up late negotiating every square inch of her transport van to fit the animal crates necessary for today’s rescue mission. She calls the process “Petris.” It’s like the video game Tetris, but the stakes are higher. 

Val is the president and founder of Country Roads Transport Rescue, a non-profit organization established in 2014 to network, foster & provide life-saving rescue transports for animals in high kill pounds and shelters. 

She’d be the first to say she doesn’t do her work alone; she has a cadre of big-hearted volunteers on her side, but, no doubt, Val’s a boss, as the kids like to say. She has a big voice and an even bigger personality. If she’s in the room, you know it. And you’re probably going to get a big Brooklyn hug and, “How the hell are ya?!” 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Val comes by her love of animals honestly. Her parents instilled it in her from the beginning. 

“There was always this sense of wonder, excitement, and enjoyment, a sensitivity to being around living creatures. And I was always a very sensitive kid,” she says. 

It wasn’t until 2012 or 2013 while living in Manhattan that Val got involved in animal rescue through a comedy of errors. One weekend she’d happened upon the Animal Care & Control of NYC website, a network of kill shelters that covers Manhattan, Staten Island and Brooklyn, and discovered the “red list.” The animals on the list would be euthanized if they weren’t adopted immediately or snagged by a rescue service. The fee to “reserve” a dog was $65. Val watched the site throughout the day keeping her eye on two dogs. Eventually, she called and paid the fee to reserve the dogs. She had saved their lives, so she thought. 

The next day, both dogs were back on the kill list. Val called the shelter to discover that all she had done was flag the dogs for rescue. This was a tool intended to allow rescue organizations to reserve the dogs they intended to pick up for transport. Val was devastated to learn that not only had she not saved the dogs, she’d caused them to be passed over by rescuers. 

As it turned out, one of the two dogs was rescued, but the other was not. Val was determined to get the dog, a female Pitbull, out.

“I was contacting people like crazy,” she recalls, “On Yahoo groups, people I’ve never met before all over the country, trying to figure out how to get this dog out of the kill shelter.”

She eventually found a Pitbull support group and a woman in Red Hook, NY willing to foster the dog. 

“I had to go down and actually fake adopt her to get her out because she was in what they call isolation,” Val says. “She had kennel cough which meant that she was not viewable to the public. She was as good as dead.”

The woman in Red Hook fostered the dog for three months until a permanent adoption placement was made in Indiana. Yes, Indiana. Val was learning the hard way getting a dog out of a kill shelter was only the first step. Securing a foster home and a permanent home were just as important. But there was still one enormous missing piece of the puzzle. Who would transport this one dog from New York to Indiana? 

“I didn’t have any transport contacts or resources. So again, I went back to the network groups,” Val says. In the end, she pieced together enough transport legs so the dog could make the 12+ hour trip. She raised $350, and five complete strangers stepped up to drive two-hour legs.

“That’s really difficult. Usually, you can only find one-hour legs, and making them all match up is the problem. It was really kind of a miracle,” she says. 

Val’s introduction to the world of rescue transport, traumatic as it was, was the sort of trial by fire that would pave the way for Country Roads Transport Rescue. If she hadn’t stumbled her way into the inner workings of big city high kill shelters, she never would have known to ask the questions she started asking when she moved to rural West Virginia a year later.

Left to Right: Gina Anderson, Stacy Hayes, Jane DeOlloqui, Kayla McCoy and Val Colella

Truth be told, there is more than one saint at CRTR accomplishing many “small things with great love.” Val has through the example of her compassion grounded in real action collected a powerful group of likeminded people as the Country Roads Transport Rescue Board of Directors. They include Greg Jensen, Vice President; Jane DeOlloqui, Treasurer; Courtney Hereford, Secretary; along with Kayla McCoy, Gina Anderson, Stacy Hayes, and Rose Cochrane. 

To find out how you can support their good work, visit CRTRescue.org. Oh, and that Pitbull from Brooklyn? She’s still happily living in Indiana with her forever family.