Job Corps steps up to make doghouses for seized animals

PALMER — Ever since the Mat-Su Borough seized 157 dogs it says were starving and dehydrated from a Willow-area breeder, support has been pouring into the animal shelter.

Wednesday, people were waiting outside the shelter with help to offer. A representative of a local construction company asked which the shelter would prefer — a pallet of food or a check. A man with a hay bale in the back of his car asked where to drop it off. A woman with an empty dog lot volunteered space. The help has not slackened.

“It’s pretty much like it was yesterday,” Animal Care and Regulation Manager Richard Stockdale said Thursday.

He said the borough is still asking for everything it asked for Wednesday — metal dog bowls, fencing, plywood, zip ties, tarps and Science Diet Advance Fitness Original dog food. Stockdale said he’s planning for the worst-case scenario; that the dogs will be in the borough’s custody for the long term. Which might be a good plan. He has to hold onto the dogs until the court case brought against their owner, Frank Rich, wraps up, a process that can drag on for months.

Still, he said, if the dogs leave and he’s got some supplies left over, the shelter has ongoing needs.

“It’s not like it’s going to go to waste around here,” he said.

Over at the Alaska Job Corps center in Palmer, 20 students in the construction program’s carpentry class were sawing up sheets of donated plywood Thursday morning.

“We have a very simple design for doghouses,” said Cleve Robinson, construction industry supervisor at the center. “One sheet of plywood will make one dog box.”

He said that the houses will have flat roofs and raised ever so slightly off the ground,

“It’s good training for our students,” Robinson said. If a student isn’t qualified yet to run a table saw, he or she can nail the pieces together. “Students of all different levels of skills can be a part of it.”

Part of Job Corps’ mission is to participate in community activities. Robinson said the construction program has done a dozen or more similar community projects. Other things the kids had been doing have been set aside while the dog houses are being built.

“We started this morning when they donated the material and we’ll keep going until it’s gone,” Robinson said.

He said that since the shelter needs the houses as soon as possible they won’t be painted. But they are made of a type of wood that can stand up to the weather. He estimated the students would produce something between 50 and 80 dog boxes. The houses will be built to last.

Asked if the shelter has a use for more than 50 doghouses when it’s not overrun with dogs, Stockdale said he could think of a number of things. They could be sent to prisons where inmates provide obedience training for shelter dogs. They could be put in reserve for use in responding to some kind of natural disaster.

On the fund-raising end of things, Julia Durand, president of Alaska Dog and Puppy Rescue, and Linda Henning, publisher of Alaska Dog News, coordinated with borough officials to set up an account at Wells Fargo to accept donations from the public.

As of Thursday afternoon, Henning said, the account contained $12,000. She said people can also donate directly to the shelter or to groups like Willow Dog Mushers Association, Alaska Dog and Puppy Rescue or Homeward Bound in Fairbanks.

Stockdale, who has been on the job for about a week, said the outpouring of support has been a great help.

“It’s nice to see the Valley and the community is getting behind us,” he said.

In addition to dog supplies, he’s received things like breakfast pastries and jugs of water for the water cooler. There’s been so much of it, he said, he’s having trouble keeping track of it all, a fact that isn’t helped by his lack of Valley experience.

“I’m so new here I don’t know who they all are,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.