A Strays Best Friend

By Ptolemy Tompkins

Courtesy Guideposts July 2004

Abandoned dogs roam the streets of East St. Louis by the thousands, many of them wild. They trust no one, Except One Man.

Randy Grim used to be terrified of everything. Crowds, Unfamiliar places, Strangers, Stressful situations. Everything, that is, except dogs. He worked with them every day at his St. Louis, Missouri, grooming shop.

Still Randy got a bit of a shock one morning years ago when he discovered a bedraggled collie mix in front of his shop. “She was pregnant, but so skinny you could see the outlines of the puppies she was carrying. One of her back legs was lame. An eye was swollen shut. I started stressing out. I wanted to help this dog, but I was afraid I didn’t know how. Then, with her one good eye, that dog gave me a look I’ll never forget. A look that said, “I need you. Please don’t turn away.”

Randy didn’t. “It was like something I didn’t even know I had inside me took over. Something stronger than my anxiety.” He lured the dog into his shop with some food. “I called Animal Control. They told me she’d be put down. The Humane Society couldn’t help, either. There was no place for this dog to go.”

Randy paid for Bonnie – that’s what he christened her – to be treated by a vet, and for an emergency Caesarean. Bonnie had an infection of her mammary glands so her 13 puppies needed to be hand fed round the clock. Randy bought 13 bottles of nail polish at the drugstore and painted each puppy’s nails a different color so he could tell them apart.

“As soon as I’d finish feeding the last puppy, it would be time to start over with the first. I devoted every waking hour to them. My friends all thought I was nuts. But in my heart I felt like it was what GOD wanted me to do.”

Randy found homes for Bonnie and every single one of her puppies. He went back to work. But from then on, he noticed something. The city was full of stray dogs. He would see them on the highway, peering out of abandoned buildings, sniffing around dumpsters. He began picking them up. “I saw Bonnie in all of them. And a little of myself too.” Randy says.

Randy is addressing a problem that increasingly plagues America’s inner cities – feral dogs. Not merely strays, but animals that have in part turned back into wild animals. People get dogs to guard their homes, or to train them to fight, then decide they don’t want them after all. The animal is let go, with no idea how to survive.

Today Randy rescues stray and feral dogs full time. He drives his van through some of the toughest neighborhoods in East St. Louis, looking for animals people have given up on.

“People think that once a dog’s turned feral, there’s no reaching it. I understand what it’s like to live in fear. I’m patient. If I keep going back to visit a dog, one day I’ll see what I saw in Bonnie’s eyes that morning. “I need you.”

And in a way, Randy needs them too. “When I’m rescuing dogs, nothing scares me. That’s how I know that is what God wants me to be doing.”

POST NOTE: Early one afternoon Randy Grim got an unexpected phone call. It was a worker from the local dog pound. “The woman said they’d had to euthanize some unwanted dogs with carbon monoxide,” says Randy. “But after the twenty-minute procedure was over, they found one dog still alive.” The woman felt the dog must have survived for a reason and wanted to find him a home. Randy adopted the one year old basenji himself and named him Quentin. “No one can explain Quentin’s survival,” says Randy. “I believe God stepped in. Quentin’s living proof that anything is possible.” More information about Stray Rescue of St. Louis www.themanwhotalkstodogs.com