Mayor Rescues Puerto Rican Pooch

A new furry, four-legged friend accompanied Bethlehem Mayor John Callahan during his workday on Tuesday.

Jeter is a 2½-year-old Portuguese water dog, which the Callahans adopted over the weekend. They traveled to Newark Airport to pick the dog up after its rescue flight from Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico has a “huge problem” with stray dogs, according to Cesar Millan—known to many as the “Dog Whisperer.”

In a recent Huffington Post blog, Millan wrote about a documentary film called 100,000, a title which refers to the estimated number of homeless dogs living on the streets of Puerto Rico.

Dogs there are starved, struck by cars, thrown in the trash, abused and tortured, Millan wrote. The estimated kill rate in Puerto Rican animal shelters is 97 percent. In one incident—known as the Barceloneta Massacre—80 dogs were thrown off a bridge to their deaths.

Jeter was rescued by Stray from the Heart, a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization whose mission is “to rescue, rehabilitate and place homeless dogs with loving new families.”

Most of the 1,800 dogs the organization has rescued have come from New York shelters where euthanizing is imminent. But it also has projects to rescue dogs in Puerto Rico and Ecuador.

“I don’t have enough good things to say about them,” said Mafalda Callahan, the mayor’s wife. Stray from the Heart picked the mayor’s family out of hundreds who had applied to adopt the dog that was known as “Shaggy” on the Stray from the Heart Petfinder website.

The Callahans didn’t set out to adopt a dog from Puerto Rico. At first, the goal was to find a new Portuguese water dog, Mrs. Callahan said. Their last dog, Scout, was a Portuguese water dog that died of liver cancer in January.

Preferred by families with allergies to pet dander, like the Callahans, the breed has grown even more popular since President Obama’s family adopted one after taking office. They have become increasingly difficult to find, Mrs. Callahan said.

When the dog arrived at the airport, it smelled so bad that the Callahans decided to keep the car windows open for the whole ride back to Bethlehem.

After allowing him to sniff around his new home, they threw him into the bathtub and gave him a good scrubbing. Jeter wasn’t happy, but he still displayed a good temperament.

“If there was a time for him to nip or bite at us, that would have been it,” Mrs. Callahan said.

Not long after his bath and a meal, Jeter was lying on the couch as if he had lived there all his life, she said.

The mayor said he had some “major anxiety” over bringing what had been a stray dog into his home.

“When he arrived in that cargo crate, smelling as bad as he did and his tail was still wagging, I knew we were going to be all right,” he said.

And now, one of the 100,000 has a new lease on life in Bethlehem.