She suddenly found herself with 19 dogs. But now she can’t imagine life without them.
Katherine Canedo Valdez is in the middle of explaining how she loves the 17 dogs she owns like they’re her children, when she suddenly pauses, scratches her head, and realizes that — wait a second — she actually has 18.
But then as soon as it falls out of her mouth, she doesn’t seem so sure of that number either.
“Cuantos perros tenemos?” she asks her husband. “That we got over here? Eighteen?”
They then spend a full minute counting out loud and in their heads and on their fingers, both contributing names to the list — Sam, Buddy, Chop, Junior, Domino, Pituka, Pitaka, Lala, Bella ... — then they lose count and start all over again. Another full minute later, Katherine shrugs.
“It might be 19,” she admits, as one of them climbs in her lap and another pants over her shoulder and maybe two or three (or four?) can be heard barking in the back of her little rented house in east Charlotte.
She does some math one more time before throwing up her hands. “Yeah, it’s 19. I do have 19 dogs.”
How did she get to this point? To the point where she has 19 dogs living in and around a 994-square foot, two-bedroom, one-bath house in the Oak Forest neighborhood near Reedy Creek Park that she also shares with her husband, her teenage sons and her godfather? To the point where, because she unexpectedly was asked to move earlier this summer, she had to scramble to find another landlord who would allow 19 dogs?
It’s kind of a funny story. But parts of it are also kind of sad.
‘Oh my God. It was so many babies.’
The saddest part is that it all started with Katherine’s former next-door neighbor, who — roughly 2-1/2 years ago — tied his three pit bulls to a tree in the backyard; repeatedly told Katherine he’d come back for them while he was in the process of moving out; and after he left with one last load of stuff just-plain never did.
For the first several days, one of her sons would bring food and water to them. It soon became clear to her, though, that being tied up outside 24 hours a day wasn’t a tenable longterm solution for these pooches.
She says she called CMPD Animal Care and Control, but was told its shelter was over capacity. The rescues that she contacted also turned her away. The fact that they were pit bulls didn’t help. So after a week and a half of sending her sons next door, she decided it was time to untether the three dogs and bring them over to her house.
Since she already had three of her own dogs, jumping to taking care of six seemed like a huge deal. She hadn’t seen anything yet.
Because she hadn’t seen yet that the two female dogs’ stomachs were expanding.
“At the time, we didn’t know two were pregnant,” Katherine says. “Then probably two weeks later, they started having babies. And I was like, Oh my God. It was so many babies.”
The first one had nine. From there on out, it was hard to keep up.
“Out of the 11 babies, three had passed when she delivered them. We had eight left. And I was giving them away — I gave four away from her litter,” Katherine explains. (It is, not surprisingly, easier to rehome cute little puppies than adult dogs.) “Then maybe a week later, the other one had her babies. She had nine, and out of those I gave away two.
“But I told people, ‘If you can’t take care of ’em, please just give ’em back to me. Like, two that I gave away I ended up getting back ...”
It’s no wonder she’s lost count.
Things could have been worse
Katherine says that, for the most part, she eventually stopped trying to give them away.
Her reasoning? “To me, pits bring the wrong type of person. I don’t want nobody fighting ’em. They’re not that kind of dog.”
“They have feelings. They get hurt. They cry. If they step on something, they’ll yell. Like a baby, you know? ... I know how some people think of (pit bulls). ‘They’re dangerous. They’ll bite you,’ or, ‘They’ll turn on their owners.’ ... No. Because as you saw, all those dogs in the backyard, they’re lovable. Because we talk to them and we treat them like kids. Like family. Because that’s what they are — we’re their best friends, and they’re definitely our best friends, and I have no problem.
“They never talk back to me when I say something to them,” she says, laughing.
So, she’s resigned herself to keeping them unless the perfect rehoming situation comes along for one of them.
RELATED: Pit bulls scared her. Then one inspired her to commit an astonishing amount to help them.
And fortunately, despite her current house being small, it has had a big backyard to offer. Fortunately, she’s got a husband who has been able to use the skills he’s honed in his blue-collar jobs to build a network of kennels in that big backyard.
She’s got a landlord easygoing enough to allow both the dogs and the kennels for the past 2-1/2 years. Because the dogs primarily live “outside,” she’s got a “three or more” permit that has allowed her to keep more than a dozen of the dogs outside, their living arrangements having been approved by a city inspector.
It hasn’t been easy, especially recently. She had a major knee surgery in the spring and since hasn’t been able to work her job as an assistant manager at a nearby gas station, instead making what she can by selling and reselling used items online. But fortunately, she says she and her family have been able to scrape together the $150 a week it costs to feed all 19 dogs, in no small part because her 17- and 18-year-old sons offered to get jobs specifically to help cover those costs, she says.
The latest hurdle: She was recently given notice by her landlord that he wanted her to move out so he could help a family member who needed a place to live.
RELATED: Your dog or your home? Some Charlotte dog owners forced to make a tough choice
She panicked. She was sure no one else would allow her to keep 19 dogs as a renter. But someone she told about her predicament told someone else, and — long story short — it got relayed to someone who offered a workable new living arrangement, out on an old farm in Monroe.
They’ve been slowly and carefully moving pieces of kennel to (and constructing new pens on) the property all month.
While the house itself is a fixer-upper, and it’s on her and her husband to do a lot of the fixing-upping, she’s fine with it. She says she’d live in a camper if it meant she could keep the dogs.
As for whether it’s actually rational, or appropriate, or even healthy to own this many dogs in the first place ...
‘Probably looks like a hoarder situation’
Katherine would like to reiterate that she didn’t ask for this.
She didn’t have any sort of fixation on collecting dogs over time. For years before this, she had just three dogs. Lots of people have three dogs. Then she had that fateful choice to make, thanks to a deadbeat former neighbor: Ignore the strays; let Animal Control take them away — in which case there’s a good chance they would have ended up dead; or take them in and care for them herself.
She didn’t dream of owning 19 dogs. It just suddenly worked out that way, and once it did — once she got used to being around them all — she couldn’t imagine life without them.
“It’s probably hard to understand,” Katherine admits. “It probably looks like a hoarder situation. ... But it wasn’t like that. I fell in love with something I couldn’t control. I couldn’t control that they had babies. I mean, I could control not bringing them over here, but I couldn’t live with leaving them over there.”
She explains that she’s out back talking to them all the time, that her sons play with them every day, and that they get plenty of attention in general.
Sometimes, she says, a dozen or so of her 18-year-old son’s old high school football teammates (he graduated from West Charlotte this year) will come over and they’ll all walk the dogs down the street together.
The only major concern — and she recognizes it’s a major concern — is that the old neighbor’s dogs and their puppies haven’t been spayed or neutered. What’s stopped her, she says, is worry about the expense and the logistical challenges involved with getting all of the dogs to a provider who can fix them, given her own limited resources. Her interim solution, she says, has been to take care to always keep the males in pens away from the girls.
But she’s been told about some organizations that might be able to help, and has promised to reach out to them.
In the meantime, Katherine says:
“You could say they could be better taken care of. That’s probably true,” she says. “I mean, 17 dogs is a lot.”
Someone reminds her that the number is 19. “Nineteen. Nineteen dogs is a lot,” she corrects herself, nodding and laughing.
“But I’m doing the best I can.”
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Two quick postscripts: After the story was originally published, Stand For Animals — a Charlotte-based veterinary clinic — called to offer to fix all of Katherine’s unspayed and unneutered dogs for free. Also, a GoFundMe that was started to help Katherine and her family pay for dog food, supplies and better kennels at their new home has nearly reached its $2,000 goal. For more information: https://bit.ly/3LAxOkR.
