Gump is currently at Pets Alive in Middletown, NY
(This was first published in the Village Voice, 1995)
Maggie’s Visits the Farm
Whalen takes Negroponte and myself on the official Pet’s Alive tour. Andrew, her pet steer, actually comes running over like a dog when she calls him by name. Every animal at Pets Alive has a horrendous history. The horses were about to be butchered; a goat was abandoned with a broken neck; the pony had a fractured jaw from a wack in the mouth with a two-by-four. It would be a gross understatement to point out that Whalen loves her animals. The more relevant question is whether she loves them too much.
Whalen is tied into the vast network of New York rescuers, animal rights lawyers and shelter workers who deal with thousands of dogs and cats each year. When Whalen moves in on a situation, her reputation precedes her. Pets Alive is legendary because of her refusal to euthanize. But her “safe haven,” as she calls it, is also controversial in certain animal welfare circles. Samantha Mullen, director of animal care and sheltering for the Humane Society of the United States, says, “One has to worry whenever there’s a facility with lots of animals where the public is not allowed in.” Mullen explains “a dichotomy in the animal protection world “between people who focus on the quality of life and those who focus on life itself—being alive.”
Indeed, we are not invited into Whalen’s house, a neglected red brick colonial with no landscaping. “I don’t have time for flowers,” says Whalen, adding that she can’t let us inside her home because “there are too many aggressive dogs.” She describes her “kitchen dogs” as her most disturbed guests. Baby, for instance, who lives in an open door crate, was run over by a subway at the 125th St station. A rescuer happened to be there to scoop him up on the spot. “They knew the dog had fallen onto the tracks,” Whalen says. “But it was only a dog. They didn’t want to stop and make the train late. Baby is the kind of dog who might take your face off.
Whalen also has innumerable cats in the house and a room full of birds. Tilly, her prize Scottish deerhound, lives in a bedroom upstairs with Whalen. Tilly is a key to a piece of Whalen’s history. “She was Top Winning Female in her breed for two years running,” says Whalen proudly. “Can you believe I used to show dogs?” That was when she was an “executive housewife” traveling all over the world with her husband on business. Whalen even put Tilly and her brother Billy in the prestigious Westminster show. It’s difficult to imagine Whalen ever buying into the American Kennel Club’s “purity at any price” ideology. Today, she wants to call for a moratorium on breeding.
Callie is currently available at Pets Alive
Whalen takes us to the new dog areas behind the house. There we meet Hannah, a German Shepherd rescued just before she was about to be split open and cooked for supper by a group of homeless people who, she tells us, survive on strays; and Jake, part coyote, who was tied to the back of a car and dragged down a mountain when he peed on the new carpet. Whalen wont let us into the big kennel, which resembles a small airplane hangar and holds 60 indoor-outdoor runs. There are 19 pit bulls in permanent residence.
Pets Alive has an adoption program, but Whalen will not place pit bulls. [Remember—it’s 1995.] “They just shouldn’t be born,” she says. “Most of them suffer terrible lives—they’re just penis extensions.” Most of her pits have been with her since 1987, when local troopers broke up a fighting ring. “But they’re happy here, they really are,” she insists. I tell her that it is difficult to contemplate 19, permanently kenneled pit bulls. “Look,” says Whalen. “They eat well and play when we take them out. They love people, but they’re animal aggressive. Every pit bull I have can be handled except for Stonewall.” This dog came via a court case in Westchester after he bit someone; the choice for Stonewall was euthanasia or Pets Alive. Which is better?
Whalen makes a practice of getting dogs out of legal jams. At the moment, she has Stonewall and a rottweiler, also rescued from the courts, which forbade her to put him up for adoption. “He’s sweet, I swear,” she says. I ask again if I can go into the kennel and see these dogs. “It’s too disturbing for the animals,” she repeats. The more she resists, the more suspicious I become. “If I let people into the kennel the dogs would bark all day long.” she explains. “My neighbors will complain and then I’ll have a big problem.
As we sit talking on her front steps, Beverly Williams, her only assistant, who has lived and worked on the farm for 14 years, comes around the corner with a blonde Irish wolfhound. Beverly is English and she looks about 30. “That’s Cream,” says Whalen. “She hates men.” Beverly makes a wide circle, keeping the dog away from us. I can not believe that these two women take care of all these animals—alone. “Beverly loves the dogs,” says Whalen. “She’s one of them. She gets in their kennels and lies on the cold cement floor with them. She’s amazing.”
Before we leave, Whalen interrogates Pendelton and Negroponte about Cogan. Is she ever violent? How is she with animals? Has she ever had psychiatric treatment? Cogan is a diagnosed schizophrenic; in the film she seems nutty, but witty, a visionary who is not much crazier than the rest of us in New York. She may have journeyed to hell, but she was carrying a round-trip ticket.
Cogan began her illustrious career as the only female horse-and-carriage driver at the Plaza. Jupiter’s Wife includes a vintage clip from What’s My Line, where Cogan failed to stump (Petticoat Junction’s) Meredith MacRae. Host Wally Bruner tells her, “Your future is in Central Park.”
Soon after her 1968 television appearance, Cogan fell in love and had two children, Michael and Justin. Here her story starts to fade. “Maggie’s parents knew she was too immature to take care of the kids,” says Brendan Nugent, who was homeless in the streets with Cogan in the mid ‘80s. Now he’s the director of Community Support Service /Empower Inc., a counseling organization that tries to help people stabilize their lives. “Maggie is very intelligent,” says Nugent. “But emotionally, she’s about 16 or 17. Michael was returned to his biological father, a Harvard MBA; Justin’s paternity was unclear (this may be where Jupiter entered the picture) and the child was put up for adoption. “When all this went down,” says Nugent, “Maggie took a three-year vacation from life.” At one point, Cogan was hospitalized. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know the dogs are Cogan’s surrogate children. In the past four years alone, Cogan has gone through 34 dogs, repeating an agonizing cycle of finding, adopting and loosing, as if they were her offspring.
Cogan is hardly the first person—homeless or not—to devote her life to picking up strays.”Collectors,” as those in the shelter world call them, are people who gather more animals than they are able to care for, and frequently refuse to adopt them out. Small scale collectors often get turned in by neighbors who smell something strange or complain about noise. Whalen and Cogan have both had neighbor worries. Cogan was evicted after the tenants in her building signed a petition; Whalen has built a tall fence around her backyard to prevent anyone from seeing her animals. By the standards of Humane Societies, Cogan was definitely a collector, living with too many animals in deplorable conditions.”Her place was a horror show,” says Nugent, who happened to visit the day before Cogan was kicked out.
Whalen doesn’t fit the definition of a collector; she believes strongly in adoption, spay and neuters every animal before he or she leaves her sanctuary, and has a newsletter and a board of directors. Yet, a large number of her dogs are kenneled for life. Moreover, she does not want us to see them.
As soon as Cogan’s dogs are ensconced at Pets Alive, Negroponte decides to drive Maggie up to meet Whalen and visit her animals. His goal is to get Cogan out of the park before winter; her goal is to see her dogs. I go with them, eager to meet Jupiter’s Wife for the first time. Negroponte and I pick up Maggie and her two remaining dogs at a bench in Central Park near Fifth Avenue. When I greet her, it’s as if we’ve always known each other; she begins talking to me like we are resuming a conversation that had recently been broken off. She calls me Bess Hess. Cogan looks amazingly fit, and she’s wearing her signature bandanas wrapped around her forehead.
Cogan tells us in the car that she is anxious to see her dogs in Middletown because they have been sending her telepathic messages. “Boris is having a rough time,” she says sadly. He’s eight years old and has just been neutered. (Cogan wanted to know if it was possible to freeze some of his sperm.) She is hoping to stay at Pets Alive with her dogs and work for Whalen. But Whalen has made it clear that, for now, Cogan is only invited for a visit.
I don’t really like tiny dogs but when Cogan’s Chihuahua climbs into my lap during the ride she is irresistible. Jovita looks like a newborn fawn. “I’ve had her since she was a pup,” says Cogan. “Bruce Springsteen was driving down the road in an old green car with cardboard plates trying to be anonymous, and he just stopped for a second and dropped her off by the side of the road.” Negroponte looks at me. It’s my first brush with Cogan’s “unconventional reality,” as he calls it. She points to a sign near a spectacular overlook on the Palisades Parkway called “Rockefellar Lookout,” and shouts: “Rockefeller, Look Out!” We all laugh. She makes puns out of road signs, billboards and names on the sides of trucks. When I ask her about her life she answers every question with a long story that begins with a precise date. Cogan frequently rambles off into her own world, weaving stories together that are too complex to follow. But she always comes back. The ride to Pets Alive is a great adventure.
Dillon
When we pull into the farm, Cogan is ecstatic, but Whalen, although cordial, seems more excited to meet Jovita and Herculissa than Maggie. She wants to show us the new runs in the back of her house that were built with the proceeds from Jupiter’s Wife. But instead of Cogan’s dogs, the runs are filled with her own. “Your dogs are justtoo noisy,” she tells Maggie. “I had to put them in the kennel. I can’t have dogs that bark out here or my neighbors will complain.”
Next, we visit two horses in a field near the house. Whalen bought Queenie, a pregnant Belgian Draft mare, just before she was about to be sold at auction for meat. Queenie gave birth to Noble, a brown quarter horse. They’re chomping on a pile of hay together. “Just approach them slowly,” Whalen cautions. But Cogan puts two fingers in her mouth and makes a piercing sound that is somewhere between a whinny and a siren. The horses jerk their heads up and come running over to the fence to check out this stranger. “You’ve scared them,” chides Whalen. “I don’t think so,” says Negroponte. Cogan seems to speak their language.
Then a van pulls into the driveway and a man steps out. It’s Rick, a tall, thin friend of Whalen’s who’s come to repair the kennel roof. Whalen explains that he once adopted a dog from her named Jennifer who later died. “Then one day Rick was driving down the road and he just suddenly stopped his car outside a small animal shelter he happened to pass. When he went in—there was Jennifer! This time her name was Jenna.” Rick is smiling. Cogan is amazed. “You mean you know that dogs and pets sometimes reestablish themselves in other bodies?”
“I’ve seen it many times,” says Whalen.
“Incredible,” says Cogan. “It’s usually so hard to explain this to people.”
With this exchange, the two women begin to warm up to each other, and walk off towards the kennel. “I have so much to learn here,” says Cogan. She’s listening intently to every one of Whalen’s gruesome stories, and swaps a few of her own.
NEXT WEEK: PART THREE—COGAN VISITS WITH HER OWN DOGS
All the dogs featured here, Gump, Callie, Dillon and Zeus are currently available for adoption at Pets Alive, which is run by a new group of dedicated rescuers. (Whalen died in 2007.) There are many available dogs, including the handsome pit bull below. Check out petsalive.org
ZEUS