Web Site Saves Death Row Dogs

Oct. 16, 2007— -- Maxwell wasn't all bad; he just had a lot of energy. And that hangdog face? Well, it didn't mean he was guilty, he just couldn't help it.

But his number was up. And at 9 months old, he had been sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Fortunately for the lab-whippet mix, help was on the way.

"Within a day or two of posting on dogsindanger.com, we found him a great owner," said Paula Werner, program manager at Lake County Animal Care and Control in California.

Dogsindanger.com is a new Web site, which like other similar sites, posts photos and descriptions of dogs in shelters around the country in need of adoption. What sets the site apart, however, is it includes only dogs that are expected to be euthanized and includes a countdown clock that estimates when the animal will be put to death.

As of Monday, the site featured an abandoned 8-year-old border collie from Brooklyn named Pete with 24 hours to live, and a female Rottweiler with less than a week before she is scheduled to be put down.

Started three weeks ago by Alex Aliksanyan, the site includes some 400 dogs from 140 shelters nationwide, about 50 of which have found homes. Another dozen, those who weren't adopted, are remembered on a memorial page.

"About a year ago I started to research ways to inform people about these animals' suffering. I knew if people knew of the suffering they would want to do something. … If we show them the eyes of these dogs that are going to be killed for no reason people will act. It all snowballed from there," he said.

Just how long a dog has before it's euthanized depends largely on the city or state in which the animal is being held. Despite the site's timer that counts down the number of days and hours a dog has left before it's put down, many shelters say that time is subject to change and depends largely on how much room the shelter has at any one time.

"If we bring in a stray, we will give it five days for an owner to reclaim it. After five days we put it up for adoption," said Carl Shooter, animal services manager at the Carrolltown Animal Shelter in Texas. "If there's no interest, we give a week before it's scheduled to be euthanized."