I remember walking out of the Sacramento international arrivals about eleven years ago. I had a huge backpack on and was pushing two baggage carts stacked two kennels high each with rescue dogs I had just flown with from Mexico City – probably about 20 dogs in total. Customs doesn’t allow anyone to come in and help you when you arrive at the airport, so I had to figure out how to push all 20 crates by myself.

To say I likely looked a bit disheveled is probably an understatement. I used to find the flight enormously stressful with the dogs packed away in cargo and me above in the cabin, obsessing on their wellbeing from the moment I dropped them off at the check-in counter to the second they came out on the rotating baggage claim belt . I rescued hundreds of dogs from Mexico City during those years and never once had a complication, but none the less managed to find each trip completely nerve wracking.

The night I am remembering is one where I was arriving at some god awful hour – probably the 2:00 a.m. flight and a good friend was picking me up. I made it out with my barking luggage carts and backpack and frazzled nerves and greeted my friend with an irate recount of how  the customs agent had treated me like a total nutcase when I passed through immigration with my precious cargo.

“Can you blame him? Look at you for God’s sake!”  was her completely appropriate response.

Okay, okay, so she was right. I suppose the sanity of any bleary eyed, stressed out young Gringa with a well-used backpack and 20 mutts in carriers making her way thru customs from Mexico at 2:00 a.m. was something that could be rightfully questioned. Especially when that customs agent was getting used to seeing me in this same state almost monthly at that point.

Fast forward some 10 years later to March 9th, 2013, and I am back at the same airport. Not at international this time, this is  national rescue – the cargo hanger of a commercial airline actually.

And, it’s not 2 a.m. – it’s  4:00 a.m. And, I’m not rescuing Mexican street dogs, I’m rescuing Chihuahuas from the Central Valley as part of our new program to save this overrepresented breed from overcrowded California shelters and send them to a wonderful shelter in Minneapolis where they are in demand.

It’s freezing. Dogs are barking. Crates are being loaded. The man who works for the airline is weighing and loading the crates. He turns to look at me a bit inquisitively and I’m sure my sanity was just one of the things he was questioning at that point.

I admit I, too, had questions as to the rationality of my actions when I asked with an unrecognizable and admittedly ridiculous curiosity what the exact poundage of Chihuahuas was we were shipping that day.

Fast forward a few weeks more, 3/23/13, and, you guessed it – my rationality could be called into question, yet again, to anyone watching me as I  step in to the crowded animal control pen in Mexico to select dogs for our next rescue. Why would anyone who even remotely likes animals  be in such a depressing place and why on earth would they put themselves in the excruciating position of seeing these animals in such horrible conditions and then only being able to save a lucky few while having to leave the rest behind to die?

What an absolutely crazy thing to do.

But, you know what? The dogs that I was able to save are alive today because I did enter that pen and because I somehow found the sanity to make it back out.

So, here I sit after 11 years doing this crazy work and pretty much pulling out all the stops and exploiting every possible travel and rescue scenario in order to move as many dogs as possible from situations and places where they are unwanted and going to be euthanized to places where they are going to be highly adoptable and live. That is what we do.

Saving dogs sometimes is as easy { or as hard as the case may be} as getting them from point A to point B.

That is exactly how we have managed to save the lives of more than 1500 dogs over the past 11 years.

A little craziness, it would seem, can go along way.