If a dog could read the room, he’d never accept a “free” cheeseburger from Madi Nix.  The Habersham Animal Shelter director feels her heart break whenever she’s forced to drive a dog to a local veterinarian for their last goodbye. They still get one more treat en route, though: a delectable Big Mac.

Nix, a legendary dog lover, emotes passionately about the enormous effort her team makes to keep every last one of “her” dogs and cats alive and healthy. The overwhelmed staff of eight, plus volunteers, look relentlessly for new homes that suit every individual creature. They advertise. They make phone calls. They blast out pleas on social media, with cute photos and heartwarming videos to accompany them.

Nevertheless, a very few are sent to die at a local vet’s office.

Before that, though, the boss will try almost anything to re-home her dogs. Periodically, Nix grabs a few of her friendlier dogs, packs them into her van, and drives them the half mile across Toccoa Highway to the county office building. She and the four-legged mob descend on her fellow county employees, and the puppy dog grins and wags will occasionally win over a commissioner, tax assessor, or clerk; that lucky employee goes home with a new friend in her back seat.  “Yeah–sometimes, it works,” she laughs, and she returns to the shelter, if not dogless, then at least with a few less yips and barks than when she departed.  That’s a win.

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The dogs go Yankee

The shelter staff’s biggest commitment? A few of them pile into the shelter’s van to drive a pack of dogs—19 of them, on a recent trip—to a shelter or rescue group somewhere up north that has offered to help re-home the furry creatures. The October run was an 820-mile trek to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, where a rescue group, “Mutt Life,” was waiting for them, as were 19 prospective pet-owners. That trip involved hotel stays, but shorter trips to New York can be “turn and burns,” where staff leave before dawn, drop the dogs, and make it home to a very late dinner with their families.

In the last few weeks, there have been pet caravans to Bedford Hills, New York; Phoenix, Maryland; and Springfield, Virginia, each returning with blissfully empty vans.

For reasons Nix ascribes to “cultural differences,” it seems to be much easier to find new pet-homes north of the Mason-Dixon line than in Georgia or elsewhere in the South.  For one thing, spaying and neutering are much more common up north, so there are far fewer “surplus” pets.  And stray dogs are likelier to survive the Southern winters than the colder climes of the Midwest or Northeast, which means there are more here for the adopting, year-round. The shelter staff takes advantage of the Northern need with our Southern dogs, affording many of them a good Yankee life instead of an indefinite stay at the shelter—or worse.

But then, why euthanasia?

With all this strenuous effort to keep them alive, one might be tempted to ask: Why, then, is any shelter dog or cat ever euthanized?

There are a lot of reasons. Some are strictly medical, and simply amount to choosing a humane death over a harrowing life. Others because they can’t fit in with other dogs or cats in a prospective owner’s home; still others because they’ve been exposed to a rabid wild or domestic animal, and it can take months to find out if they’re sick themselves, while other animals are waiting for that same spot at the shelter.

But behavioral issues are usually the main reason. Nix explains: “Some of the dogs have aggressive behaviors we just can’t control. If none of us would feel safe with the dog in our homes, we can’t very well put them out into the community.”

As to cats, kindhearted Habershamians often make the mistake of collecting stray newborn kittens they find on their property. But that may not be a kindness; if they’d leave them alone, the mother cat—who often is nearby, foraging food for her litter—will come back and take care of them better than any human could. Nix hopes people will learn to leave the little mewing bundles alone; many of the youngest kittens don’t fare well in the shelter.

The ever-present dog in the road

Perhaps the most common medical reason for canine euthanasia is the ubiquitous problem of dogs hit by cars on the road, who, if not killed right away, may be hurt too badly to recover, which happens distressingly often. “And usually, that’s an un-neutered male who’s escaped so he can go out looking for a ‘girlfriend,’” Nix says.  “Neutering would help.”

The hard numbers for euthanasia might sound relatively good to dog-lovers, depending on one’s perspective. In the first 10 months of 2025, the shelter took in 1,491 animals and successfully sent 1,264 to new homes locally or elsewhere, the staff reported.  Of the remainder, 84 (less than six percent of the total) were euthanized, many of those because of medical crises. The good news: it remains quite rare for a healthy, well-behaved dog or cat to be euthanized. If they’re “put down,” there is almost always some serious problem that led them there. But if a dog is doing all right in the shelter, there is always another Northern trek to put them on, if no one adopts them here.

The shelter staff are not allowed to euthanize the dogs anymore, because of new federal DEA rules—instituted a few years back over concerns about the dangerous (and sometimes illicitly trafficked) drugs used for euthanasia. Since now only a veterinary office can handle and use the lethal drugs, the unfortunate need for euthanasia is entirely handled by several local veterinarians, at a cost of $50 to $150 each, charged to the county.

Asked if she prefers the new protocol to the old one, Nix, perhaps surprisingly, says that when euthanasia was necessary, she preferred to do it herself, because the animals knew and trusted her and she knew how to make them comfortable, she says.

“I felt it was my responsibility,” she said, grimacing at the memory.

As to the veterinarians taking on the grim task: “Obviously, it’s not why any vet got into this line of work,” Nix says, “but it’s part of their job.”

From the vet’s perspective

Among the Habersham County vets who take on the sad task of euthanasia for the shelter is Dr. Cecily Nieh of Northeast Veterinary Hospital in Cornelia.

“Doing euthanasia takes an awful lot of compartmentalization,” says Nieh, an avid animal lover who brings her own small, fluffy white dogs to work with her every day. “But the quality of life for an animal lingering in a shelter is not good; for an old dog with serious health issues, we just don’t think it’s fair to keep them alive,” when their lives entail so much suffering.

Nieh willingly makes the call herself when medical issues are the reason for euthanasia, “but when it comes to behavioral issues, I rely on Madi.” Even a well-behaved dog can get wild in the strange environment of a vet’s office, she says, so only the shelter staff would know what the dog is like day-to-day and whether his behavioral issues preclude adoption.

Even so, the vet says it is common for Nix to be crying by the time she arrives with a pet to Nieh’s office to end the animal’s life.

The procedure itself almost always goes smoothly, Nieh says. She injects the pet with valium or an opiate to calm him. If a dog is fighting, sometimes the vet staff will have to throw a blanket over him to restrain him, but they use the least force possible.

Upon the arrival of an exceptionally angry or fearful dog, the vet staff will maneuver the dog so that his leash is strung from behind an office door, through the opening between the hinges and the door frame. Then, though the dog may be growling and fighting, he is behind the door, with the staff safe on the other side; they look for an opportunity to inject the dog with the calming drug, usually in his hindquarters.

Once the dog is sedated, Nieh says, “he’s in la-la land”—quiet and compliant. To end the dog’s life, the vet injects a powerful barbiturate; it quietly stops the animal’s heart in 30 to 60 seconds, Nieh says.

The easiest way to avoid euthanasia

 How can animal lovers avoid the whole awful sequence?  Easy, Nieh says, two words: “spay” and “neuter.” And those simple operations are a good idea, not only to limit the number of stray and homeless animals, the vet adds. A variety of maladies can afflict older dogs whose reproductive systems are intact. For males, their abundance of testosterone can grow their prostate glands, which leads to other disorders (just as in human males). For females, they are far more prone to cancer of their teats if they make it to their first “heat” (fertility cycle) unaltered.

These medical issues didn’t arise when animals were in the wild, because few lived past five or six years of age, Nieh says. Now, these are common diseases of animals’ not-so-golden years, and much of the pain and discomfort can be headed off with a well-placed scalpel, early in the animal’s life.

Nieh says she endeavors to treat each animal with all the compassion she deserves, and that can be hard on her and the caring staff at her practice, which includes three other veterinarians and a dozen or so staff.  The hardest for her, no contest, was when her own old cat, Vixen, developed serious heart and kidney issues some seven years ago. She insisted on handling the euthanasia herself.

“I knew it was totally justifiable,” she says, “but I wasn’t right for a year,” her eyes filling with tears at the memory of the beloved companion she shared with her husband, Douglas, also a vet at the hospital.

Harvey sticks around

Nix has a favorite long-time-visitor at the shelter—Harvey, a mixed-breed with a delightful, playful personality. Nix has taken him home for short stays at her own (three-bedogged) home several times. She seems to be crazy about him, and he’s regarded veritably as a shelter mascot by the other staff. He greeted visitors when the shelter’s new site in Cornelia had its ribbon-cutting at the construction site in April, and he’s still there with Nix and her crew.

Why is the affable Harvey still a shelter presence? Easy. “He’s a resource-guarder,” she says with a resigned shake of her head. “If there’s food, or a toy, or even just a dish of water…no other dog is allowed to get near it. We can’t have that.” And prospective Harvey-adopters don’t seem to like it either.

At the shelter, the business of bringing in and re-homing dogs continues, even while Nix chats with a new visitor. Anthony Rivera recently came in, having seen a familiar canine face the day before on the shelter’s Facebook feed. Kona, his beloved mixed-breed dog, seemingly disappeared more than a year ago, then turned up on a road a short distance from home—looking none the worse for the mysterious months away.

Rivera had let his two dogs out to relieve themselves one night early in 2025; one came back, but Kona disappeared.  The young man’s theory: someone else took the dog in for the intervening months, but then the clever dog managed a second escape. Rivera hugs the dog, puts a leash on him, and leads him away after going through the necessary paperwork with shelter staff. Happy to say, this kind of result is an everyday occurrence at the shelter.

Young Zimba, another frisky long-time shelter resident, has remained because when he gets excited, he gets “mouthy,” as Nix euphemistically put it (he nips). He does get to make a legal escape from time to time—staffer Beverly takes him hiking about once a week, and other volunteers do the same for other dogs.

Hunting for Unicorns

When Zimba gets overstimulated, he is hard to control—thus the long stay at the shelter. Yet, there may be a perfect adoptive parent out there for Zimba and the others. The shelter staff call these adoptees “unicorns.” These are prospective pet-parents with kids at home, no other dogs to fight with, and ideally, at least one parent working from home, so the new dog gets all the attention it needs. They are indeed a rarity, though perhaps not quite so rare as a one-horned, rainbow-colored horse.

A few other factors work against the shelter’s never-ending battle to stay ahead of the homeless pet count. Just recently, several of the county’s apartment buildings and mobile home parks have taken an anti-dog turn, Nix says. “People were given a month to get rid of their pets or move out.” Some would move if they could find a dog-friendly new home, but that’s hard on a 30-day timetable. So inevitably, those evicted, beloved dogs find their way across Toccoa Highway to the shelter, and ideally, to new owners.

And for other humans, struggling to feed themselves or make a living at all, they may have to give up their pets as a sheer necessity. Poverty is hard on everyone—dogs too, Nix observes.

As far as getting ill-behaved dogs to improve enough for adoption, it’s frustrating for Nix and her team. “There’s not a magic wand here,” she says. “This environment is stressful for the dogs. You get a dog in here that may already be under stress from whatever home he came from; you bring him in here and it’s like putting a guy who’s already a psycho in a mental health ward…it may not be the right place for them to get better.”

When it comes down to it, dogs belong with a family, not on a long, sterile hallway, with other dogs barking, stressing, and yearning to breathe free. “I’d go crazy, too, looking at the same brick walls 23 hours a day,” Nix says. “I can’t even imagine being that upset and angry all the time; why should they?”

Nix breaks off talking to walk the halls, offering a treat to each dog on the corridor. Nix, herself extended a rawhide skeleton hand to each dog, posing merrily with the ones who want to play. These happier times are what she lives for.

“You want a toy?” she asks the frisky mix at the end of the corridor. Apparently, she does.