Elizabeth Doyle is a romance novelist, who lives in Austin.  She writes stories about the dogs and cats in the Town Lake Animal Center.  These are dogs and cats that no owner has claimed and no adopter has wanted.  The poor pets are in desperate need of a second chance.

Her stories can be found on Austin Lost Pet's Pet of the Week Page, http://www.austinlostpets.com/austin/petoftheweek.htm, the Austin Pets Alive! Handbill www.austinpetsalive.org , Austin Rescue Discussion Board and the True Rescue Discussion Board.  Through these efforts Elizabeth has succeeded in helping many dogs and cats into new loving homes.  

Here's Elizabeth's story:

I started volunteering for APA years ago, just about when it first started.  At that time, I didn't want to have to work around the Town Lake Animal Center animals because
I was scared of getting attached.  Jim Collins assured me that I could volunteer without doing that, so that's the only reason I agreed.

My first project was one that I invented.  I'd lived in "no pets allowed" apartments all of my life (Even though I had a cat.  Most of the time, they didn't find out about him.  And when they did, I'd just make jokes like, "What cat?  Oh, you mean the mice in my apartment?  Yes, they're huge aren't they?  I'd been meaning to talk to you about that."  I'd smile and wink, and get away with it.  But I always resented the "no pets allowed" rule.  I hated feeling like I had this big secret, like I was a criminal or an outlaw because I had ..... oh horrors ... a CAT!  When I went to an Austin apartment locator service, they told me it would be easy to find me an apartment that would take my cat.  I was really excited.  And then I told them my price range.  Their faces completely dropped.  They told me that there was NOTHING in my price range that would take a cat.  Apparently, only rich people are allowed to have cats!  Or at least people with medium incomes.  I was a typist, and my husband was a law student.  We had NOTHING.

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So my first APA project, I decided, would be to try to make it possible for
poor people, and everyone else to find somewhere they can live WITH a pet.
I went through the phone book and called every rental listed.  Most of them
didn't allow pets, some of them allowed only tiny pets, and only a VERY,
VERY small number allowed big or regular sized pets (To me, a regular-sized
dog is the average size killed at TLAC.  Most apartments won't let you have
a dog that's the average size of a TLAC dog.)  So when I reached landlords
who allowed pets, I thanked them for their policy and asked them how I could
thank them.  Invariably, they wanted advertising.  So that's how I got my
idea!

I created the Pet-friendly apartment list, which lists all the apartment
complexes in every price range that have good pet policies.  I listed the
address, the phone number, the pet deposit, the rent amount, and an
attractive description of the property.  It was a huge success!  Everybody
wanted a copy - everybody had a friend or a relative looking for an
apartment "with a Doberman" or "with three pets" or whatever else had seemed
impossible to them.  And my list served as their guide to finding that
perfect place!  It was a really gratifying feeling.  The list is now kept
updated by a different set of volunteers.  I have handed it over in favor of
a new project.

My life changed drastically a couple of years ago.  My husband finished law
school, which meant that he was now working as a criminal defense attorney,
and we had an income.  And I got "struck by lightening" so to speak - in a
good way.  My husband told me he likes the way I write, and encouraged me to
try to come up with one of those romantic stories I'm always reading.  I
wrote one and sent it around to agents and publishers for more than a year -
no luck.  Then one day Kensington/Pinnacle Books in New York picked up my
manuscript from their "slush pile", called me, and made me an offer.  So
suddenly, things were looking up.

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I was really busy though.  So my work with Austin Pets Alive! had suffered some.  Out of guilt at not having done much else lately, I agreed to start assistant editing the No-Kill Handbill once a week.  As I did that, something started to bug me.  There's a section called "Animals in Need from the Town Lake Animal Center", and every day, I was leaving it blank!  There were no articles about the animals there.

I decided that was no good.  So I did what I thought I would never do - I went to Town Lake Animal Center and met the animals.  I wrote articles about five (One for each handbill, which was published 5 times a week back then).  And I posted them in that section.  The results were tremendous!  I was flooded with emails from all over Texas, all the way up to Canada, and one message from Australia.  Everybody wanted to save the animals I'd written about.  I was encouraged, to say the least.  But my letters also brought hate mail.  People scolded me about how I can "just sit there and write" while animals die.  Others said I had gotten details wrong about the animals.  Someone wrote that I'd gotten a dog's breed mix labeled wrong and that it's
"incompetence  like yours" that leads to so many deaths.  Some people even discovered my phone number and started calling, saying horrible things, and
then hanging up.

But I understand what the problem was.  I had stepped forward.  And all the
animal-lovers of the world who had always been miserable in the knowledge of
what happens at "shelters", suddenly had a target.  It didn't matter what I was saying - it's just that I was there.

But I got used to it, and got better and better at telling people off (always nicely, when possible).  And I kept writing about the animals.  I still get an average of two pieces of hate mail per week.

I write about five per week, even though the handbill is now published daily.  I stick to my original schedule of five per week.

 And my favorite success story is the very first pet I wrote about.  Stubbs, the three-legged dog.  After more than a month of being overlooked, in one day, the entire world from here to Australia was trying to adopt him.  He was famous!  There were "Stubbs sightings" all over Austin.  "I saw the lady who adopted Stubbs!"  It was really neat.

You'll see 32 of Elizabeth's success stories on Austin Lost Pets Pet of the Week page.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Elizabeth's stories have over a hundred pets since she invented her new project. 

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