To Rescue Lost Animals, She Climbs into Places Most of us Avoid
Callie Clemens was close to falling asleep when an emergency message on the Facebook page she runs—Lost & Found Pets of Spring Branch & Spring Valley—caught her eye. Whimpers had been heard from inside a nearby storm drain, so there was likely a puppy—maybe more than one—stuck down there.
Callie Clemens was close to falling asleep at around 11 p.m. last 26 July, when an emergency message on the Facebook page she runs—Lost & Found Pets of Spring Branch & Spring Valley—caught her eye. A tiny black puppy had been spotted scurrying across a road in Spring Branch, the Houston neighbourhood where she lives. Whimpers had been heard from inside a nearby storm drain, so there was likely another puppy—maybe more than one—stuck down there.
Clemens sprang out of bed and drove to the scene. Once there, she heard desperate howls and whimpers from underground echoing through the storm drain. She grabbed her son’s toy flashlight from her car, pulled a metal grate off the drain and shimmied down.
“I wasn’t very well equipped,” Clemens says. “I was not expecting to go into the drain.” But nobody else was around, and puppies were stuck in there. “Somebody’s got to do it.”
This was not Clemens’s first foray into a storm drain. An animal lover and the mom of 7-year-old twin boys, Clemens is known in the Houston area for her rescue efforts. Aside from the Facebook page, Clemens also runs Paws Off The Streets, an outreach programme for needy animals. She has saved dogs and cats as well as the occasional possum and raccoon. Over the past nine years, she estimates she’s saved at least 100 creatures exposed to danger.
After lowering herself roughly 7 feet down the drain, Clemens crawled through about 10 feet of a 24-inch-wide cockroach-infested tunnel before reaching an area where she could crouch and search. It was 700 yards of pitch black.
“I heard splashing,” Clemens says. She pointed her flashlight and saw “two sets of eyes looking at me.” Then the dogs ran off. “They were crying,” she says.Around midnight, staffers from the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) arrived and joined Clemens in the storm drain. They worked until 3 a.m. trying to track down the dogs.
“We searched end to end, side to side,” Clemens says.
They were not able to find the two dogs that Clemens had seen underground, but they did find a female black Lab mix puppy outside under a dumpster, which the SPCA took in.But there were at least two more puppies trapped below, and Clemens was not about to give up. Although venturing down a storm drain is terrifying, Clemens says, “it would never resonate with me to know that I left an animal in there to starve and suffer.”
She went home for a few hours of sleep, then went straight back to the storm drain, joined by several volunteers, including a local engineer who drew a map of the drain system.
After several hours of searching, they finally found a tiny black pup. While Clemens was still underground, volunteers spotted the dog standing outside a small tunnel at one exit of the drain. “We were very excited,” says Clemens, adding that the puppy weighed about 5 pounds and had parasites and ringworm. They named him Timmy; he was taken to a city pound and later adopted.
That left one dog underground. Clemens climbed down the storm drain several more times to look for it, even leaving food, some of which, they were glad to see later, had been eaten. But the fact that Clemens found an exit hole and had stopped hearing the dog’s whimpers makes her confident that the puppy found its way out. In fact, she’s pretty sure it’s the same puppy that was found later and adopted through her programme.
Clemens’s tenacity doesn’t surprise Tena Lundquist Faust, who, along with her sister, runs another Houston animal rescue nonprofit, Houston PetSet. “Once she becomes focussed on a rescue situation, she is unstoppable,” says Lundquist Faust. “She is really a rock star.”
