Welcome to the Soul Touched by Dogs Podcast, the show for dog lovers who
see dogs not as toys or tools, but wise souls worth our respect and care.
I'm an Herrmann, and I'm your host.
I talk to poor some humans, people who do great work for dogs and their people.
So come and join us for today's conversation.
Anke: Hello and welcome, Kathy.
I'm super excited to have
Kathy: you here today.
I'm delighted to be here Anke.
Anke: Well, before we talk about our favorite topic, let's just give people
a bird's eye view where you're based.
What's the day job?
What's your normal business?
And, um, let's take it
Kathy: from there.
Sure.
So I live in New York.
I live about an hour outside of New York City.
My office was in New York City for many years and I actually lived
in New York City with five dogs.
So yes, you can have dogs in the city.
They work well.
Um, and my normal day job is actually, I have a couple of businesses,
but my main business is succession planning for family owned businesses.
So I help families that own a business decide whether they're going to keep
the business, sell the business, transfer to the next generation.
And it's a unique combination of.
Personal planning.
What kind of lifestyle are you going to live?
How are you going to sell the business?
Who are you going to sell it to?
Is the business ready for sale?
And then the estate planning around it.
So every day is different.
I'm helping people, which is part of my passion for life.
And I take very complex financial, um, concepts and
explain them in plain English.
So that's majority of my day.
Well,
Anke: that's like it.
That's that's topic for another podcast.
I might want to have you back to another one, but today we talk about,
you know, souls touched by dogs.
So how, when was your soul first touched by
Kathy: dogs?
Oh my god, I'm gonna start to cry.
I was a dog in another life for sure.
I mean, I'm the oldest of nine children, and I grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
and my mother stayed home obviously and my father worked on Wall Street.
And they didn't have dogs.
My mom's one of 11 and my father was almost an only child and
he knew nothing about dogs and I cried and cried and cried.
They got me a cat when I was 10 and the cat got run over
by a car on the way to school.
I was in hysterics.
My father had to walk me to school.
So then when I was I was actually, that year, I was in fifth grade.
I did the grocery shopping for the whole family, and I came
home from the grocery store.
My father was home early, and he said, go in the bathroom.
And my father was very strict, so I was really afraid that I did something wrong.
And I opened the door, and there's this little teeny puppy.
And he didn't know anybody.
He bought it at a pet shop and it was a toy fox terrier.
And I then saved my babysitting.
I'm a dreamer.
I'm a visionary.
So I decided I was going to breed dogs.
This goes back, you know, 40 years ago.
So I had no clue, um, about what we know now.
And, um, I was paid a quarter an hour to babysit and I saved
65 and bought a second dog.
And, uh...
So I had Punch and Judy, and so I had those dogs all the way through
college, and then I bought my first Golden Retriever when I was, um,
just out of college and living in Boulder, Colorado, and I used
a roller blade to work with her.
So she would go with me to work, I would tie her up outside the restaurant, I
went to school in the morning with her, so she went to University of Colorado
with me, and then she would tie up.
So it's been from there.
So my passion for the last 20 years has been helping rescues
market their dogs because they're not very good at marketing.
Everybody works a part time job, right?
These are full time, part time rescue volunteer.
And people don't realize that we do this all volunteer.
And so a lot of things fall through the cracks.
And then the other thing I do is a doctor's come to me and say, Oh, I've
been trying to get a dog for two years.
I emailed 40 applications and no one's gotten back to me.
And the reason is that the rescues do not operate like businesses.
And I'm a business person first, so I always look at things
from a strategic point of view.
And if you and I were in business together, and we had one of something,
but we had a hundred people who wanted it, as business owners,
we'd find a way to get 99 more.
And what happens with rescue, when they have a high value target, like
a little foo foo dog, or a doodle, or golden, they get a hundred applications.
They have no email marketing system.
How easy would it be to say, Hi Anke, thanks so much for applying for FooFoo.
We'll be back in 48 hours.
And then 48 hours, one button or the other.
I mean, that's what you do, right?
And boom, we'll be, you know, FooFoo has an adopter waiting, but
we're happy to get you another dog.
They don't do it.
They discard.
The, uh, applicants and people get so frustrated.
So, so this year I actually took the plunge accidentally.
So this is what I've done for years is I, I know where the rescue owners.
So I cut the red tape and I know what dogs they have.
So I know who has hounds, who has shepherds, who has little dogs.
And then people come to me, I interview them.
So I get a sense of what they are and then I connect them with the rescue.
So this way the rescue gets to the top of the pile and they get their dog.
So that's what I've been doing for years.
And so what happened is last December a friend of mine came to
me as a breeder and I'm not one of these rescues that's anti breeding.
Breeding is necessary to keep the bloodline pure and also to keep, you
know, there's a lot of backyard breeders and puppy mills that take the breed down
and then they get cancer, disease, etc.
So the breeders, good breeders, are necessary to help improve
the genetics of the dog.
So this particular Golden Retriever breeder is a friend of mine.
We went to high school together and his dogs lived till 16.
A Golden Retriever, that's incredible.
So he had a dog he sold to a woman.
She died.
He went back to get the dog and found out it had been severely abused by her son.
The dog had PTSD.
And he was drop dead gorgeous.
Four years old, you couldn't touch him, you couldn't brush
him, you couldn't bathe him.
And he had been trying for ten months to find a home.
So he asked me to help.
So I posted it on Queen of Facebook.
I have 5, 000 friends.
I know how to use Facebook.
So I made a post.
It went viral.
We had 1, 800 shares.
I had 100 people that wanted that dog.
So I interviewed a bunch of them, I gave Bob several recommendations,
and I had an Excel spreadsheet of 30 people that wanted golden retrievers.
And I went in search of goldens, and I couldn't get
any goldens on the East Coast.
I live in New York, so none in Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania,
unless you want to take them from the Amish, which then you're
supporting the puppy mill industry.
And so then I went to rescues, and I said, if I give you the adopter,
and I find the dog, can you just...
Do your stuff.
And that was impossible.
So through a commodity deal I'm doing, a physical commodity deal, I had a guy
in Fort Worth, Texas, who introduced me to a guy he was at church with, and
Brad was rescuing one golden at a time.
So he connected us, and he has room for one dog to foster.
So we didn't set out to start a rescue.
We set out to find homes, find goldens for the homes I had.
And Anke, one thing led to another because, oh, now we need a foster.
Oh, now we need veterinarians.
Oh, now we need transport.
Oh, now we need clinics.
And so, believe it or not, this thing just exploded and we started
officially February of 2023.
And by May, we had done 32 dogs, so up year to date through September, we're
up to 58 dogs, most of them golden retrievers, but we also have done
hounds and great pyrenees and labs.
That's
Anke: incredible.
I never, you know, you always think about this whole situation
as if like from the point of view that there's more dogs than homes.
Like that's like here when I remember a neighbor of mine, she
had, well, it was an accident.
So her dog ended up with a whole bunch of puppies and they was like, Oh my God, how
are we going to find seven good homes now?
Well, she didn't, she ended up like, she found one good home, one puppy
had a home that wasn't that good, where we didn't actually end up even
knowing where, who they gave the dog to, and so the other four she just kept
because she couldn't find a good home.
So to have it like, oh, actually, yes, there are so many people who want the
dogs, but just kind of, but I think that whole idea that people who rescue dogs
are just doing it on the side, like you see that here as well, you know, there's
a lot of like, You know, usually kind of young women who kind of just try and do
their best, but really don't have any idea of how to do this in an effective way.
I think there's so much, yeah, that, that, that there's such a hole
in there, that there's such a gap in the market to, to really help.
Yeah,
Kathy: that's incredible.
Yeah, so the stats are absolutely amazing.
Two dogs unneutered can produce 350, 000 dogs in five years.
Two cats, five million, two cats, five million.
So spay and neuter is critical.
The problem is we don't have spay and neuter enforcement and even if there
are mandatory like Dallas actually has, Dallas, Texas has mandatory neuter spay,
but they have no capability of enforcing.
Yeah.
And I'll give you a couple more stats that are really scary.
Houston has 1.
4 million dogs living on the streets.
That's ridiculous.
Dallas has 28, 000.
San Antonio has something similar.
San Antonio kills 60 to 100 dogs every week.
Uh, I don't know how many Fort Worth does, but there were so
many dogs in there the other day.
So, you know, people unfortunately, you know, all of us in rescue, you know,
we have the commercial, the cartoons that joke and say, I've decided I
no longer can handle my children.
I wasn't really thinking when I first had them.
But this is what we get.
It's like, Oh, I got a baby and I can't take care of the dog anymore.
Oh, I got another puppy.
I mean, I saw a senior dog two weeks ago.
He's 16 years old and they got a puppy and the puppy was bothering the 16 year old.
So he wasn't happy.
And what did they do?
They turned him to a kill shelter.
Oh,
Anke: that's ridiculous.
I just don't even know how somebody can even, you know, look in the mirror
in the morning, you know, without
Kathy: getting sick.
It's unconscionable.
I mean, Texas is like a third world country, uh, in terms of dogs.
They really treat them, um, as furniture in many, not all Texans.
I mean, I am so blessed to have, we have 20 foster families in, in Dallas,
and I have a few around the state.
But we primarily, it's easier, so I am a machine, so I'm very organized, and so
we now have the clinics, the fosters will take the dogs to the clinics, get the
vaccination, we have an inexpensive vet, I make appointments a month in advance,
so I have, as soon as I get a dog, boom, they go in, uh, we have transports that
leave every other week, so we take them to the east coast, the adopters meet
them, if they're golden retrievers, we adopt them remotely, because the goldens
have such predictable personalities.
And while we want to save all dogs, it's really a matter of adoptability.
If I can't adopt the dog, my partner in Texas has two dogs as a foster
for another local organization.
He's had those dogs for over a year.
Not one application.
Not one.
A whole year.
And because they're hound shepherd mixes, and there's a gazillion of them, right?
And on the East Coast, everybody has families.
I live in la la land, you know, so it's four acre zoning.
It's beautiful, it's green, but everybody wants, you know, a lab, a golden,
a foo foo dog, you know, doodles.
We have a million doodles, you know, and doodles aren't purebred dogs, by the way.
They're mutts.
They're a hybrid of mutts.
Hey,
so my passion is really getting people educated and making alternatives.
So I'm working very hard in these commodity deals because
they're sizable if they close.
And then I plan to fund mobile spay neuter clinics and make them 100 percent free.
And so if I can do that, we'll make a change because if we don't, I mean,
we just took an owner surrender this week, a golden retriever, gorgeous.
He's one year old.
He's not neutered.
And then she has a Boston Terrier who was fighting with him and he's not neutered.
So you have two unneutered males.
Right, and she has a little female.
I didn't ask about the female because I was more concerned
about whether the dog is friendly.
We also went out there.
It's actually five and a half hours west of Dallas, out in
Lubbock, which is west Texas.
You get into oil country out there, and we were taking three dogs from another woman.
Um, my fosters were so wonderful.
The husband and wife went out there.
We found out the dogs were feral.
They're all golden retrievers, like it's an oxymoron.
These dogs are just so level, they haven't been touched at all.
Do you think the owner could have told me?
That's what it is.
Yeah.
So now it's very complicated, but my, my network is incredible.
I'm so blessed.
I really believe that the universe provides and, you know, I just pray
my, my life away, you know, that things just fall into place and.
We have generous supporters, people, somebody this morning just
donated to our vet, so I know that my neuters tomorrow are paid for.
So, we've been funding this ourselves.
It takes a while for your 501c3 in the United States to come.
Um, there's 90 million dogs in the United States.
44 percent of the households in the United States have dogs.
There's 97 million cats.
And yeah, so you know, we live in a society where it's bifurcated, right?
You have the rich and the poor, and I think that's globally we're
starting to see that, right?
And so what happens is the upper end takes care of their foo foo, their
little dog, with lots of, you know, the pet business is incredible.
Dog food is 28 billion, growing at 25 percent, and over the counter
nutraceuticals for pets is 15 billion, growing at about 15 percent.
So the people that the empty nesters.
are, you know, downsizing their dogs.
Half the dogs in the United States are now under 25 pounds.
And so they're feeding their food, so all the trends.
So it, you know, it locks in with business in a lot of ways, but my
passion is to make a difference.
If we can educate people and give them tools to be able to neuter spay for
free, because if you don't have money to put food on the table, you're not
spending a hundred dollars on the dog.
You just don't have it.
Anke: That's so true.
Yeah, I love that.
So, I mean, I'm just like, yeah, the statistics are mind boggling.
You know, I thought, I thought Spain was bad, but I think
this sounds, this sounds...
Horrible.
It's just, there's so much work to do.
So I'm so grateful that, that you are on that mission, and I think there
seems to be more and more people who actually, you know, well in, in,
in the, in the process of, of what I'm doing with these interviews.
It's heartwarming to see how many people, there's so many people doing great work.
for dogs and and their people and that's like really heartwarming it
feels like this hope for humanity so you know it's really beautiful.
So where can people go people go and connect with you find out more about
you maybe support where should we
Kathy: send them?
So uh since we're not incorporating yet our website's not quite done
it'll be done shortly but the the rescue is called the golden project.
Saving those with hearts of gold.
We started with Golden's.
We will not be Golden Retriever specific.
We want to save other dogs.
It's just a matter of whether we have homes and the ability to place them.
So we have a Facebook page.
So you can easily find the Golden Project on Facebook.
And then Kathy Boyle, B O Y L E.
Chapin Hill is my company name.
C H A P I N H I L L.
We're on Insta at Chapin underscore Hill.
I'm on Twitter.
Um, on LinkedIn, so you can find me pretty easily.
I do a fair amount of TV and radio, so it's very easy to Google me and find me.
And then I'm happy to connect.
You know, we really are offering a personal service.
I match up the dogs by personality, after interviewing the families.
And so I'm happy to help anybody get any dog.
You know, obviously...
From Texas to New York and Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey is easier
for me than, you know, finding a dog for someone in Minnesota, but I'm
happy to help and I have a very large rescue circle, so I can refer people.
Somebody asked me for a dog recently, he's in Tennessee, so I
wanted to drop him off on the way.
And I said, well, I have a Tennessee rescue, why don't you talk to her?
So I'm a connector and I use those skills to help animals as well.
Anke: I love that.
And I'll put, obviously, I'll put all the links in the show notes,
so to make it really easy to, for people to connect with you.
Thank you so much.
And thanks for all the work you do.
Thanks for taking the time to come here.
And, uh, I really hope to have you on again
Kathy: in the future.
Wonderful.
Thank you, Anke.
Thank you for what you're doing.
We appreciate getting the message out to people, you know,
that dogs have hearts of gold.
Thanks so much for listening.
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And if you know a pawsome human you think I should interview,
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Email me at Anke.
That's A N k E at Soul touched by dogs.com.