Month: October 2003

In American Motel, a short film by local writer and director Alexandria Searls, a man uses a piece of string to illustrate for a young woman the various connections, or "lines," in life. Gently, he wraps the string around her neck, her feet, a lamp on the wall, etc. Then he tugs. "Pull on one line," he says, "and we have confirmation of another."

That’s not unlike Charlottesville’s burgeoning filmmaking scene. An ever-growing group of artists is using the City’s available resources, increasingly affordable technology and each other to make diverse, interesting films at an unprecedented rate. Local filmmakers are shooting features, avant-garde shorts, computer-animated films and documentaries on topics ranging from the Presidential inauguration to neighborhoods in town. While most of these filmmakers are true independents, the connections between them have established a kind of filmmaking community. Pull on one of these artists, and you have confirmation of another. And another, and another, and another.

 

The most obvious (and, as it happens, most timely) of the factors leading to this state of affairs is the Virginia Film Festival, specifically the efforts of its director, Richard Herskowitz. Through the programs the festival offers, the people it brings to town and the tantalizing goal it provides—i.e., exhibition to a wider audience—the festival is the backbone of the City’s filmmaking infrastructure. Searls, for instance, an experimental filmmaker, considers the Virginia Film Festival’s contribution to her work invaluable.

"The Virginia Film Festival is a huge resource, because once a year some of the top people in experimental filmmaking come," she says. "So meeting the top people in these genres through the festival, it really opens you up. I mean, I’ve gotten incredible connections there."

One of Searls’ most recent films, Buy Nothing Day, was accepted in the festival this year, and will show October 25. Getting into the festival has inspired her to work on other projects, she says.

It’s those sorts of sentiments that give Herskowitz great satisfaction. "I guess the thing I take pride in the most is that this program is really a model outreach program," he says, calling the festival the UVA program people feel "most fond of" in the community.

Since its inception in the early 1980s, the annual weekend-long October festival has always posited itself as a partnership between the University and the community. All the better to, as Herskowitz puts it, "promote Virginia as a filmmaking destination." And under Herskowitz, who took over in 1994 after 12 years as the director of the Ithaca, New York-based Cornell Cinema film society, the festival has increasingly been presented as a City, rather than a University, event.

To that end, in 1996 the festival’s "center of gravity" shifted to Downtown, with local movie houses like Vinegar Hill Theatre and Regal Cinema becoming involved in festival screenings and presentations. Herskowitz calls the recent move of film festival headquarters to W. Main Street from the University campus symbolic of the urban evolution.

In the mid-’90s, Herskowitz founded the Virginia Film Festival Film Society, a screening program conducted under festival auspices. The film society presents cinema that would not make its way to town otherwise (like the recent series devoted to famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s collaboration with his favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune), as well as question-and-answer sessions and presentations by directors and writers.

According to longtime Vinegar Hill manager Reid Oechslin, a filmmaker himself, the society contributes to local film literacy and provides another networking opportunity for movie buffs/makers outside of the festival itself.

 

Through society events, "you accumulate some sort of context—what movies are, what they can do, what the language is," he says. Society members attend events and "see other people beginning to know [the language], and talk with them."

 

Herskowitz and the festival’s connections to the City also extend to Light House, a Downtown-based nonprofit media education center for teenagers, and another key ingredient in the City’s growing filmmaking infrastructure. The board, on which Herskowitz sits, includes local filmmakers, who invite other local lensmen to act as mentors and instructors to Charlottesville’s youth.

Paul Wagner, an Academy Award-winning director and a Light House founder and board member, says the organization takes up where the festival leaves off, keeping those in the business in a sort of loop, however informal.

"Richard and the festival, and the screening programs Richard does, are the focus, sort of, on the west side of town," he says. "So like with a lot of things in Charlottesville, there is sort of that center of activity, and then Downtown. And if you’re just looking at Downtown, I do think Light House is a center to it. It’s sort of ironic, because it’s not for adult filmmakers, it’s for kids."

Light House’s mission emphasizes the responsibility of filmmakers to the larger community. In the words of Wagner, the program is "not just about helping young people become good filmmakers, but trying to play a role in the community and showing those filmmakers how the use of film and video can be a community-based project."

Similarly, Johnny St. Ours’ "guerrilla filmmaking" efforts also seek to intertwine film with ideas of community. Participants in his guerilla film boot camp are given a general topic, then two weeks to make a film. At the end of the session, the films are screened and the group gives feedback.

St. Ours is trying to democratize film, to bring the medium to the masses as a way of expressing the voice of "the folk." According to him, "film has become the vernacular of basic, modern communication."

St. Ours believes we’ve all seen too many of the wrong sorts of movies.

"I remember watching a fight when I was in junior high school, the kids made punching sounds when they swung at each other. George Lucas lives in their souls," he says. "There are some problems I have with that. George Lucas and his Hollywood pals don’t walk the streets, they’ve never heard a word out of those junior high school kids’ mouths, they can’t possibly represent us as the storytellers of our culture. We have to represent ourselves. Film needs to be in the hands of the people because it seems to be the only thing that the people listen to."

 

Others in town have worked to reinforce the ties between artists and the community, and, if you will, create a latter of the former. To that end, five years ago Searls founded the Vinegar Hill Film Festival, designed to showcase the work of local artists.

Searls had just finished work on American Motel, a film inspired by the Mount Vernon Hotel on Route 29, which was recently demolished. Searls describes the film as "the portrait of a young woman who feels trapped and wants to escape both her home and town. The motel represents American society as a whole—transient, presenting opportunities for shallow and immediate intimacies." It was a project in which she’d enlisted the help and advice of many of the area’s filmmakers, including Oechslin and Wagner.

"Basically, as a way to thank the community, I knew that a lot of us were finishing up our films, short films in particular, so I decided to organize their showing over at Vinegar Hill," she says. "At that point I didn’t make a call for submissions, I just chose the people I knew who were working in film." Since then, Searls has expanded the format, opening the festival up and making it a state-wide competition. Through the festival, she’s expanded the scope of her own activities, and encouraged other local artists to try their hand at film.

"By running the festival, I’ve ended up being a producer more than I thought," she says. "Some years when I didn’t have exactly what I was looking for, I would approach someone and say, ‘Hey, it’s easy to make a film, why don’t you make one?’"

 

Pull on the string of Wagner, St. Ours, Oechslin, Searls, etc., and numerous other local filmmakers pull back. There’s Mark Edwards and Mary Michaud, for instance, a couple living in Belmont who made a film, Still Life With Donuts, about their neighborhood and the people in it. The film was shown at last year’s Vinegar Hill Film Festival, has aired at a benefit for the Virginia Historical Society and will premiere on Charlottesville/Richmond public television November 25 at 9pm.

After moving to Charlottesville from San Francisco, they were surprised at the diversity of the local population. "We were used to seeing a lot of people on the street" back in San Francisco, Michaud says. "You got to know these characters, and they become a part of your life." In Belmont, they found "there were so many characters and really funny goings-on."

They began the film in 1999, finishing last year. The effort, both say, brought them closer to the neighbors and, in the words of Edwards, taught them to have "a lot greater respect for people in general.

"I see these people and they open up and they tell us these wonderful things. It’s incredible," he says. Edwards was particularly amazed to learn that each person had a real philosophy that they based their life on, or "rules to live by." And despite their different backgrounds, "they have this overlapping belief and love of the neighborhood."

Or there is Kent Ayyildiz, a film school-educated documentary filmmaker. Ayyildiz, originally from Roanoke, has a masters of fine arts from Columbia College in Chicago. He came back to Charlottesville after school with his wife and son in 1997.

A Turkish American (his name means "moon star," and MoonStar Films is the name of his production company), Ayyildiz got interested in filmmaking while studying Turkish history at Bogazici University, a prestigious school on the Bosphorous in Istanbul.

"I was corresponding with friends, and many of them were very ignorant of what the Turkish experience was about," he says. "Kidding, they would joke—am I riding camels, and stuff—but to some degree that was their notion of what Istanbul was about."

To Ayyildiz, "that ignorance was so profound that I felt like my calling was to educate through film. Because I felt that visually I could tell the story historically of the city, and of any subject, better than going the traditional academic route and teaching from the pulpit."

As it turns out, the film about Istanbul didn’t get made. But others did. One of these was 1999’s Homedaddy, about Ayyildiz’s experiences as a stay-at-home dad. Ayyildiz, in the course of making the film, met other people in the community, and discovered—and explored in the piece—a national movement for stay-at-home dads. There was also The Polyface Farm Video, shot in 2001, about one of the world’s leading organic livestock farms.

Ayyildiz draws his inspiration from personal experiences, which he then expounds on to explore larger themes. "I have always felt that personal stories are more interesting," he says. If he can show how "my experience as one individual reflects a societal issue, than that’s a good thing."

In line with that philosophy, Ayyildiz has two projects currently underway. One is an hour-long project called The Lawn, inspired by his own disgusted efforts at mowing his three-acre plot, or as he calls it, grass farming.

"I’m going to change my landscape over the next three to four years," he says. "I’ve already begun, and I’m filming the process, documenting how to change your lawn to be something other than a fossil-fuel based design. I want to have a sustainable, vibrant, indigenous [environment]…with a good deal being edible for me and wildlife."

Another film in the works is titled Spaces, which explores more "environmentally and economically progressive" building techniques and documents Ayyildiz’s attempt to build a studio from straw bales, using permaculture design methods.

From Ayyildiz, it’s but a short step to his friend Russell Richards, an artist and avant-garde filmmaker who has also shown at the Vinegar Hill Film Festival. Richards spent a year at the School of Visual Arts in New York and primarily works in print, but has started stepping up his filmmaking efforts.

Richards thus far has specialized in ironic, pointed short films with a neat little twist at the end. A classic example is A Tale of Two Siblings, a story of two Siamese twins linked in a most unfortunate place.

Though his pieces are generally only a few minutes long, Richards meticulously plans and executes each step.

"It took me four days to shoot the main footage for A Tale of Two Siblings, minus a few insert shots and music, but only because I had the shoot planned down to the last detail," he says. "I was in pre-production on the film for about two months, and I edited the film in a little over a week. I storyboarded the whole thing—it is usually the case that I have been thinking about a film for quite some time before ever setting out to do it, so that by the time I am ready to shoot I know exactly what I am going to film."

Richards is now working on a feature film, Lust of the Monster, "about a creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon type monster who follows a girl he is obsessed with to Hollywood where he inadvertently becomes a movie star."

Also working on a feature is Charlottesville resident Dave Stewart, who got much of his film education doing movies for Virginia Tech Television while at college. "Acting, directing—you name it, we did it," he says. "Really super micro-budget movies, shot on video."

Stewart recently completed a family film, Return of the Cheyenne Kid, a collaboration with local musician and filmmaker Mitch Toney, but is now working on something with a much harder edge, a thriller titled Confinement.

"The general plot is this guy, he’s got his regular life and everything like that and one day he wakes up and he’s dressed totally different and he’s in the middle of the woods and he comes to find out that he’s been kidnapped and put into this gaming zone where basically rich eccentric people come along and hunt him for sport," he explains. "The first scene is him just walking down the streets of Charlottesville going home, and then he wakes up and he’s in the woods and he doesn’t know what’s going on."

With local filmmaking comes local difficulties. Stewart’s production has been held up by the weather. "We were going to be shooting this inside-of-a-cave scene, and we were going to shoot that first, because that was the most difficult part of the shoot…and of course when we went out there to go do it, because of all the rain the cave was flooded."

Edwards, Michaud, Richards, Stewart, Ayyildiz, et al. are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s Jane Barnes, a successful author (her works include the novel I, Krupskaya, about Lenin’s wife) and filmmaker who is working with producer Cabell Smith on a documentary about the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Cabell. There’s Melissa Shore, working on a piece about the history of the African-American community in the Ivy Depot area. Or Fernando Catta-Preta, working in digital animation from his home on Hydraulic Road. And more every day.

 

Perhaps the most significant component to the upswing in filmmaking activity in the City is not unique to Charlottesville. The advent of digital video technology, and its relative affordability, has perhaps done more than anything else to open creative doors.

Searls teaches digital filmmaking at UVA, and both shoots and edits with digital equipment. "Pretty much I was a purist when I started this process," she says. "I thought I was never going to shoot on anything but film…I thought film was just so much better and I was not going to accept anything else. And I remember having a conversation with Richard Herskowitz, and he says, ‘No, you cannot be like that. You have to let in digital video.’ So I became a convert."

Adds Ayyildiz, "Because we live in the digital revolution we can do this thing easier than ever before. You’re talking to a person where today I can shoot, I can edit, I can direct, I can light, I can rig the sound… I have the capability to make a film on my own. At no other time in history has that been possible, and it’s getting easier and easier with the DV revolution."

For Michaud and Edwards, who squeezed their filmmaking in between full-time jobs, without digital video Still Life With Donuts wouldn’t have happened. "You could really be a one-man band, or a two-man band in this case," Michaud says.

Veteran filmmakers, while supporting and using the new technology, hope that the aesthetic component isn’t lost in the commotion.

"Of course, the trick is to use a cheap tool with great taste and skill and knowledge," Wagner says.

 

There is another element to Charlottesville’s filmmaking activity, though it is the hardest to define—the City’s appeal to artists of all stripes, and, perhaps, some sort of shared sensibility. Very few of the filmmakers in town ended up here by accident.

It could, of course, just be the scenery.

"I’ve been in Virginia for most of my life, and the region between Roanoke, Richmond and Charlottesville in my opinion is the most beautiful area that Virginia has to offer, and aesthetically, there are those of us who [gravitate] to areas that are geographically special," Ayyildiz says.

It’s also a university town, and there is money here, points out Richards. "I would theorize that anywhere where there is an abundance of intelligent people, there will be artists. Film is an expensive medium—though less so with the advent of digital video technology—so I would guess that a degree of affluence is necessary for a filmmaking community to develop as well. Both of those traits describe Charlottesville, I would argue."

But perhaps there is something more. Wagner says he hopes his current project, Anjlz, a feature film shot in Charlottesville with a local cast and crew, reflects "the Charlottesville aesthetic."

Asked to explain further, he laughs.

"I was afraid you’d ask that, because it’s difficult to say. But I do have a sense that—part of it is just doing it in Charlottesville and having all the people involved be from Charlottesville—that there’s just sort of a vibe about the film that is a natural outgrowth of the creative community here," he says.

Whatever the nature of that "vibe," what is undeniable is that Charlottesville is taking on its own filmmaking identity, defined by the people who work here and the work they do. When it comes to making movies, the City has become the sort of place that filmmakers, when they begin pulling the strings of their difficult, demanding craft, can expect to feel more and more tugs on the other end of the line.

American Motel’s armchair philosopher muses, "There are all kinds of lines, dividing, connecting, but you can’t see them." Well, now you can. And maybe one day, at a theater near you.

On a recent afternoon, Sharon Tate turned her GMC pickup onto a rutted dirt road branching west off Route 29, and knocked on the door of a white cottage.

The door opened, and a stooped man looked up from his walker and beckoned Tate inside. Sitting at a kitchen table strewn with Tylenol bottles and a plastic tray of prescription drugs, he tells Tate that a pack of dogs killed one of his goats and harassed another.

"They bit him on his butt," he says. The man says his hired helper reported a shepherd-like dog and a Jack Russell terrier were part of the pack. "I can’t get out there and shoot the dogs myself," he says, holding up his right arm, which is braced with plastic panels and tucked into a sling.

So Tate, one of Albemarle County’s two animal control officers, steps gingerly through the muddy, dung-coated floor of a tiny stall where a goat sits in the corner. With the edge of her baton, Tate prods the creature to stand up so she can inspect the wound on his rump. A brown horse keeps one eye on Tate and the other on the green hillside rising beyond the enclosure’s wire fence.

Tate climbs back into her pickup, with a well-marked calendar, a cell phone and an old Virginia Lottery ticket clipped to the sunshade.

"I never win," says Tate. If she does, she will build her dream house, which she has mentally cobbled together from favorite parts of different homes she’s seen around Albemarle County.

 

Tate goes bouncing up another dirt road to another house that sits up the hill from the aggrieved goat. As she pulls into the driveway, a child’s face watches from behind a curtain. A pair of women in t-shirts and Spandex shorts emerge from the house and stand on the back porch. As Tate approaches them, a white wolf barks in a deep, aggressive tone and pulls on the chain keeping him tethered to a doghouse. Tate tells the women that their neighbor’s animals have been attacked by some dogs, as a Jack Russell terrier not much bigger than Tate’s boot yaps at her feet.

The women respond just as Tate expected they would. "’Ain’t my dogs,’" she recounts them saying. "That’s what everybody says."

This is how Tate spends most of her days––driving along the back roads of Albemarle County, mediating between neighbors. Armed with a disarmingly folksy personality and a gun she’s fired only once in her 12-year career (to kill a German Shepherd that attacked her) Tate confronts potentially violent people every day. While the rest of the Albemarle County police force aligns itself with the War on Terror and creates a reputation for roughing up civilians, Tate practices a kind of "community policing" that the County says it wants to initiate.

Unfortunately, in a City and County where public safety resources are already scarce, combating animal cruelty isn’t a high priority.

 

"I take a lot of vacations," says Tate. "You have to get away about every four to six months, because you get burned out so quickly in this job."

Tate gets away to the Caribbean to scuba dive and jet ski about twice a year, and she credits these trips with helping her survive more than a decade in an emotionally wrenching job.

Not that she doesn’t know how to handle stress. Tate always dreamed of working in law enforcement––a self-described country girl who grew up in Albemarle, she joined the Charlottesville Police Explorers (a kind of police internship for teenagers) before going on to study law enforcement and police science at Piedmont Virginia Community College. Then she got married and her career plans took a 14-year detour during which she worked as a bus driver. Perfect training, it turns out, for animal control.

"You learn a lot about the County if you drive a bus," says Tate. "You get an insight into how kids’ lives are affected by their home life, and you learn a lot about mediation, helping kids work out their squabbles."

Since she started as the first female animal control officer in Virginia in 1992, she has seen seven fellow officers come and go; the most recent officer quit last spring because, Tate says, she was an animal lover who could no longer face the daily encounters with animals suffering pointlessly at the hands of people who are cruel, ignorant, or both.

No doubt, the recent examples of violence against animals are enough to make anyone want to run off to a tropical beach.

On July 25, railroad worker James Willis found an adult female boxer lying on the tracks north of the Arrowhead Valley Roads Southern Crossing. According to the police report, her front paws were bound together with a cord, and she had been shot in the head and thrown from a 20-foot-high bridge to the tracks below. The fall broke both hind legs. The dog was treated and now has a new home. Private citizens have pooled their resources to offer a $17,500 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in this case.

On September 6, a construction worker discovered a tabby kitten nailed to a plywood board at Stone Creek Apartments, along Route 20 South, adjacent to Monticello High School. The kitten had been beaten to death and spray-painted gray and red.

"That’s kind of Satanic," says Leisa Norcross, whose son is a freshman at Monticello. "It’s sick to take something that’s innocent and defenseless…I just don’t understand the motivation."

What kind of person does this kind of thing? Norcross recalls the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

"They’re always the quiet, secretive-type kids. You don’t know what’s going on with them until after they start shooting. If they catch whoever did that, it would be like predicting a storm," she says.

At Monticello High School, principal Billy Haun says he and Albemarle resource officer Matt Powers, who patrols the school, have no reason to suspect that the killer is a student.

"To make accusations that a teenager did this, when we have no idea that it’s true, that can be a dangerous thing," Haun says. "We have no way of knowing whether that was a teenager or an adult."

Private donors have advertised a $2,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, and the national group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering an additional $2,500.

According to Dr. George Boudouris, a Charlottesville psychologist, such cases of animal torture are rare, and while they are often associated with twisted teenagers, children are no more likely to commit violence against animals than are adults.

"Children are more likely to reveal the abuse in therapy sessions," Boudouris says. "Adults tend to be more guarded."

People who brutalize and torture animals may be reacting to their own feelings of pain and helplessness, Boudouris says, or acting out abuses they’ve seen or suffered themselves. "One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child," anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in 1964, "is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it." Indeed, children who commit violence against animals are five times more likely to commit violence against people later in life, according to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, used to enjoy smashing mice with crowbars and shooting woodpeckers, according to friends. Luke Woodham––who at 16 stabbed his mother to death, then went to high school and shot and killed two classmates in Pearl, Mississippi, in October, 1997––wrote in his journal about beating his dog, Sparkle, and torturing her by pouring lighter fluid down her throat and setting her on fire. Serial killers Jeffery Dahmer, Edmund Emil Kemper and Albert Desalvo all tortured and killed animals before moving on to human victims, according to The Humane Society.

"Hurting or killing animals is one of the diagnostic criteria for what we call anti-social personality disorder," says Boudouris. The disorder manifests as a disregard for the rights of others, a trait of many serial killers.

"Its not a good thing," he says.

 

In patrolling Albemarle County’s trailer parks and tony subdivisions, Tate doesn’t often see the work of cruel psychopaths. In the City and County, animals are abused by people who are just plain stupid.

"Most of the calls we get are reports of dogs running loose, and reports of neglect," Tate says.

Animal control officers do not have full police powers––they carry guns, but do not have the power to arrest people. Animal control officers can write tickets to people for, say, leaving their dogs in a hot car––which usually nets a fine of $50––or issue summons for animal cruelty, which is a Class 1 Misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $2,500, up to 12 months in jail, or both.

Animal control and police officers may confiscate a person’s pet if the animal is in danger of dying from neglect or mistreatment. On September 7, for example, Charlottesville Police Officer James Morris, responding to a report of an animal in distress, found a dog tied to a plywood doghouse in a semi-circle of dirt behind a house at 701 Rockland Ave. The dog was held captive by about one foot of chain, according to the police report, and the dog had pulled the collar so tight that it dug into his neck, and the wound had become infected with maggots. The police report states the dog had apparently been without food or water for some time. The pet owner, Curtis Christmas, has been summoned to appear before Albemarle General District Court.

All animals rescued by police and animal control end up at the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA on Woodbrook Drive. Chico, the dog from Rockland Drive, was treated for his wounds and now paces timidly in a chain-link pen, waiting to be adopted. The SPCA keeps a "black list" of known animal abusers who are not allowed to adopt animals from the SPCA, says Executive Director Carolyn Foreman.

As she drives around Albemarle County, Sharon Tate often ponders why people can’t seem to get along. If you’re a dog owner, and your dogs are running around in someone else’s yard, for example, and the neighbor complains, why can’t you just put them in the garage? And why, if a strange dog keeps appearing in your yard, do you need to solve the problem by killing the dog?

"I try to convince them to let me handle the problem, but people want to come out with guns blazing," says Tate. Whoever killed Harry Marshall’s dog took a more subtle tactic––rat poison.

Around July 28, Marshall noticed his 1-year-old Brittany spaniel, Parker, wouldn’t eat. The dog got so weak he could barely stand up. "He’s just a puppy, so my first thought was that he chewed into something," says Marshall. Then Brandy, his 10-year-old German short pointer, scratched her eye. It started bleeding and wouldn’t stop. Another dog, Samantha, also "started acting funny," says Marshall.

Tests run by veterinarian Dan Woodworth reported that the dogs had ingested Remic, a rat poison that prevents blood clotting. Brandy died in early August, but after extensive treatment Parker and Samantha recovered and "are fine now," says Marshall. His fourth dog, McKenize, had not ingested any poison.

Marshall suspects that one of his neighbors poisoned his dogs. According to the police report, neighbors reported Marshall’s dogs running loose multiple times, and his dogs have been taken to the SPCA and picked up by animal control. According to Tate’s report, the neighbor claimed to be afraid of retaliation from Marshall. Marshall says his dogs usually live behind an invisible fence––a buried wire that gives dogs a mild shock if they try to cross the boundary––but he admits Parker sometimes got loose when his son took the dogs down to the Mechums River, near the Marshall’s home in Ivy.

"If you’ve got a problem with somebody, go talk to that person," Marshall says. "Don’t go kill their dog. The dog isn’t to blame. Dogs love people unconditionally."

 

At the SPCA, Chico, with his neck hair shaved and his once-infected wound now almost healed, pants lovingly at Shaye Heiskell, who travels around Charlottesville and Albemarle presenting evidence on the links between animal abuse and human violence.

"If a dog is chained to a tree with maggots coming out of the wound, what is happening with the children in that house?" she wonders. "It’s a big red flag."

The link between animal abuse and child abuse is so strong the animal control agencies report cases of animal cruelty to social service workers, and vice versa.

"If [animal control officers] are investigating an animal situation, they may come to us with concerns about the children," says Phyllis Coleman, supervisor for foster care and adoption in Albemarle County’s social services department. "There’s plenty of times our workers conduct an investigation and we find dogs chained up and starving," she says. "There’s a very clear link between domestic violence and child abuse."

The SPCA’s Heiskell says the link usually takes one of two forms. A man may beat his wife, children and his dog. Another common scenario, she says, is a man beats the woman, the woman beats the child and the child beats the dog.

The good news for animal lovers is that abused pets can usually overcome the cruelties of a previous owner.

"The amazing thing is that she’s so people-friendly," says Jan-Bas van Beek, who adopted the boxer found on the railroad tracks. The SPCA received about 100 calls from people who wanted to adopt that particular dog, but van Beek’s brother-in-law happened to be the vet in Richmond who treated the dog for its injuries. "I have a boxer who is 3 years old, and I thought this dog would be a perfect buddy," says van Beek. He has named the injured boxer Britta, and he says that despite a limp the dog is doing fine.

"In the beginning, she didn’t know how to play. She had this blank look about her. But now she’s starting to play with toys, and she loves to go out and meet people," van Beek says. "She’s shown a bit of aggression towards other dogs, but that’s slowly going away."

But the bad news for animals is that animal control is simply not a big part of local law enforcement. In the City, there is only one animal control officer, and that department gets only $59,000, less than 1 percent of the $8,710,292 City police budget. In the County, there are two officers (with room to hire one more) in a department that gets 1.8 percent of a $8,178,983 County police budget. Tate used her own money to buy two of the animal traps—harmless cages with a trip-wire door––she placed near the beleaguered goat’s pen to catch the offending mongrels.

And animal control officers have less power here than other places. Some jurisdictions, like Richmond and Roanoke, have "nuisance dog" laws that allow police to ticket people who fail to control dogs that run loose or bark too much. Albemarle and Charlottesville don’t have those rules.

Also, in Charlottesville and Albemarle, dogs who attack and kill another person’s pet must be classified as "dangerous dogs," meaning they must be confined or kept on a leash with a muzzle. Other jurisdictions have adopted rules that give animal control officers much more flexibility in deciding how to deal with problem animals.

"I don’t think the folks upstairs in the County executive office are aware of how much of a demand we have for something like that," says Tate. "Are people frustrated? Yes. Are we frustrated? Yes."

One of the cinder-block walls at the SPCA is decorated with this quote from Chief Seattle: "What is man without beasts? If all beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to beasts soon happens to men. All things are connected."

In Tate’s line of work, she sees how animal suffering is connected not so much to human cruelty as human ignorance and indifference—to their neighbors as well as their pets.

"So many problems could be solved if people would just talk to each other," Tate says. "But people don’t talk to their neighbors. They want to be isolated. The sad thing is that the animals get caught in the middle."