{"id":1044,"date":"2026-05-27T12:14:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2026-05-27T17:22:55","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T21:22:55","slug":"no-animal-left-behind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/no-animal-left-behind\/","title":{"rendered":"No Animal Left Behind"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Sue
Sue Furtado \u201985 with two WAGS dogs: Percy (left), rescued just before he and his siblings were scooped up by a known dog fighter, and Georgia, found abandoned on the side of the road as a very young pup.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n
By Melissa Lynch \u201995, MSPC \u201915<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Sue Furtado \u201985 did not plan to become an animal rescuer. She planned to retire. But life, as it tends to do, intervened \u2014 in the form of a conference, a plane ride, and a sudden, clear conviction that something had to be done to help thousands of animals find homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furtado\u2019s solution is WAGS (Waiting Animals Getting Support)<\/a>, a foster-based animal rescue based in Dighton, Massachusetts. The name was deliberate. \u201cWe never wanted to be limited to helping only certain kinds of animals,\u201d Furtado says. True to that promise, WAGS has since helped donkeys, pigs, horses, parrots, gerbils, hamsters, cats, chickens, a very large snapping turtle, and\u2014in a story Furtado tells with a measure of pride\u2014two-day-old kittens she drove to safety, at high speed, with both animals tucked inside her bra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf I get pulled over by an officer right now,\u201d she remembers thinking, \u201cwhat are the chances I\u2019m going to pass the mental status assessment?\u201d She made it. The kittens, named Tater and Tot, made it, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her own two dogs reveal a similar story. Oliver, a pit bull, was 32 minutes from euthanasia at Brooklyn Animal Control when Furtado drove down from Massachusetts to rescue him (she picked him up on the same trip she\u2019d taken to collect her daughter from Clark for spring break). Bella, a 95-pound Coonhound-shepherd mix, was born in a chicken coop in winter and surrendered by an owner who just wanted his coop back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cClark attracts a certain person, then builds a certain person. We all go there because we belong there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before WAGS, Furtado spent 22 years working with adolescents in state care \u2014children placed in custody because of abuse, neglect, and trauma. She built residential continuums, as well as educational and vocational programs, when public schools and other community institutions wouldn’t, or couldn’t, serve the kids. Furtado now serves as director of quality management for a large social justice agency, overseeing 150 programs, from housing for people experiencing homelessness to programs for survivors of sex trafficking and residential schools for youths in care. It is not a small job, and she runs WAGS \u2014 which is funded solely by donors and fundraising<\/a> \u2014 \u201cin the hours that are left over,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The through-line between her two callings, she says, is unmistakable. \u201cBoth populations are somewhat invisible,\u201d Furtado explains. \u201cThe majority of the world doesn\u2019t even realize there are group homes and residential schools in every community. And the same thing with the rescue community.\u201d She cites a figure that stops most people cold: more than 3,500 healthy dogs are euthanized every day in the United States, and twice as many cats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDogs never get a voice,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is no one to say \u2018That dog is being starved in a crate.\u2019 \u201d It is the same sentiment she has expressed about children for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WAGS was born somewhere over the Atlantic, on a flight home from a Humane Society International expo. Furtado had attended the conference partly for her agency, which uses therapy animals in several programs, and partly out of personal curiosity. Her daughter Alexandra \u201919, then finishing her first year at Clark and following in her mother\u2019s footsteps as a psychology major, came along on a free voucher. They split up the sessions, compared notes, and boarded the plane home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn the plane ride back,\u201d Furtado says, they made the decision to open their own animal rescue. \u201cWe were like, \u2018OK, let\u2019s just do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were saving dogs before the paperwork was even filed. Today, WAGS is licensed in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, with Rhode Island on the horizon. It has placed animals in 32 states and rescued animals from just as many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no physical shelter; every dog that comes through WAGS lives with a foster family, which is both the model\u2019s greatest strength and its most persistent constraint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think often people think we\u2019re much bigger than we are,\u201d Furtado says, \u201cbecause we\u2019ve had some great successes.\u201d People regularly show up at her front door expecting a shelter, and are greeted instead by Oliver and Bella at the window. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WAGS is known in certain circles for an extensive adoption process that some prospective adopters insist is more rigorous than adopting a human child. Furtado is proud of that. Every WAGS adoption comes with a contract stating that if the adopter can no longer keep the animal, at any time and for any reason, they must return it to WAGS. They will then look for a new placement and conduct the same rigorous vetting process for the next home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She asks engaged couples which of them gets the dog if the relationship ends. She asks older adopters what happens to the animal if they become unable to care for it. She asks families expecting children whether they have genuinely thought through how their dog will adapt. These are not comfortable questions, but they are necessary ones, Furtado says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the few cases where she has had needed legal advice, she turned to Jeremy Cohen<\/a> \u201992, aka the Boston Dog Lawyer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course, he would be a Clarkie fighting for the rights of dog owners,\u201d Furtado says. \u201cWhere else would he have gone to school?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If WAGS has an unofficial institutional affiliation, it\u2019s Clark. Furtado graduated in 1985 with a double major in psychology and sociology, and a minor in French. Her French, she notes, was mostly wine and cheese shared with \u201cvery cool professors,\u201d and her ability to speak the language has not survived the intervening decades. Alexandra helped build the organization\u2019s early marketing infrastructure from her dorm room and still designs promotional materials from her home in Maine, where she works with people experiencing homelessness and manages three dogs on 35 acres of land that Furtado suspects will eventually become WAGS North.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of WAGS\u2019s five board members are Clark alumni. A third Clark friend helps when her schedule allows, bringing expertise in corporate sales and sponsorship. Furtado went into real estate with two of her Clark roommates. Half her donors, it seems, went to school at 950 Main Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt attracts a certain person,\u201d she says of Clark, \u201cand then it builds a certain person. We all go there because we belong there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sue Furtado \u201985 founded WAGS (Waiting Animals Getting Support), a foster-based animal rescue to help all kinds of animals find homes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1306,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"departments":[13],"issues":[32],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","departments-alma-mater","issues-spring-2026"],"yoast_head":"\nNo Animal Left Behind | Clark Magazine | Clark University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/no-animal-left-behind\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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