When Stephen McGarva and wife Pamela decided to move to Puerto Rico because of her job, he jumped at the chance to explore the sun-soaked islands.
On their first week in the lush resort community in Humacao in October 2005, McGarva — an artist, extreme-sports addict and professional free spirit — went exploring remote Playa Lucia beach for a killer wind gust.
“I noticed what I thought was a pile of coconut husks,” he told The Post. “When I got closer, I said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a dog.’ ”
The pathetic pooch — a husky with one ocean-blue eye — was a clump of skin and bones, resembling more than anything a child’s crude sketch of a dog. McGarva then noticed gashes on the creature’s sunburned hide.
“Yet despite it all, he was still wagging his tail,” said McGarva, 48, whose life was changed the moment he committed himself to running to the grocery store to buy food for the suffering dog. “When I came back, I saw a bunch of noses sticking out of the jungle. There were 16 other dogs in the same condition. I said, ‘OK, I didn’t buy enough food.’ ”
These were the abused strays who lived in fear on the cursed shoreline locals called Dead Dog Beach, where McGarva would for the next two years rescue hundreds of dogs — and bury over 1,000 more.
“It was a dumping ground for unwanted pets,” McGarva said, adding that the culture there was more accepting of dumping dogs once they become too big, too expensive or less cute. Once ditched, they faced threats from many fronts, explained McGarva, the author of “The Rescue at Dead Dog Beach,” which comes out Tuesday.
Area hotels, fearful that mutts wandering the picture-postcard shoreline would ruin things for the up-and-coming tourist destination, conducted routine “beach sweeps,” where they would cull and kill the animals.They’d get rid of any unwanted animal that was going to be an eyesore. Some people would use the dogs as target practice for paintball. I found dogs with welts, broken ribs and splattered with paint.
- Stephen McGarva
“They’d get rid of any unwanted animal that was going to be an eyesore,” McGarva said.
Other locals simply took pleasure in abusing the dogs.
“Some people would use the dogs as target practice for paintball,” he recalled. “I found dogs with welts, broken ribs and splattered with paint.”
Others ran over the dogs, poisoned them, hung them up to die in a boathouse or hacked them up with machetes.
It was an expensive cause. McGarva initially shelled out about $1,000 a month on food and medications, “exponentially higher” as he tended to a pack of about 60-100 dogs at any one time.
“I felt almost like a creepy cult leader,” he joked.
But the more McGarva did for the dogs, the more he became a target. “I was the long-haired gringo helping the dogs,” he said.
He was followed, his home burglarized, and he was shot at — they missed, but they hit the dog he was carrying.
“I had come to terms with dying this way,” he said. “I went back home, and I did not tell my wife about it.”
And when he was approached by men with machetes, it was his dogs who came to the rescue.
“I ran for my car and they followed, but the dogs cut them off,” McGarva said. “All I remember were the sounds of people yelling and yelping. And when I turned around, I saw three of my biggest dogs dead on the ground.”
Eventually, he went to the mayor’s office to sound the alarm, but he received a chilling message: “In Puerto Rico, you cross the wrong people, you go for a long boat ride and you may not come back,” McGarva recalled.
With the local government slow to do anything to help the dogs’ plight, McGarva eventually arranged for about 270 to be flown from the island for adoption.
“I just didn’t want the dogs to die in vain,” he said.
Volunteers continue his efforts in Puerto Rico, and McGarva, who continues his work with animal-rescue groups, now lives in Massachusetts and is raising his own pack — two kids and a border collie named Briana, one of the island dogs he helped give a new lease on life.