If you’re daily online haunts and television viewing habits are like mine, then you undoubtedly have been exposed to the countless online banner ads and tv commercials that have been pimping out National Geographic Channel‘s new show “Rescue Ink Unleashed.”And hopefully you tuned in to the first show, “It’s a Cruel, Cruel World” this past Friday night at 10pm on NatGeo. I am a big fan of these dudes and couldn’t be happier for them.
By now there have been countless articles and blog posts written about Rescue Ink, but in case you haven’t been introduced to them, they are a group of tattooed, biker-types who were all friends that banded together to form they’re own animal rescue group.
Because they are not affiliated with any other organizations they do not get any kind of state funding, therefore they rely heavily on donations (and many times end up reaching into their own pockets). They answer only to themselves and because of that they are not tied to any kind of bureaucratic policy. Basically, when they show up to deal with a situation, they get results by any means necessary (within the law, of course). And chances are they don’t need to show up again.
With the whirlwind of a media blitz for Rescue Ink that happened last week, I had the pleasure of being able to interview Joe Panz, Big Ant and G.
Joe Panz from Rescue Ink
[RK]: I assume people make some snap judgments about you guys as being scary biker dudes. I’m wondering, what is their reaction when they find out that you rescue animals?
J. Panz: We are scary guys; we just rescue animals. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Right, Ant?
Big Ant: Yeah, that’s right. We’re tough guys and we’re showing that tough guys can do a good thing.
G : Our image works. It does the job; it gets the job done.
J. Panz: Listen, when we show up at your house, we give you a moment of pause. We make you think. You don’t know who brought us there, you just know we’re there and you know we’re there for a reason. The reason is there’s a problem with you and an animal. So you’re going to listen to us and you don’t want us to come back. You’ll never know who called us, so you’ll know somebody’s always watching.
Big Ant: After we fix the situation, I might say, we usually never get invited back for some reason.
G: After we educate them, right?
J. Panz: Yeah, we never had to show up for a second time, not yet. But we do check up.
[RK]: Obviously Rescue Ink relies heavily on donations from the public, and the motorcycle community as a whole is known for being very generous and supporting a lot of these different causes. Have you guys ever tapped the community for fund-raising, like in the form of a bike raffle or benefit rides?
Big Ant: We have our own. We try to do fundraisers on our own.
J. Panz : We try to do fundraisers as much as possible but I tell you the truth, lately we’ve been going to everybody’s fundraisers, raising everybody [else] money and neglecting ourselves. That’s why we’re trying to send newsletters out now and telling everybody exactly what we’re doing trying to raise money for specific animals that need help and medical attention right away. We’ve just been running ourselves ragged trying to help everybody because right now with the economic times being the way they are, everybody’s crying for help. We’re just spread very, very thin trying to help everybody out. Quite frankly, we hope the TV show promotes awareness and people will start to donate so we could do more for the communities, and more for the animals and more for the other rescue groups.
[RK]: It makes me wonder now that you guys have your own television show, whether this national exposure will encourage the biker community to step up and organize some rides to help you out.
Big Ant: Yeah, I’m very well known in the biker community so I get a lot of feedback that everybody’s behind us. Like Joe was saying, the money’s tough but we do have good backing and hopefully it just gets better.
G: The thing is now we’re the ones that get called on to help and now the helpers need help. So we hope that everybody will go to our donation page and help donate, and help us so we can help others. We don’t want to stop here. We’ve got a long way to go.
J. Panz: There’s a lot of animals out there and a lot of people that need help. No shortage of that.
Big Ant from Rescue Ink
[RK]: Does it surprise you when people you show up to help turn violent on you when you’re just there trying to do the right thing (like in the 1st episode-the guy who was shooting feral cats with a pellet gun)?
J. Panz: You can’t fix stupid. People react however they’re gonna react. We negotiated with the guy but he decided to do something else when we left. We came back and we tried to help him out and tried to do the right thing, and he didn’t want to do it. So we let it be known to him that if he continues this course of action, we’re gonna have a problem and it’s gonna escalate real quick.
Big Ant: We gotta feeling that every time he picks up a pellet gun, he probably has us in mind.
J. Panz: Yeah, I just want to say the thing that sets us apart from other rescue groups, anybody can take an animal out of an abusive situation. The person abusing an animal could just get another animal. What we do is we address the problem at its source. We talk to the person abusing the animal. They’ll go from an animal, which can’t defend himself, and can’t talk and lives in the moment. What we do is we nip it at the source.
Big Ant: That’s why we stop it where it starts.
[RK]: So because of that approach, do you feel like your organization is more effective than say other rescue organizations?
J. Panz: We do whatever is necessary. We don’t leave a note on your door. We don’t give you a ticket.
G: We don’t go through the red tape.
Big Ant: We don’t sit and just talk about it. We go and do it.
[RK]: I’m sure you guys have seen a lot of really horrible situations on the calls that you’ve gone out on, and I’m wondering if there’s any particular situation that has stuck in you head over all this time that you could share.
Big Ant: The worst was the 180 cats, right? Yeah, we had a house with 180 cats and we had to actually catch every cat to get them spayed, neutered, and that one pretty much still sticks in me.
[This is the case that I heard of earlier this year that enlighteded me to the existence of Rescue Ink. Read the original post here.]
J. Panz: It’s still going. It’s an ongoing thing. I think there’s like 40 cats left and we’re down to adopting them out.
Big Ant: But we were at one point, if we’re doing adoption events every weekend, we got them out. With that case, these people called all the rescue groups and as soon as they heard 180, they hung up on them and said, “Well get back to you.” That’s the difference with us again. They called us. We showed up at their door. They were surprised. They were like, “I can’t believe that you’re here.”
J. Panz: And we didn’t have the money. We didn’t know how we were gonna do it; we just did it. We still owe people money probably. I don’t want to talk about it. It was a Cat-tastrophy!
G from Rescue Ink
[RK]: I assume this is your full time job that’s going on, rescuing the animals. How are you guys supporting your families?
J. Panz : [It's]…very, very difficult.
Big Ant: Yeah, we’re trying to do our work as much as we can, but if something comes in, we’ve gotta go. That’s it. Money, yeah, we need the money and everything but suffering and suffering has to stop. You know?
[RK]: You guys are actually still trying to juggle your jobs and rescuing?
J. Panz: Well it’s not really juggling anymore; it’s trying to pick it up from off the floor.
G: Trying not to lose it.
J. Panz: Yeah, which we’re all struggling. We’re all struggling. You know what the problem is? Everybody sees a TV show and everybody sees this and they think we’ve got millions of dollars. That’s not the case. It’s not the case at all. We struggle with every single time we go out on a rescue. We struggle; you’ll see it on the TV show.
We get money to pool out of our pocket to get gas. We pool our money to eat. We go to rescue some horses and we’ve got to come up with $500, but you know, who’s got $20? Who’s got $7? Who’s got $100? We come up with the money and then we’re like, “I can’t believe we just spent our gas money. How are we gonna get home?”
Big Ant: And believe me, we write a lot of IOUs.
J. Panz: Yeah, we write them on ice cubes, on nothing that sticks! [laughs] No, we pay all our bills. You’ve got to give us time and we pay everybody.
Big Ant: Yeah, in time we’ll catch up but with donations, it would make it a lot easier. We could go into the situation a lot happier, and then we could go do what we’ve gotta do and not worry about the money. Let’s worry about the animal.
J. Panz: Yeah, you know what it is? Every single time there’s a phone call, every single time there’s an e-mail, there’s money attached to it. When a rescuer calls and says, “Listen, there’s an abusive situation over here. A guy let the dog out. He ran across the street. He got hit by a car and the dog’s been crying for three weeks now and the guy’s telling us get the hell out of here. He says he doesn’t have the money to fix the dog and he’s not letting anybody else help him, and this, that, and the other thing.”
We have to go in there and talk to this guy and get the dog out of there and get him medical attention. That’s gonna cost $1,500 to $2,000. We find ourselves putting out an e-mail blast to try to raise the money and we’re already gone on the rescue. We don’t wait for it; we’re just hoping it comes. Then by the time we get back, we’re like, “Okay, how much are we in the hole now?”
The other rescue groups, they do whatever they can too. They say, “Thank you.” We say, “You’re welcome.” But the plain, simple fact is we’re not a city organization. We don’t get funding from the city. We get funding from no one. We get donations, that’s it. This is what people have to realize.
[RK]: At least your money is actually going to help animals and it’s not towards an advertising budget that sends direct mail pieces to people who are just going to throw them away. I hate when I get those in the mail.
J. Panz: One guy came in and goes, “What are you gonna do? I’ll sue you.” We’re that guy’s nightmare. Sue me? Go ahead, go ahead, sue me. That’s why it doesn’t matter. We’re there to take care of a situation by any means necessary, within the means of the law. I have to keep on throwing that in there because the lawyer will get mad at me if I don’t. It’s the way things are. You don’t send a boy scout after a bad guy. We never said we were angels. We’re just there to help and we’re on your side.
G: By us showing how much we’re struggling, we’re telling other people that no matter what situation you’re in, somebody’s out there worse off than you and that’s what we do. We know we’re all struggling but we make sure we make the rescues. We make sure we go try to save a pet’s life or an animal’s life.
J. Panz: And people too.
J. Panz: There’s a lot of times we go into a situation where there’s abuse, but the abuse isn’t really the fault of the owner due to the fact that they don’t have enough money to feed the animal. They don’t have enough money to feed themselves. Remember that old woman?
Big Ant: We went to her house and the dog bowl was full. The cat’s dish was full. She actually had a couple of rabbits. Everybody was fine. We were like, “This is fine. I don’t know what’s going on.” The refrigerator happened to open and there’s nothing in there. We went through her cabinets. She had nothing to eat so she was feeding the animals, but she had nothing to eat.
So of course, what’s the next thing we have to do? We all pool as much as we had in our pockets and went to the store and we had to get this lady food. We said, “What did you eat today?” She said, “I ate some cereal this morning.” We help everybody and everything that needs help.
[RK]: Okay so I have a totally silly question for our last question. I have a lot of girlfriends now that are seriously crushing on all of you guys and I’m wondering, are you going to appreciate all of that additional female attention?
J. Panz: Well, it’s always appreciated, the female attention.
G: We got a couple chick magnets on our team.
J. Panz: The only person you’ve got to watch out for is G. Everybody gravitates towards G.
G: Yeah, okay.
Big Ant: All I’ve got is bill collectors and stalkers after me. That’s all I have.
J. Panz: It’s nice to have people appreciate you.
Big Ant: That’s right.
Rescue Ink airs Friday nights at 10pm on the National Geographic Channel. The official Rescue Ink website (which just got a shiny new make-over) can be found at rescueink.org (where you can make donations online) and you can follow them on Twitter @rescueink or get updates from the National Geographic Channel @NatGeoChannel.
Related posts:
Rescue Ink: an in-your-face-approach to animal welfare
Rippin’ news
this fall: Rescue Ink “Unleashed” will air on NatGeo