Art simply cannot keep up with the relentless productivity of Ron Danta and Danny Robertshaw. When we meet the owners of Danny & Ron’s Rescue, at the beginning of the 2019 documentary “Life in the Doghouse,” we’re told that they’re approaching a milestone of 10,000 dogs saved and adopted from their home shelter. By the time they graced the Mizner Park Amphitheater stage Tuesday night, following a screening of “Life in the Doghouse” at Festival of the Arts Boca, we discovered that the pair of canine saviors were approaching 15,000 adopted dogs.
Sandwiched between two historically and politically charged events—Doris Kearns Goodwin on Monday night and Carl Hiaasen tonight—last night’s screening and Q&A proved to be a necessary balm for the soul amid the heaviness of the news cycle and its inevitable weight on the Festival’s programming. Though the movie has been a hit on Netflix, last night was my first time viewing it, and I found myself enraptured by Danta and Robertshaw’s backstory and vision for a different kind of dog rescue.
Danny and Ron earn their incomes as horse trainers, which presumably helped pay for their expansive South Carolina homestead, where they volunteer just about all of their spare time to running their nonprofit rescue. All of the animals they save from puppy mills, hoarders, kill shelters, dog fighting rings and other unsavory situations live at home with the founders. At the beginning of the filming of “Life in the Doghouse,” Danta and Robertshaw shared their domicile with 71 dogs, a number that changes daily based on adoptions, new arrivals and deaths, which in a situation like theirs have become all too familiar—and which the film’s director, Ron Davis, does not shy away from, in one of the film’s many moving moments.
In addition to the enormous feeding, bathing, health care and housing logistics of operating a free-range shelter in Danta and Robertshaw’s home, Davis delves into the personal lives of the founders—their love for each other, their history of health scares and family traumas, the personal sacrifices they’ve had to make to transform a home once bustling with people and social gatherings to a space in which they, as the humans, are more like guests in the titular doghouse. For dog lovers like me, there’s nothing quite like the moment when Danny and Ron rise from bed in the morning, their forms barely visible among the hoard of kissing canines.
Davis takes time to weave important issues into his narrative, namely Danny and Ron’s advocacy for spaying and neutering, which if addressed, in concert with the shutdown of illegal puppy mills, would drastically reduce the population of unwanted dogs—and make their lives easier and diminish the suffering of so many of our four-legged friends. The duo acknowledged, both in the film and in the post-screening Q&A, that congressional legislation on these issues is a pipe dream. In the meantime, they’ll continue their work as long as they’re able. And as volunteers of their nonprofit, who don’t take a salary and who often need to pool their own funds into the organization, they can use all the financial help they can get.
Ron Danta sent us off with a message he’s gleaned from his 20 years of rescues: that dogs don’t judge each other based on breed, sex, fur color, hair length or anything else. “It’s a beautiful thing we learned from the dogs,” Danta said, closing with a two-word directive that even the non-dog lovers should be able to get behind: “Be kind.”
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