Kristi Wright was hired as the animal-control officer in Pecos, Texas, in 2017. The town’s shelter, a windowless cinder-block building behind the police station, had twelve bare-bones kennels and few resources. “People thought of it, like, That’s where animals go to die,” Wright told me. “And it wasn’t untrue.” In Pecos, a West Texas oil-field town dotted with man camps , equipment yards, and the occasional roofless adobe structure melting into the scrub, packs of stray dogs congregated by the gas stations and the elementary schools. The animals that wound up in the shelter, some strays and a few surrendered by owners who couldn’t care for them, were unlikely to get adopted; anyone in Pecos who wanted a dog probably already had three. The shelter had a budget for euthanasia drugs and foo

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