Ask Sherry Carpenter of Bloomsburg anything about pets--any species, any breed--and she'll cheerfully give you the answer, or find it for you. Just don't expect it to be a short conversation. She'll answer your question, then others you may not have asked, then others you didn't even know you needed to ask, leaping transitions of thought as quickly as she's available to help.

    "As long as I'm talking, I'm always learning about others," she says. But, her rambling conversations are really a cover to keep others from probing too much into her life--"we're very private people," she says about her family. But, have a problem, especially about pets, and she'll talk all night if she has to, and she's not shy about talking about her five English springer spaniels and marmalade cat she rescued.

    Carpenter, a freelance journalist, is executive director of Animal-Vues, a national organization which promotes "compassion for animals, and to help strengthen the bond between animal professionals and the public." She takes no salary from Animal-Vues, and accepts only a fraction of the expenses to which she's entitled. "The work is more important," she says.

    This caring 61-year-old was always surrounded by animals, almost in opposition to her parents who "were not animal friendly." As a child, Carpenter brought frogs' eggs home, and watched them metamorphize. She also had dogs and cats, turtles, rabbits, and birds--"any animal that can love you back," says Christian, 38, her younger daughter and co-owner of Murphy Communications in State College. But she especially loves horses. As a teenager, she and Red, a horse "with a lot of personality and playfulness," would go into the woods. "I'd ride him sometimes, but we often just walked together," she says. They'd stop, chat, rest, and think. Like many animals, Red died violently. A man who was boarding Red became annoyed at some of the horse's antics "and just shot him," says Carpenter. "You never get over that." She never owned another horse.

    In one of the few contradictions in her life, although Carpenter is uncompromising in opposing cruelty to animals, she also believes that hunting is necessary, but "I couldn't be a hunter myself." Her father, a businessman, was a hunter and trapper. Her mother, a Realtor and art gallery owner, shot birds. As her father became older, says Carpenter, "he became more compassionate," although he still enjoyed duck hunting. She doesn't talk much about her mother.

    Carpenter entered St. Lawrence University on a New York State Regent's Scholarship, planning to become a physician. In her senior year, she married, and decided to go to graduate school in education, not medicine "so I could devote more time to raising a family." She earned an M.A. in one year at Alfred University, then went to the University of Buffalo for doctoral work in psychology with additional courses at the medical school. She thought she could handle the demands of motherhood, psychology, and medicine. Six months into her first year of medical courses, Carpenter dropped out.

    "They were operating on brain centers in cats to test responses," says Carpenter, who can't forget having to decapitate the animals in order to take histological samples while the animals were still alive, then hearing their death gurgles. "I didn't like it," she says, not defiantly, but with reluctant acceptance. She pauses, thinks a bit, as if searching for the right words, then quietly adds that the other reason she couldn't continue was "because I decided I'd rather be a mother full-time," something she could do to help develop life, not take it.

    "She always wanted to be at home when we came home," recalls her older daughter, Sherilee, 40, now an editor at Penn State. At home, Carpenter made sure her daughters developed a love of reading and writing. "She loved books about horses and dogs, but we read everything we could," says Sherilee, recalling that the family "seldom watched TV." Their mother "was pretty strict about that."

    She was also strict about establishing rules and "making us be good to people," says Christian. "She taught us the spiritual side of life and what school can't teach you."

    Carpenter says she was neither helped nor hindered by the feminist movement for equality, even when confronted by the flaming rhetoric that questioned why women would want to give up careers for motherhood. "Equality really means that each woman should be allowed to be whatever she can be," says Carpenter, proudly stating she is "so much because I am a mother."

    Both daughters earned journalism degrees from Penn State; both are full-time media professionals. Both daughters say they want to be mothers--"just like Mom."

    In 1969, Carpenter's husband, William, by then a corporate executive, had a stroke at the age of 39, leaving his left side paralyzed. Her husband, says Carpenter, "wasn't allowed to have pets as a child, but in college he took rats home as pets rather than see them euthanized." An English springer spaniel therapy dog, one of the first therapy dogs in the nation, helped him regain his will to do the necessary exercises to regain mobility; there was never any question as to which breed Sherry Carpenter would prefer over the next three decades. Carpenter's husband, having regained most of his muscle use except for his left arm, eventually returned to a career in corporate personnel, including work at Johnson & Johnson, the Geisinger Medical Center, and as personnel director of Centre County. The Carpenters separated in the early 1980s.

    By then, Sherry Carpenter had established herself as a journalist. Writing "was my own therapy," she says. She had written her first magazine article while a high school student, using the income to "buy presents for my family and friends." During a three-decade career, she has been a newspaper reporter and columnist in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a radio news director, a public relations account executive, and a substitute teacher, all part-time jobs, always a full-time mother. For the past 12 years, she has written a monthly column for Dog World magazine. Among the awards she has received for her writing are two from the New Jersey Press Association, and two gold medal Maxwell awards from the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA), for a video about the Canine Good Citizen program and a widely-used handbook for police officers to learn how to deal with dangerous dogs. She has also won a first place award in feature writing from the DWAA.

    In 1984, still haunted by the sights of animal experimentation, she and Dr. George Leighow, a Bloomsburg area veterinarian, founded Animal-Vues. The organization is an outgrowth of "Animal Crackers," a weekly radio show they hosted for more than a decade. She says Animal-Vues "has given my life focus, purpose, vitality, and joy." In addition to one-to-one counseling, she also teaches non-credit classes at Bloomsburg University. "It puts me in touch with pet owners, and gives me more purpose in what I do," she says.

    Her insight into both psychology and medicine gives her a special perspective few writers have. "I'm always doubtful of the claims of drug companies that use animals for testing," says Carpenter who also says the "newer" synthetic drugs to control animal behavior and personality "probably aren't helpful to the animals." But, she says, she's "always open to arguments; prove to me it'll help animals, and I might listen."

    Like many who work for others, Sherry Carpenter doesn't have a large income, now living off of social security, a few investments, and small monthly checks from her writing. "Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you make as long as you enjoy what you're doing," she says. She pauses again, another of her rare pauses. "Everything I do is an extension of my motherhood," she says. "That's just who I am."

Copyright 2002 Walter M. Brasch