Michelle Cheramie and Scrim From April 2024 until the middle of February, the escapades of Scrim the dog provided a welcome distraction from the many tensions of the world. The plucky little rescue pup escaped from home several times, eluded constant attempts to recapture him and managed to survive everything from
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Michelle Cheramie and Scrim[/caption]
From April 2024 until the middle of February, the escapades of Scrim the dog provided a welcome distraction from the many tensions of the world.
The plucky little rescue pup escaped from home several times, eluded constant attempts to recapture him and managed to survive everything from extreme heat to blizzards, speeding cars to dumpster diving. Various sightings showed that he rambled through territory from Uptown to Old Metairie to Mid-City.
The other protagonist in the story, which captivated the entire New Orleans area and garnered substantial national attention, was Michelle Cheramie, founder and owner of Zeus’ Rescue. Cheramie is a lifelong animal rescuer, but she had never matched wits with the likes of this Houdini of hounds. Nor had she ever experienced such a public spotlight.
After nearly nine months on the lam, the peripatetic pup was finally collared and is now living with Cheramie. Reactions to the conclusion of the saga covered nearly as much ground as had Scrim, including considerable relief that he was safe as well as dismay over the end of his so-called freedom.
Cheramie has also played a key role in the revitalization of the Freret Street corridor, home of two of her three facilities. The business owner sat down with Biz New Orleans recently to talk about pets, neighborhood restoration, and co-starring in the long-running drama of Scrim the Superdog.
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"Scrim's running around, he's saving all these other lives in the process, and bringing awareness that there are pets on the street that require some help."[/caption]
Scrim was obviously one of the biggest stories of last year. What was it like for you and your operation to suddenly receive all that attention?
It was definitely an adjustment. I was getting phone calls all day and all night of sightings, so it was all about time management. I have all these plates spinning — I have three locations of Zeus’ Place, I have a nonprofit; I also run the vendors for the Freret Market and the Freret Street Festival. Then Scrim decides, ‘I’m gonna go run around Mid-City for a moment.’ You have to start delegating. All of this was done thanks to the staff here and at all the locations, keeping this going while I was leaving in the middle of an adoption.
As far as professionally, I’ve been doing this for 19 years. Scrim made me a better rescuer. He made me a better organizer. He made me better at time management.
It did bring a lot of attention to the rescue, because he became a spokesperson for animals on the street. People were not just looking at that little white thing on the side of the road, they were stopping — ‘Is that a dog? Does it need help?’ We were raising awareness for the pet homeless population. At the same time, when the recovery team and I were out, we were rescuing dogs and cats, we were calling Trap Dat Cat and letting them know where there were litters of kittens. Scrim’s running around, he’s saving all these other lives in the process, and bringing awareness that there are pets on the street that require some help. It was an interesting time.
What were some of the impacts and key lessons learned from the Scrim situation?
Usually, you put a task in front of me and I’m going to go full bore into it. About a month into doing the Scrim search solo, I realized that I couldn’t do this alone. I needed help. I was able to work with these five amazing people from all different parts of life. These people gave up eight and a half months of their lives. Anytime I got a call they were able to just run out. And we needed New Orleans in general. Without their help, Scrim would probably still be running. I learned to rely on people more and not just say, ‘I can do this.’
How and when did Zeus’ Rescue get started? How many locations, employees and volunteers do you have?
I’ve been rescuing since I was a kid. But rescuing animals does not bring in a ton of money; in fact ,it takes a ton of money. So, I ended up becoming a network administrator for an international company. Bought a house, married, had a daughter, and then Katrina hit, and we evacuated to Houston. The company sent me back to New Orleans on September 8 to fish the servers out of Lakeway Towers. I loaded them up in my truck and then walked to my house through waist-deep water.
Then I started to get calls for animal rescue. These national organizations were looking to help, and they needed somebody to drive a boat, that knew the streets of New Orleans without the street signs because they were blown over. I checked all those boxes, so on September 8, I started going. At that point, I had lost everything: house, Jeep, everything I owned. So, I said, ‘I need to start over, I need to do what I love.’ This is what I love.
I did that for a couple months, and finally the rescues started to calm down, and I was driving down Freret Street, and there was a sign on Eve’s Market on the corner of Freret and Cadiz, it had been up for sale, and it said ‘reduced.’ What? I could open a boarding facility that’s going to front my rescue habit! So I called my then-husband and said, ‘Can I buy Eve’s Market and open up a boarding facility?’ and he said, ‘Sure, why not?’ Now at this point we had torn down our house, we had just taken out a huge construction loan to build this new house, and here I am asking to take out another $250,000 to buy another building.
It took two and a half months to find a bank that would loan me the money. Now I had a building that I needed to convert to something that would work for me. It took a month — I did a lot of the work myself.
I outgrew that building after the (2016) Baton Rouge floods, and this building on Napoleon became available. At the same time, South Market District was opening, and they reached out to me, and said, ‘Hey, would you open up a pet daycare/boarding facility servicing our buildings?’ Within 10 months, we went from one building to three. Now we have 35 employees and a couple hundred volunteers.
What are the biggest challenges to running this type of organization?
That it’s 24/7, 365. I’m never completely off. It’s different than a retail establishment or an accounting firm. These are living beings. Sometimes they want to kill each other. Sometimes they get sick, and sometimes they bite people, and sometimes people drop the leash and they get lost. It’s nonstop, and it’s hard work, because we see the worst of the worst. We get abused dogs, and I’ve got to deal with that and then turn it right off and deal with the next thing that’s in front of me, constantly navigating all these different circumstances and being very aware of burnout.
That’s so huge in this industry, you see so much bad and you’re constantly on the go, so just constantly checking to make sure that I’m not burning out and neither are my employees. No two days in here are ever the same. I never know when I get dressed in the morning, will this be the day where I get to do all the computer work, or will somebody call me and I have to jump into a canal and rescue two pit bulls.
I’m criticized a lot because I turn people away from adopting. We do landlord checks, we do home ownership checks, because we want to be sure that the pet we’re going to put in that home is allowed to be there. I also do vet checks, and if you’re not providing vaccines or heartworm prevention, or if every eight months you get a new puppy and he gets hit by a car, then we turn people away. When a pet comes into my program, I’m responsible for it. I always take my rescues back if it doesn’t work out. You break a lot of hearts, and you make a lot of families, all in the same day. At the end of the day, I’m here for the pets. I can’t do it without the people, but I’m here for the pets.
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"The business owners, we know each other, we communicate. I see the restaurants sharing ice or walking back and forth for change. It's a great community, and it happened organically. It's beautiful to be a part of it."[/caption]
What are some of the key accomplishments of Zeus’ Rescue?
(laughs) That you and I are sitting in this building eight years later. I receive no city, state or federal funding. I have at this location six full-time employees. I have to pay rent. Then there’s the amount of insurance I have to pay, not only for workman’s comp but liability and property for a building that houses animals who need conditioning. That’s on top of the normal everyday bills. My medical bills for the rescues are $200,000 a year. Every day I’m trying to figure out how to keep these doors open, and the fact that we’ve done it for eight years is a huge accomplishment.
I ran the numbers last year, and since Zeus’ Place on Freret opened, I’ve adopted out over 15,000 animals. That’s 15,000 lives I’ve saved. In all of my 19 years of doing this professionally, I’ve only had to euthanize for behaviors six times, only when the animal becomes a danger to itself, or there is no way that I will feel good putting them out in the public that isn’t a professional setting like a sanctuary, and all the sanctuaries are full. Six animals in 19 years. That’s an accomplishment. For the Baton Rouge floods in 2016, we were just in one building, and we took in over 250 animals in three weeks and found them homes. We also will hold animals during hurricanes for people who have direct hits until they’re ready to go back in, free of charge. I’ve evacuated these buildings three times, which is no easy feat. Just the fact that we’re still here and relevant that many years later, that’s a big deal.
What has been your role in the ongoing revitalization of Freret Street?
After I opened up Zeus’ Place, the next thing was how do I get people here? This was in April of 2006. No one was driving down Freret Street. I’m a million dollars into debt in mortgages alone, and nobody’s coming to this neighborhood.
I was sitting in the front office of Zeus’ Place — it’s a wall of windows — and I see somebody standing in the parking lot across the street. Then there was another person walking this way — we all met at the intersection of Freret and Cadiz. We just stood there and I said, ‘Hey, I’m Michelle, I just bought this building.’ The guy over there says, ‘I’m Peter Gardner, I just bought this building.’ This other guy says, ‘I’m Greg Ensslen, I just bought that building over there.’ And we’re looking around the street going, ‘We’re going to lose our shirts here, we need to do something. Let’s talk, let’s figure out a vision for this street.’
Out of that meeting came an art market. Freret had been historically used as a thoroughfare. An art market brings people and makes them stop, makes them look around. We were putting up these big poster boards of all the available storefronts on the street and their real estate agents, so when people came in, they were like, ‘This is not so bad, I could actually live here.’
Peter, Greg and I would sit around and say, ‘What do we want this street to look like?’ We want a mix of retail, restaurants and businesses to serve the neighbors. We want to make this a walkable street. To get an alcohol permit was really hard for a restaurant at that time, but we also did not want to turn into a row of frat bars. We wanted to be respectful of the residents who were here before Katrina. We looked to Frenchmen Street, and they had an art and culture overlay zone.
What we finally came up with is that we’d only have one bar per block face per side. The city was granting restaurants that had a certain amount of food sales versus alcohol sales an ABO without any special permit needed. We talked about everything from go-cups to trash cans to ‘Is karaoke live music?’ We set limits to how long you could have amplified music on the street. The go-cups given out by restaurants should have their name on them so we know where the trash is coming from. We came up with a good neighbor agreement for businesses that outlined all the things that they were going to sign on and sure enough, we started to get traction. These businesses started popping up, and some of them failed and some of them got replaced, and some of them are still here with us. And it’s beautiful.
How do you feel about where the street is now? Were you involved with Trader Joe’s coming in?
I absolutely love this street. I live a block and a half off it. I walk it every day. It’s trending younger, which I love. I work with Tulane and Loyola — their students come for community service hours, and they walk my rescues, so those students are coming all the way down here. I know most of the residents. The business owners, we know each other, we communicate. I see the restaurants sharing ice or walking back and forth for change. It’s a great community, and it happened organically. It’s beautiful to be a part of it.
Trader Joe’s, I found out about it when I got that NPP (neighborhood participation program) notification, and at first, I was really concerned. I wasn’t the only neighbor feeling that way, but they listened to our concerns and said, ‘Let’s work together, that’s why we’re here.’ I’ve heard that before, so I was a little nervous.
We had another meeting and [Trader Joe’s] came back in and they had changed their drawings! Then we had follow-up meetings, and at every step of the way they kept asking us, ‘What do you want to do about this?’ and ‘We’re going to do this, how does this sound?’ The drawings that I saw at the last meeting, they pushed the store all the way to the corner of Napoleon and Freret. They have a big wraparound porch that mimics the feel of Napoleon. All their deliveries come in during certain hours. The dumpster is in the center of the property, landscaped around it with a drain underneath it, so refuse can go straight down the drain, it’s not just collecting dust and smells and flies. If I have to let a big national chain into my little bitty street, I’m thankful that it’s them and they listened to the neighbors’ concerns.
How do you see the corridor continuing to evolve? How do you plan to remain involved?
It’s going to evolve. People are going to retire, businesses are going to fold. It’s trending younger, which is great, but you still have Mr. Dennis’ Barbershop, who’s been there since the dawn of time, and you still have Nana Nursing, who’s been there for 30 years. It should keep growing, it should keep reflecting the neighbors around it. Since I’m a neighbor, I’m going to stay involved. I have no plans to move. This is my heart. This is where I belong.
Does the growing number of businesses impact you as a nonprofit?
It’s helped me in both my locations. The Freret location brings a lot of awareness to the rescues, because that front window is filled with cats. And for the location on Napoleon, the people that are waiting for the restaurants, the restaurants give them little beepers and they come over here and play with the animals. It’s certainly raised my visibility to the public.
With the Scrim episode wrapped up, what are your objectives for Zeus’ Rescue going forward?
I’d like some normalcy, that’s for sure. I’m going to just keep doing what I do. I’ve been doing this all along, there’s just been a lot more eyes on me in the last 10 months. He was an exceptional case, and I hope that along the way, he’s raised the visibility of rescues in general. Not just here, but across the country. He was in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, everywhere.
I’m just going to get back to what I do, hands-on with the animals, and not having to run around nearly as much. But I hope in the process that Scrim has raised the awareness that there are so many animals in need, and you don’t have to be a professional rescuer, you can just let a rescuer know or do it yourself. It’s beautiful the way New Orleans came together for this 17-pound dog that they’d never met, and they saved a life together. We all did it together, and I think we all feel really good about it.
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