Kramer, a Bernese Mountain dog, stretched out flat in the corner of his kennel, craving the cool floor. The big guy was in a tight spot, and he knew it.
His dark eyes simply gleamed with pain for himself and for the person he still loved with all his heart, his owner-breeder. Days earlier, she had come between him and two female Bernese in heat. In the throes of canine instinct, he tried to get to the two dogs and bit his owner’s leg, tearing her ligaments.
Now Kramer sensed finality. The animal control officer, his injured owner, and the director of the Nevada County Shelter agreed: Kramer— gentle, dignified Kramer, four-time champion show dog—could unfortunately never be trusted again.
Yet by the time Kramer arrived at the shelter in 2008, a crew of dedicated volunteers led by Cheryl Wicks was ready to help. Cheryl and her fellow volunteers had long since adopted a credo in which no animal dies. If they need medical help, we’ll raise funds. If they are aggressive, we’ll figure out the reason and work to rehabilitate them. If the shelter is crowded, we’ll step up our promotion of adoptions and fosters. No one dies on our watch.
Cheryl knew Kramer deserved a second chance, so drawing on her network of animal rescuers, she located a last chance animal rescue facility, the Smiling Dog Farms in Wharton, Texas that was devoted to saving injured, unwanted, or aggressive dogs. Cheryl called and told them about Kramer; they agreed to adopt him.
After Cheryl obtained the consent of everyone involved, especially the injured owner, Kramer’s kennel attendant volunteered to drive him to Texas, where the two owners, Jay and Ricky, rehabilitated him and eventually adopted him as their house dog. With the love and care of these kind men, Kramer enjoyed a long life, a model citizen and beloved family member.
Just a few years later, after almost a decade of volunteer rescue work, recruitment of volunteers, and supplementing the shelter’s meager medical budget with their own funds, Cheryl and her partner, Curt Romander, struck a formal agreement with Nevada County: Cheryl would be the CEO and Curt would be the CFO of a non-profit that would raise funds to pay for the shelter’s medical expenses, including an expanded spaying and neutering program. The county, in turn, would pay for the facility and staff. The Nevada County Animal Shelter would now be called “Sammie’s Friends,” in honor of Cheryl and Kurt’s beloved Shar Pei, Sammie. The facility would be dedicated to one steadfast principle: no healthy animal in their care would be euthanized. By 2010, the county granted Sammie’s Friends full supervision of the shelter.
Fast forward to 2025. Nevada County is currently one of only eight counties in California where shelter animals are put down only for critical medical or public safety reasons. Quite a distinction in a state that has the highest overall rate of animal euthanasia in the country. In the 50 California counties in which extensive euthanasia is still practiced, well over 100,000 healthy animals, adoptable dogs and cats, are killed each year, a massacre of innocents.
Such routine euthanasia used to be common practice in our county. Back in 2001, when Cheryl Wicks first volunteered to walk dogs at the shelter, 68% of all shelter animals were euthanized. Utilizing the skills she learned as a teambuilder for Hewlett- Packard, Cheryl recruited and organized a program of over 150 volunteers devoted to fund raising, animal care, and adoption. They were committed to saving our shelter animals, one at a time. To date, over 39,000 animals have been saved, and many thousands at the shelter and out in the community have been spayed or neutered.
One can readily imagine the human trauma for shelter workers where euthanasia is a common practice. The staff and the volunteers of shelters everywhere are inveterate animal lovers who have a hard time sleeping at night when they know the lives of animals in their care are imperiled.
Even in Nevada County, our shelters are now operating at almost twice their capacity. “While we can take pride in all we accomplished,” says Cheryl, who retired from Sammie’s Friends in 2023, “there is still much work to be done. I hope the residents of Nevada County continue to be generous in their donations and in their willingness to foster or adopt a pet. Our local shelters need our help.”
So, here’s to Cheryl Wicks. And here’s to the shelter workers whose daily lives exemplify a sacred principle of the Talmud: whoever saves one life saves the world entire.