‘Life In The Doghouse’ on Netflix: An Inspiring Love Story Worthy of Documentary Treatment

From the opening shot, it seems like a lot to deal with.

A house full of dogs — room after room packed with crates and cages, dogs of all shapes and sizes, ages and conditions, breeds and mixes — rising with the sun to eat their breakfast, a meal prepared on the scale you might except for a military mess hall. It’s more than any normal person could handle. Of course, Danny Robertshaw and Ron Danta aren’t any normal people.

Life In The Doghouse, an uplifting 2018 documentary available now on Netflix, follows the daily life and operations of Danny and Ron’s Rescue, a home-based operation in Camden, South Carolina that, by the best count of its namesake operators, is nearing its 10,000th adoption of a shelter dog. These dogs have been through a lot — abandoned by disreputable breeders, rescued from animal hoarders or dog-fighting rings — and many of them are facing the prospect of euthanasia at over-crowded municipal shelters.

“Seeing their faces and knowing they’re going to die, that drives me harder to want to save more,” Danta explains in an on-screen interview. Where others have seen troubled or violent dogs, these committed partners have seen loving creatures that only need a second chance. A caring hand and a compassionate ear can get them out of danger and on their way to a permanent home. “You give them the time, and they come to you and they tell you their terms of life.”

Robertshaw and Danta, a couple of nearly 30 years, long considered themselves dog rescuers — if not operators of a full-fledged dog rescue. That all changed in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, displacing millions of people and orphaning countless dogs whose owners either died or were forced to leave them behind by the terms of their evacuation. Faced with the immensity of this tragedy, their rescuing of dogs went from a hobby to a calling. They stepped up and opened their home as wide as they could, delivering dogs to every friend and acquaintance they could convince to rescue. “Within a five-month period, we saved approximately 600 dogs from Hurricane Katrina.”

From there, they never stopped. Horse trainers by profession, they became dog rescuers by mission, and they didn’t even waste time working on a name. “I never liked the name,” Robertshaw notes with chagrin, “but people knew Danny and Ron from the horse world, so it stuck.” The ad-hoc operation became a 501(c)(3), and the rescue became their lives.

“I’m wondering how we lost the house,” Robertshaw notes, as a montage of old pictures morph into the present-day, showing how dining rooms, fireplaces, living space and spare bedrooms have gradually been given over to space for crates, dog beds and litters. They’re by no means hoarders — it’s a clean, tightly-orchestrated operation, even as it’s displaced the normal rhythm of a couples’ life. “The house is 4,400 square feet, and of that space left for us — well, how big is a king bed?” Of course, it’s not sterile, loveless operation — and the dogs are allowed in the bed too, all the better for accustoming them to life in a future family’s home.

Beyond covering just the daunting logistics of running the rescue, the film gives ample and deserving space to sharing Robertshaw and Danta’s relationship and personal biographies, struggling with family drama and the difficulties presented to young gay men in the 1980s. Danta dealt with a divorce and came to terms with his sexuality, and Robertshaw struggled with his family’s lack of acceptance of his chosen profession, and they found support and eventually love in each other. Decades later, through triumph and tribulation, through serious health scares, they’re still there for each other. It’s a love story worthy of documentary treatment, and learning more about who they are as people makes it so much easier to understand how they’ve found space in their hearts for thousands of forgotten dogs.

One starkly jarring segment later in the film, a distant overhead drone shot of trash bags being carried out of a kill shelter and taken to a mass grave, sets the stakes that they know they’re up against. “I don’t blame the shelter,” Danta explains. “It’s the community that’s failed, and the shelters are forced to do the community’s dirty work.” They’re passionate about stemming this tide of tragedy, and about advocating for making spay/neuter requirements a matter of law. In the meantime, though, all they can do is do all they can.

“I don’t think I could ever turn my back on this, because I couldn’t live with the guilt of walking away from all those faces that need help,” Robertshaw shares “There’s a part of me that would love to be selfish — live the rest of our life and have a good life, travel and enjoy retirement — but my insides won’t let me do it.”

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and internet user who lives in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, two young children, and a small, loud dog.

Stream Life In The Doghouse on Netflix