Canine Estates, run by retired sisters, provides a home for cast-off dogs

PALM HARBOR — The house where "last-chance dogs" get another chance is a 4,000-square-foot ranch-style down a gated private drive.

Inside, Slinky and Maria, beige chihuahuas with deformed front paws, rest in the foyer. Muffin, elderly and blind, has the grooming room, which might be an office if people lived here, to herself. Gloria, a terrier mix with a terminal tumor beneath her head-to-tail mohawk, roams the spotless kitchen.

There are 38 dogs living in this house, where the front door never opens, where dogs, and the numerous humans who serve them, enter through a waist-high doggie gate off the garage.

They are dogs that got too old for their owners, too temperamental for the shelter or too sick and therefore too expensive for somebody's pocketbook.

But not for Canine Estates.

Sisters Jayne Sidwell, Sybil Freeman and B­arbara Erskine founded the nonprofit two years ago, hoping that in retirement they would build something worthy of leaving behind.

"It's about making a difference," said Sidwell, who, like her sisters, has no children of her own. "You get to a certain point in life where you don't care about material things anymore."

Now, though, they're realizing love might not be enough. The expenses for the sanctuary are high, as much as $20,000 a month.

They need help.

On Sunday, they'll host the first of what they hope will be an annual benefit concert at Jannus Live to help them save "one tail at a time."

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The sisters grew up in rural Alabama, where they acquired their Southern drawls and love for undesirables. Their mother was a sucker for displaced animals, and the community knew it.

"We were known as the place where you could just drop your dog off," Sidwell said. "It's natural for us, to love and be with dogs."

Sidwell came to Florida first, about 35 years ago, when she and her husband started their business. Soon, both her sisters and their mother had moved to the Sunshine State, as well.

Then Sidwell got, and fought, breast cancer. She decided it was time to step away from the family business. But now, in retirement, she found she had free time and an itch to make a difference.

She and her husband bought the house in Palm Harbor in 2012 for $265,000. Freeman remembers one of their first nights in the house. The sisters sat on the floor, surrounded by their first four rescue dogs, the walls bare, the rooms empty.

"Are we really doing this?" she recalls thinking. "It just sort of blossomed from there."

The sisters, with their 80 volunteers and six staffers, have since adopted out 160 dogs. The walls in the house are now painted a soothing gray, and decorated with black and white portraits of their "fur kids" that have come and gone. Each room has either a TV tuned to something your grandmother would watch or a radio playing soothing tunes. Carpet was replaced by tile, and the back yard is sectioned and fenced like a fortress. The kitchen pantry is stocked with canine necessities. On the bookshelf, filled with titles like Puppies for Dummies, sits a sign that reads, "Live, laugh, bark."

The hope, Sidwell says, is to make the dogs feel at home, to ease the transition from Canine Estates to a real family, especially for the ones that had spent months sleeping alone in animal shelters.

They quarantine each dog for 10 days, vaccinate them all and medicate them when necessary. Groomers visit regularly, and they have a resident veterinary technician. Each dog gets its own crate, its own blanket, its own cushioned doggie bed.

Is this level of care financially sustainable?

With raised eyebrows, Sidwell said: "That's just it."

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Running Canine Estates is like having a full-time job all over again. Most days, the sisters drive around the bay area to pick up "red alert" dogs about to be euthanized.

When she wakes each morning, Sidwell says she gets a sinking feeling in her gut. There will be dogs, she knows, they cannot save. That's the hardest part.

Canine Estates takes only dogs weighing less than 25 pounds, but sometimes people will call and lie about the breed. That's how the sisters acquired Ray Charles, a blind springer spaniel that far outweighs the limit. He gets skittish around the smaller dogs, so Ray lives in the master bedroom by himself. There's a television. He fancies HGTV.

Some dogs are too damaged for Canine Estates. The sisters take them home.

Sammie Sue, a 2-year-old hermaphrodite Papillon, lives with Freeman and has undergone four surgeries to prevent potentially fatal infections. The sisters call Sammie their mascot.

"We don't go on vacations," Freeman said. "We work seven days a week and pretty much all day."

But they don't mind.

"Gosh, with the money we put in it, we probably could have bought a house in the south of France," Sidwell said. "But then what?"

Every night, about 7 p.m., Sidwell, Freeman and Erskine meet at the home. They let the dogs roam out of their kennels and snuggle on the couch with them. Once the chores — washing towels, mopping floors, cleaning toys — are complete, the sisters dim the lights and usher the dogs to bed. They blow kisses through the kennel bars and call each by name.

"Good night, kids," Sidwell says on her way out. "Love you."

Contact Katie Mettler at (727) 893-8913. Follow @kemettler.