Local hero: Tim Hutson, Collie Rescue of the Carolinas
By Tom Gillispie Jan 30, 2023
Tim Hutson had no idea what he was getting into.
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| TIM HUTSON AND DOVE |
“I don’t remember how I’d found out about it,” the Kernersville resident says. “I was told that ‘tons of people are gonna help you’ and ‘it’s going to be a big caravan.’ There were a lot of donated crates and anything we needed.”
They couldn’t bring 198 collies back, “but we’d bring as many as we could,” he says.
They didn’t have a big caravan. It was just Hutson and two women, Traci McCabe Lovelace and Jena Katherine Johnson. Lovelace flew up from Florida in mid-September 2022 to organize and take part in the rescue trip; Johnson is from Winston-Salem.
When they got to Mercer County, Ill., they learned that many of the dogs had been released to rescues around the country. They offered to take 50 collies; no, sorry. How about 30? They wound up with 15, still a huge pack of dogs for that kind of trip.
Hutson says there were people from all over the United States there, including some he met from Texas and Louisiana.
Why was he urged to go? Jean Smith, the founder of Collie Rescue, wanted him to take pictures.
“I would never have thought I’d do something like that,” he says. “It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience to do that.”
Hutson says he’d volunteered at various places before he got involved with Collie Rescue a few years ago. He went on a day when lots of other CRC volunteers were there, and he took a few pictures. Smith, still the rescue’s director, saw his photos and liked the compositions better than her own.
So she asked Hutson, who uses a couple of digital Nikons, to be the rescue’s official photographer.
Hutson isn’t the busiest Collie Rescue volunteer, but he says he works four to six hours a week, at least 200 hours a year.
Asked what volunteering means to him, Hutson says “it means we’re helping these dogs that otherwise wouldn't get cared for, that would probably die. We’re helping creatures that can't help themself. It says a lot. It’s the right thing to do.
“I feel sorry for some of the dogs that come in here.”
CRC has touched him another way. He was looking to get a dog, possibly a German shepherd or a lab. There were a bunch of non-collie puppies in a litter, and Hutson was looking at another dog, but an English shepherd puppy came over and kept licking him.
He wound up adopting that one. The puppies were all named after ice cream or candy; his puppy was named after the Dove ice cream bar.
So Hutson has gotten two great treasures from Collie Rescue, a beloved, athletic dog and the memory of what seems to him an epic trip.
“It was nice to be there from the beginning to the end,” he says. “It was kind of cool.”
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