Debbie Miller would have made a nice complement to Dr. Dolittle.
While Dolittle carried on conversations with the animals, Miller would have done practically everything else: fundraisers to help homeless cats and dogs, opening the farms she’s lived on to ferals and livestock, donating 100 percent of the proceeds from her homemade soap business to support shelters and so forth.
“For full disclosure, Debbie is my wife of 40 years,” her husband, Tim Miller, wrote to the Monitor, nominating Debbie for our Hometown Hero series. “She has always been a very passionate and committed animal lover. Throughout our married life, we have had horses, cows, dogs, cats, chickens and ducks. Debbie built a great reputation raising replacement heifers for a local cattle dealer. Many dairy farms asked specifically for “Debbie’s Cows.”
She says she’s loved animals since shortly after birth, adding that Bambi’s demise in the short animated film, “Bambi Meets Godzilla,” took its toll on her. Her license plate says “COW GYRL.”
Now 63, Debbie and Tim have 13 cats, four dogs, 15 egg-laying chickens, three cows and a horse named Jazz on their 31-acre farm in Canterbury.
“We’ve had Jazz for 12 years,” Debbie said. “She’s like a big pet, a big dog. She loves our three cows and she’s like a mother to them. She whinnies when they run out of sight or she’ll run after them.”
And Debbie has been a mother to them all. For several decades, in fact. Her parents were dog lovers when Debbie was a kid. Cats, not so much, until they heard meowing outside their basement door and found an abandoned kitten with huge paws. They called her Mittens.
“That’s what began as our love for cats,” Debbie said.
She loved horses, and worked at shoveling snow and mowing lawns to earn money to buy one before her 16th birthday. “I rode all the time,” Debbie said.
She rescued dogs and cats and had room for them on the family’s farms in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In time, neighbors and strangers began dropping off pets that they no longer could care for.
“We started getting involved with rescues,” Debbie said. “We had the barn nearby and we’d put the barn cats in there.”
She assisted Tim with his work at New York Life and had time to restore some of the homes where the couple has lived, while volunteering and coordinating efforts to find shelters, homes and foster homes for homeless pets.
She’s proud of her business, Paws Four the Claws, which she began six years ago. She handcrafts soap for people while all the proceeds from sales benefit numerous animal rescue causes.
“I wanted to support rescue (agencies), which do a great job,” Miller said. “I wanted to donate more money and do it on a larger scale. Once my mind is rolling with ideas, it snowballs.”
Miller said her nonprofit has raised more than $85,000 since 2017. She’s donated the money to places like Kitty Angels in Tyngsboro, Mass., Boston’s Forgotten Felines and Furrr Feline Rescue in Rochester, NH, plus local organizations.
“The need is so great out there,” Miller said. “If I get a call from someone for help, I try to help in some way and Paws has helped so I could give money to organizations.”
Her devotion to, and passion for, animals has opened her heart to impactful experiences. For example, she’d stop jogging to check on a neighbor’s birthing pen, making sure the pregnant cows were safe and comfortable.
She’s not a veterinarian, but she played one quite often in that pen.
“The worker would close the pen and I would run by to see if there was a problem with the pregnant cows,” Miller said. “I pulled out quite a few of them.”
Another time, a fisher attacked a farmer’s chickens and left one alive, with the back of its head torn away. The farmer planned to slaughter the chicken.
Miller had another idea.
“I said let me try to nurse it back to health,” Miller said. “I put her into a small cage and gave her tons of food and I cleaned and washed (the wound) with antibiotics and in no time, she came back and she lived with our flock.
“She even had feathers.”