Best Friends FOR LIFE

One day this summer, Kathi Kibbel’s craftsman cottage on Clinton Avenue was home to six dogs, a few porch cats and some inside cats, the exact number of which she avoids mentioning.

“The cats rule the roost over the dogs,” she says.

The pet population of the home Kibbel also shares with her husband, Ish Caraballo, changes as fosters come and go. She’s always looking for friends, acquaintances, friends-of-friends and strangers — any responsible person, really — to take one of her brood. When one finds a permanent home, there is space for another foster.

She opens her bathroom door and retrieves a kitten, a pretty little gal with a damaged eye.

“I found her in the street, and she was near death,” Kibbel says, clutching the kitten to her chest. “She was covered in fleas and malnourished.”

Pets just seem to come to Kathi Kibbel, or maybe it’s that she just can’t look away when she sees an animal in need.

That’s how she found Salt the Dalmatian, who was the pet of two young homeless guys Kibbel met downtown.

She noticed the dog had an injured leg, and after talking to the men for a while, she convinced them to let her take the dog.

“I think she must’ve been run over by a car,” Kibbel says of Salt.

Salt, the three-legged Dalmatian People’s choice winner

Her vet tried to save the leg, and they went so far as to put Salt through hydrotherapy to strengthen it (as a result, the dog now dreads water). Eventually, the vet told Kibbel the leg needed to be amputated.

“She lost her leg the same day we put to sleep our old girl dog that had the very same leg amputated years ago,” Kibbel says. “Her name was Zelda, and she is the reason we did the Pooch Prom [fundraiser] at Lee Harvey’s for two years in a row.”

Kibbel and Caraballo moved to Oak Cliff 13 years ago, and they immediately noticed an abundance of stray cats and dogs. So they started working with animal rescue organizations to capture, vet, spay or neuter, and adopt out as many of them as possible.

Kibbel has become a feral-cat-colony manager for the city of Dallas, so she humanely traps feral cats, hands them off to Dallas Animal Services to be fixed, and releases them back into the neighborhood.

She encourages her neighbors to fix their pets. She once took her neighbor’s “mom and dad dogs” to the vet herself to be spayed and neutered, with permission of their owners, because “I was tired of finding homes for their puppies,” she says.

Kibbel has been in the bar business for many years, and Caraballo is a welder by trade and a DJ for fun.

“This is how we give back,” she says.

A pAck of dogs wAs running down Lausanne one hot day a couple of years ago, and Jessica Johnson noticed that one of them dropped in the median near Colorado.

The other dogs took off and left him.

“He was so exhausted and winded,” Jessica’s husband, Christian, says. “He couldn’t go on.”

So she stopped, got out with the homeless kit she keeps in her car and approached the dog with crackers and water.

She took the dog home and cleaned him up a bit.

“The first night, he had this howl that was like out of a novel or something,” Christian says. “It was the eeriest, timber-wolf, like, you-think-you’re-in-Alaska howl.”

The Johnsons tried putting pictures of him on neighborhood boards, but no one claimed him. At the vet’s office, they found that the dog had fleas and ticks under all his matted fur, and worse, he tested positive for heartworm. The dog was 10 pounds underweight and, they were surprised to learn, less than a year old.

“Two thousand dollars later, we got him all cleaned up and clear of heartworm,” Christian says.

But Pepper has turned out to be a big, beautiful dog that is an important part of the family. The Johnsons’ 9-year-old daughter, Chloe, is an equestrian, and she’s taught Pepper to jump obstacles.

“He comes when you call. He loves to be obedient,” Christian says. “The dog is the sweetest dog I’ve ever owned, and he wants nothing but to be next to you.”