Pilot Christine Schwab, right, reaches back to Brody while Christine's daughter, Sadie, observes as they arrived at Mount Pocono Airport from Virginia.

Killing groups of dogs and cats in gas chambers and by other means, ranging from needles to guns, has become a frequent solution to shelter over-crowding.

Is this inevitable? According to a survey by the Humane Society of the United States, if one quarter more of the 17 million people per year who consider getting a pet would adopt from a shelter, the shelters would be nearly empty. Currently only four million of the eight million animals yearly taken in by shelters find homes. But efforts and evidence for other options are growing.

When a small plane belonging to Air National Guard navigator Christine Schwab landed at the Mount Pocono Municipal Airport on a recent Sunday evening, the first head out the door belonged to Brody, an exuberant pit bull terrier mix, narrowly escaping a shelter death. The South Carolina shelter to which Brody’s owner surrendered him euthanizes a majority of the animals they house, and pit bulls particularly get little time to be adopted, according to Donna Casamento, who coordinated his rescue. She is program administrator and founder of the Help Every Animal Reach Tomorrow (HEART) nonprofit organization, working with animal rescue groups to find foster or permanent placements for the many doomed adoptable animals at overcrowded shelters.

Brody and Baby, a handsome but skinny and matted death row cat, tucked in a crate in the luggage hold, had arrived to live in a Pike County home.

Part of Casamento’s challenge is to find ways to get animals to distant homes when someone wants a cat or dog they see among the dozens whose photographs appear on e-mails she sends across the country. Schwab is one of 2,100 participating pilots in Pilots N Paws, a nonprofit created for animal rescue by Debi Boies, a horse breeder and former nurse in South Carolina.

Boies conceived of the organization in 2008 after her efforts to bring an ailing Doberman to her home resulted in a friend flying the dog to her. Finding that pilots love to fly and need to fly to maintain their skills, she set up a website where animal rescuers can post their transport requests, and pilots can respond and post information about upcoming flights with space. Thousands of flights later, the website abounds with photos and stories.

Schwab, who lives near Albany, had seen the request for a flight from South Carolina to Pennsylvania and offered to fly the animals from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Marty Hutto, a computer programmer from Virginia, offered to fly the other leg, and the two pilots coordinated their times. To satisfy laws in different states, pilots require that animals, which have also included pigs and pythons, have health certificates.

Bill Lloyd, director of the Port Jervis Humane Society has expressed concern about bringing animals from shelters elsewhere when he euthanizes some local animals for lack of space. But Barry Heim, director of the Pike County Humane Society, has taken in animals from the South, and is concerned about the practice only when a shelter rejects local animals.

Hutto , who brought along a friend and crated Brody in the back seat of his plane, reported Brody was a peaceful passenger, as did Schwab, who brought fellow Air National Guard member John Bartow, and harnessed Brody in back next to her daughter, Sadie, 13. PNP pilot Doug Stephenson, a financial consultant in Delaware, who had also offered a ride, said animals tend to be lulled to sleep by engine roar before the plane takes off.

Schwab is now assisting with transport for a National Science Foundation mission in Antarctica, where the sun never sets now, the bay is frozen, and the creatures, such as seals and penguins, whales and skua birds, will not emerge until December.

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