Unleashing Rescue Ink on TV - liherald.com
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“You don’t send a Boy Scout after a bad guy,” says Joe Panz in the first episode of the new show on the National Geographic Channel, “Rescue Ink: Unleashed.” “You send a bad guy after a bad guy. The difference is, we’re yourbad guys.”
Weighing a total of around 1,700 pounds and with more than 80 tattoos among them, the guys of the Island Park-based animal rescue group Rescue Ink know exactly how they look and the impression they give. Their imposing demeanor was one of the reasons that this unlikely group of animal lovers was asked to film a TV show for National Geographic.
“Rescue Ink: Unleashed,” which premieres Friday at 10 p.m., follows members of the group as they take on cases in the New York area. They see much more than just abused dogs and cats (although there are those): They chase some chickens that someone dumped in a Queens neighborhood, and take piranhas that were being kept in a fish tank in the city to the Atlantis Marine World aquarium in Riverhead.
“The main thing we always talk about is that it’s not how many [animals] we’ve saved, it’s how many we can save or how many we didn’t save,” said G, whose colleagues, like him, go by first names or nicknames because they tend to make a lot of enemies while doing their work. “How many animals lost their lives because we weren’t there?”
For Rescue Ink, the show isn’t about making themselves famous or selling T-shirts; it’s all about raising awareness of animals in trouble. “I’m a retired detective,” said Angel, the group’s very own pet detective, who used to work with the NYPD. “I’ve been in the media before for homicide, because we would use the media with that to help us. And that’s what we’re doing now, too.”
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“She followed us and then sat down with us individually and talked to us about each of our pasts,” said member Johnny O.
For the past eight months or so, the guys have been followed around by National Geographic Channel cameras — to Queens, where they chased chickens, to the Rescue Ink base in Island Park, and to a house in West Hempstead, where the guys got reports of a man shooting cats with a pellet gun.
The organization, which has been around for two and a half years, has been happy to have the cameras in tow, which will help raise awareness of animals in trouble, but hasn’t changed the way they operate. They’re still out there doing their jobs, funded by donations to their Web site, www.rescueink.org. “We live off of donations,” Johnny O said. “We’d do this with or without the cameras. We did it before the cameras were there, and we’re doing it now.”
Not only will the show help the group’s cause, but it also will help viewers get to know another misunderstood breed: the big, burly, tattooed biker. “People get to know the Rescue Ink guys in a little more detail and what we’re about personally, and that we have lives as well, and just a little of our pasts,” Johnny O said. “And it makes people understand we’re not just big muscle heads — we’re real people, too. There’s people under those tattoos.”
Comments about this story? ACostello@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
'Bad' guys are pussycats on 'Rescue Ink Unleashed'
Photo credit: National Geographic Channel, 2009 | Rescue Ink member Batso and his dog Inka
THE SHOW"Rescue Ink Unleashed"
WHEN | WHERE Docu-reality hour premieres Friday night at 10 on NatGeo.
REASON TO WATCH Local tattooed-dude animal rescuers are so soft on pets, they come down hard on abusers.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT The Island Park-based nonprofit group Rescue Ink includes these eight hulking wheels-and-tats guys, who may look like bad news but do good deeds. In premiere missions, they cross paths with a West Hempstead man enraged over cats getting in his yard, a hospitalized South Bronx veteran with three pit bulls waiting hungry in his projects apartment, and a Queens neighborhood beset by roaming chickens.
BOTTOM LINE Playing the guys' big-and-mean appearance/ attitudes against their sentiment for animals is a winning juxtaposition - even when the show leans too hard on genre staples like busy editing, foreboding music/video and hard-boiled narration.
Better to slow down and get to know these guys, especially when narration says they're doing good at least partly to "redeem past sins."
But "Rescue Ink Unleashed" parcels out the info slooowly - head-to-toe-tattooed 75-year-old Batso (Nicholas Maccharoli) lost his son to Lou Gehrig's disease; Big Ant (Anthony Rossano) has seven pets, including rabbits and a kitty; leader Joe Panz (Joe Panzarella) is a "body builder and mortgage broker" who previously had been "shot by enemies on the street." (At least their bios are online at natgeotv.com/rescueink. There's also the book "Rescue Ink," co-authored by former Newsday pets columnist Denise Flaim. The guys will be at Huntington's Book Revue Oct. 2 at 7 p.m.)
Local animal lovers will appreciate how often NatGeo shows the guys working with city animal control, Long Island veterinarians and Port Jefferson Station's Save-a-Pet. Their adventures nicely go beyond the dog/cat nexus, too, following the guys' hapless stray chickens chase and their trip to Riverhead's Atlantis Marine World with rescued "pet" piranhas.
But it all comes back to the muscle when it comes to abusers. "You don't send a Boy Scout after a bad guy," Joe says. "You send a bad guy after a bad guy. The difference between us is, we're your bad guys. We're on your side." We wouldn't want it any other way.
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