MURRIETA -- Sherrie Hendren looks over lists of kennel numbers, then stares the dogs who occupy those cages in the eye and tells them with words unspoken that they can trust her -- she won't let them die.

But she can't do it much longer.

How many more times can she watch someone pay extra to have their animals killed rather than placed in a shelter without losing even more hope for humanity, she asks? She's tried to save as many as she could, she says, but because so many people fail to control animal population growth, there are too many animals in shelters for her to take.

"It's hard to not have it overrun your mind's thoughts," said the woman who runs the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, a nonprofit animal rescue program that provides animals for adoption each weekend inside Petco in Murrieta.

"They're the most appreciative things in our society," she said. "But dogs can't speak for themselves, and they can't take care of themselves. They need someone who's going to speak up for them."

The more she talks about it, the more frank Hendren becomes.

"People are jerks," she says. "They're selfish and cruel."

And she doesn't hesitate to say that to someone whose pet-owning history proves to her that they wouldn't give more thought to a missing or endangered dog than they would a flat tire.

Worse are the words she has for people she's seen who pay more to have their animals put to sleep than they would have to pay to put them up for adoption.

"Jesus," she says after she's talked about it long enough to let her tongue loosen. "The sh- that people do to their dogs, who are looking up at them, enduring, saying, 'I love you master, I love you master,' and you say here's the $5 to put it to sleep. It's like 'you chicken sh - -,' your dog loves you and he has no idea you're going to be killing him in five minutes."

Instead, Hendren rescues them as they are lined up to be euthanized at the shelter: dogs, puppies and cats, with personalities as particular as would-be owners. She takes them from Devore and Upland animal shelters. She takes the ones with missing limbs, ones that have been deemed to have a personality problem because they don't like the way they've been handled. And then she spends her Saturdays and Sundays at Petco on Village Walk Place trying to find good homes for the animals.

"I really feel they can sense death," Hendren said. "Once they get into the back door, they kind of just sit there and you have to drag them in because they know they're going to be put to sleep."

She pays for their shots, gets them groomed and boards them for as long as she has them. But she won't rush to hand a pet over to just anyone because some of her animals don't like men and some don't like children. She holds them until she's got a good match. But she's not as picky when it comes to the animals she rescues.

After rescuing animals at one shelter, she says, officials there told her that they didn't want her doing the same at other shelters.

"I told them since it's my time and my gas and my efforts, they're going to get saved from wherever I want to get them. A life is a life no matter where they come from," she said.

Hendren says she has always been an animal lover, taking home and mending injured strays as a kid. Then, 14 years ago, she met Ruby, a red Pharaoh hound with a broken leg. As she passed the dog in a shelter, Ruby howled and Hendren knew she had been chosen. But in 2001, Ruby wandered away from a new home Hendren had moved into and got lost.

"I was going stir-crazy mad going to every shelter I could to find her," Hendren said. "I wasn't going to stop until I found my dog. It just had to be somewhere."

She found him hiding under a house, trapped there by another dog who refused to give her enough space to let her out, until Hendren called her name and Ruby sprang to her owner.

Even though driving between San Bernardino and Riverside counties racks up the miles on her car, she brings all the dogs to Murrieta, where she has built a family of furry friends. Years after some dogs and cats have started a new life with a new family, they still come back to visit her. They smile, she said, and recognize her as they would their own feeding bowl.

"I actually know my dogs' faces, and can tell if they're happy and they have a good home," she said. "If I would have just moved away and went to Hollywood or somewhere else where adoption rates would be high, I would never get to see the ones I've already placed."

The animal connection she feels carried her through seven years of saving pets, caring for them and giving them comfort when they had no one else to scratch behind their ears. She's saved countless lives and created contacts that hold off on killing some animals because they know she'll come to the rescue.

But it's getting to be too much for her. Sometime soon, she said, she may stop looking at the euthanasia lists.

"To save my own sanity, I want out of this," she said. "I just want to go home and enjoy my own dogs."

Contact staff writer Nelsy Rodriguez at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2626, or nrodriguez@californian.com.