The commotion can only mean one thing. Kinky's here!

Kinky is Kinky Friedman, the cowboy smart- aleck who used to be a hippie songwriter and is now a hippie mystery writer with a side business of rescuing ugly dogs.

"We want the dogs nobody wants. If they have a problem, that's not a problem for us."

For a stray, it's not a bad place to be. There are blue hills and dirt roads and goats grazing. Here, a stray gets one square meal a day, all the fresh water he can lick from a silver pipe, and plenty of canine companionship. The ranch is awash in country music piped in from a nearby shed. It's the only radio station you get in Utopia.

Patsy Cline seems to like it here. She's a cattle mutt who was brought back because her owner said she didn't bark. (She does.) She's here with Cat - he's part Catahoula - who was dropped off at the pound because he ate his owner's Social Security check.

"Let's face it," Kinky said. "There are a lot more animals worth liking than people."

The fence went up in August; the dogs arrived in September. The first rescue wasn't dramatic. Kinky, "Cousin Nancy" Parker, and Kinky's sister piled into Cousin Nancy's pickup truck, "Trigger," drove to the Hondo shelter and said, "We'll take 'em. All of 'em."

Red dog, we'll call you Red.

Other red dog, you'll be Fred.

Tony and Nancy separated the dogs by size - small, medium and large. The small and medium share the central pen with the picnic table. Large dogs get the big run that stretches back behind the single-wide trailer.

There's Fred the dog, who was separated because of heartworms, in the Lamar Smith pen. There's Hearty, an Australian cattle dog mix whose name is short for heartworms. He's in solitary confinement in the Ann Richards pen because he's bad about jumping up on people. In the Wilie Nelson pen, there's Molly the ring-eyed dog, who growls at people.

Then there are Spanky and Jack, the escape artists who got their own pen (with special wire netting around the top), and down at the end are Max the fighter, and Prissy, his mongrel moll.

Cousin Nancy is trying to explain how everything works, but she's having to yell because Mr. Magoo, Kinky's Labrador retriever mutt, is taunting the other dogs. It seems he has a tennis ball, and they do not.

She knows that beneath the cigar-breathing, dirty- talking demeanor is a man with a weak spot for the downtrodden. She and Kinky did their first rescue together a few years back.

Kinky found a kitten on the side of the road. A hunter had shot it in the leg. It hissed when Kinky leaned in for a closer look. Well, Kinky picked it up anyway and brought it to the vet, who gave the kitten two blood transfusions and amputated the leg. Then Cousin Nancy took over, at Kinky's request, because he had to leave,on a book-signing tour. She named the three-legged cat Lucky.

That, Cousin Nancy says, tells you where Kinky is coming from.

If Kinky cared about being part of a trend, which he doesn't, he'd have this to say, too:

Compassionate people put down so many dogs and cats last year - 5 million nationwide - that a bumper crop of alternative organizations is springing up to rescue animals from the rescue shelters. And his is one of them.

Although the number of dogs and cats "put down," "put to sleep," whatever you call it, has dropped in recent years, the numbers are still sickening. There were 750,000 in Texas in 1997 (39,000 in Fort Worth alone).

True, Americans are waiting until they are older and more settled to get a pet, and true, 56 percent get their pets from shelters, and true, trends are encouraging in other parts of the country.

But in the South and Southwest, little has changed. In the Hill Country, dogs are still dumped on two-lane roads, and litters of mewing kittens are still abandoned in ditches, and pounds can only keep them so long.

Ranch manager Tony Simons is like Gandhi, Kinky says. He walks into dogfights, where others fear to tread.

Cousin Nancy Parker is ranch director. She's not really Kinky's cousin but rather an old friend and a die-hard animal lover. She grooms every dog daily.

Kinky cajoled a rich friend, beauty supplier John McCall, into paying for 1,000 feet of chain-link fence. He shamed some other rich friends into giving him more money, and he persuaded friend Adri Brown to start a cat shelter four miles down the road. She named the first rescued cat after him. The Kinkster is a 13-pounder who never shuts up.

Then there's his friend Copper Love. He talked her into helping make the dogs adoptable. She's an animal trainer who worked in Europe but retired in Kerrville. Copper is working in the Ann Richards pen, soothing Hearty by rubbing his teeth. She's calming him so they can work out his issues with jumping.

Currently, Kinky is schmoozing friend and country musician Dwight Yoakam, aiming to get a benefit concert out of him before long.

The goal is to find homes for every misfit here. Cousin Nancy and Tony interview adoptive parents. They have a clause in the contract that says they can repossess the dog if they get wind of abuse or neglect. The contract also requires the new owner to return the dog before setting it free or taking it to a pound.

When one leaves, and Nancy always cries when one does, there's a vacancy for another to be spared. So far, Kinky has talked 15 of his friends into adopting. He's as rabid as a used-car salesman, ready to talk you into adopting a dog.

It may be a shell game of plugging holes without fixing the leak, but what matters here is that the mutt with the black spots didn't die.

Fritz the runt is still alive. So is Alice the golden retriever and Roscoe, the boxer puppy whose mother got hit by a car. All that matters here is that a dog named Red and another named Fred and another named Lucille Ball got a second chance. This is Utopia, after all.