Dog Is My Copilot: Rescue Tales of Flying Dogs, Second Chances, and the Hero Who Might Live Next Door

by Patrick Regan

  Another mission accomplished for pilot Sam Taylor—and another five very hard earned decals for the well-traveled Piper Cherokee.

  Postscript

  by Sam Taylor

  The second “layer” of this story is the rescue flight coordination conducted by Elizabeth (“Liza”) Bondarek of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which resulted in thirty-seven GSPs being flown out of South Dakota.

  Liza is a cook at a restaurant on the cape by day, and the rest of the time she is a volunteer with GSP Rescue New England. She is one of many stalwart rescue coordinators who spend countless hours behind the scenes doing the nerve-wracking work of setting up multileg rescues. She tells me it is not uncommon for her, after hours of coordinating a flight to meet the pilots’ capabilities and comfort zones, distances willing to fly, all the “what if” questions and so on, to get a call on the day of execution: “My plane won’t start.” But she somehow makes it happen, primarily because she has educated herself in the art and science of general aviation. General aviation—the flying in and out of the hundreds of small, uncontrolled airfields throughout the United States—is a world of its own, with its own culture, language, and codes. Liza understands this world and can communicate with pilots, which makes the transports go smoothly and efficiently.

  Liza Bondarek’s hound, Sieg fried, monitors the computer at “Mission Control” in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

  When the need to find homes and transportation for forty-two German shorthaired pointers came to the attention of the National German Shorthair Pointer Rescue’s headquarters, it immediately went to Liza for help. She took on this daunting task and over the next several months flew thirty-seven of them out through Pilots N Paws. The others went by land transport.

  I have worked with Liza on several GSP rescues, and over the months we have developed a friendly rapport and a mutual respect. When I call her, I introduce myself by saying, “Is this mission control?” and she responds, “Is this my favorite pilot?” to which I respond, “You say that to all the pilots.”

  Hell on Wheels

  NAME: Chance

  BREED: Pit bull–boxer mix

  AGE: 1 year

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  259

  ROUTE:

  Emporia, Kansas–Des Moines, Iowa

  Steel wheels rolled down the railroad track into the heart of Emporia, a city of twenty-five thousand on the upland prairie of eastern Kansas. Whether the engineer ever saw the dog on the track isn’t known. But someone witnessed the horrific incident and made an emergency call. To call it an accident wouldn’t be quite right. Sheriff’s department personnel who investigated the scene would later tell attending veterinarians that the dog wasn’t on the track by accident. Someone had put him there—and restrained him so he couldn’t escape those rolling steel wheels. An eastbound freight train clipped his hind end. When the impact of that strike spun him around, a westbound train hit his head.

  Animal Control officers collected the pit bull–boxer mix off the side of the tracks and took him to a nearby vet clinic. No one expected him to survive the night. But when the clinic opened in the morning, they were met with a surprise. The dog, though battered, bloody, and unable to walk, was not just alive, but alert.

  Christina (“Tina”) Khan teaches English as a second language in Topeka, about an hour northeast of Emporia, but around Emporia, she’s better known for her avocation than her vocation. As vice president of a nonprofit animal-welfare group in Emporia, Khan’s the woman area animal shelters and vets call with hard-luck cases. This one certainly qualified.

  By the time Khan got word of the critically injured dog, he had already been bandaged up and sent to the city animal shelter. “The city wasn’t going to pay for vetting or critical care,” she explains.

  Khan and another rescue volunteer intervened. They hustled to the shelter to pick up the dog and take him back to the vet. On the way, they struck a quick bargain. The other volunteer, Karen Todd, would pay for the dog’s vetting, and Tina Khan would foster and rehabilitate the dog after it was patched up.

  Khan wasn’t sure what to expect at the shelter. The shelter manager had already told her that the dog should probably be put to sleep. Even without a full vet exam, it was obvious that his back legs were at least partially paralyzed.

  Khan arrived to find a dog broken in body but bursting with spirit. “We walked in and he was just like, ‘Hi, guys! How’s it going?’ I mean, here was this dog dragging himself around—couldn’t move anything other than his front end—but just high energy, grinning and panting, with his ears up. He had such a spirit.”

  Rescuer Tina Khan says good-bye to Chance in Gardner, Kansas.

  She and Todd drove the dog back to the vet clinic, where, despite the patient’s fighting spirit, they received the same unwelcome advice—put the dog to sleep. “I said, ‘Absolutely not,’” recalls Khan. “Not an option. We’re not going to euthanize him because he’s paralyzed. He’ll be a wonderful, adoptable dog. To survive something like that . . . my God, if he survived trying to be eliminated by a train, who am I to not give him a chance?”

  Three days of care later—including treatment of a cracked skull, sinus blood clots, multiple cuts and scrapes on his head, neck, and face, and a full exam of his nonworking hindquarters, the dog was ready for release. Khan was there to pick him up and take him home. Up until then, he had been referred to simply as “the train dog.” Khan signed him out of the clinic as “Chance.” “He didn’t need to be reminded of that,” she says.

  Chance spent several weeks in Khan’s home, where he was made welcome by her four resident dogs. His condition steadily improved, and he kept up surprisingly well, pulling himself by his muscular upper body, dragging his back legs behind. But Khan knew he needed a home where he could receive more care and therapy—and she needed to free up her foster space for other hard-luck cases at the shelter—so after two months or so, she started looking to place Chance in a forever home.

  This is the story of three determined women, two caring pilots, and one incredibly tough dog. The second woman in the story lives in Adel, Iowa, some three hundred miles from Tina Khan’s home in Kansas. The two have never met personally, but they are kindred spirits in the sense that they each dedicate a large percentage of their waking hours (and disposable income) to help dogs in need.

  Amy Heinz is the founder and president of AHeinz57 Pet Rescue and Transport, located about thirty miles west of Des Moines. Heinz got into the animal-transport “business” accidentally about five years ago after volunteering to drive two homeless rat terriers from her local shelter to an animal rescue in Minneapolis. Since that time, her organization—like Khan’s, a 501(c)(3) registered charity with an all-volunteer staff—has become a vital link in the transport network that moves rescue animals across the country. “Because of our location, we’re actually a hub of transport,” she says. “Dogs go east and west and north and south, and I-35 and I-80 intersect right here.” Little did she know when she moved from California to Iowa in 2005 that she’d wind up right in the middle of things.

  Heinz, a single mother, runs her expanding operation from her home on a small acreage. In the early years, she used her garage as a kennel. While animal transport has always been her primary objective, there are invariably those dogs that need a temporary home until a permanent one can be located. She’s built a network of thirty families who actively participate in fostering dogs, and she recently leased a vacant vet clinic and set up a short-term boarding facility called “The Pit Stop.” Her goal is to make the dogs feel as much “at home” as possible—it’s furnished with comfy chairs and couches for the canine tenants. “We even have slumber parties there,” says Heinz. “We spend the night and watch movies.” It’s not as frivolous as it may sound. “They’ll make better dogs when they’re adopted if they know what it’s like to be in a home,” she explains.

  Amy Heinz had first met Tina Kahn a few weeks before when the former helped the latter transport and place
another injured dog—also hit by a train in Emporia. That dog, nicknamed Joe Boxer, went on to be fostered and ultimately adopted by one of Heinz’s foster families.

  When Kahn began looking for a home for Chance, Amy Heinz was at the top of her list. “I called Amy and said, ‘I’ve got this guy and he’s going to need a really special home,’” says Kahn. “He’s going to need a lot of attention.”

  “We couldn’t take him into our foster system because I didn’t have anyone who was home during the day,” says Heinz. “But I told Tina I’d help her find a place for him. So I started sending out mass e-mails and crossposting everyone I knew.”

  Enter determined woman number three. Sara Henderson is cofounder and current president of the Pet Project Midwest, a Des Moines–based nonprofit with the mission of keeping pets with the people who love them. The organization’s two main endeavors are a pet “food bank” for low-income animal owners and the creation and operation of Iowa Pet Alert, a Web- and mobile-based forum for reconnecting owners with missing pets.

  When Henderson received the post about Chance from Heinz, she dutifully crossposted it to her own network, as she had with so many pet alerts in the past. But she couldn’t quite get this one out of her head. It was the picture, more than anything, that got to her. “He had these ears that kind of flip forward and cover one of his eyes in the most adorable way,” she recalls. “I kept looking at that picture, and every time I saw it I fell a little more in love. By the end of the second day, I thought, ‘You’re coming to my house to live.’”

  Though it sounds like a wholly emotional decision, Henderson did conduct considerable due diligence before committing. She had long conversations with Khan to learn as much as she could about Chance’s condition and prognosis. She sought out advice and input from other owners of handicapped pets. She spent hours on the Web site handicappedpets.com and thoroughly researched “Walkin’ Wheels” and other dog “wheelchairs.” She knew caring for Chance wouldn’t be easy or cheap, but still . . . she knew—or at least felt fairly sure—that it was meant to be.

  Her biggest concern was her home—an older house that she knew would be problematic for a dog with mobility issues. The biggest problem was an oversized kitchen island that left little clearance for a dog on wheels. That problem was solved in a single day when sixteen friends showed up, tore out her kitchen, and remodeled it sans island and built a ramp off her deck. “I have some seriously good friends,” Henderson says.

  In the meantime, Amy Heinz had gone into transport mode, reaching out to a handful of her tried-and-true Pilots N Paws volunteers. Kansas City–area pilot Jim Bordoni signed on for the transport. Knowing that the disabled dog would need extra care, he asked another KC-area PNP pilot, Sarah Owens, to fly along. A few days later, the two drove to Gardner, Kansas, where Bordoni hangars his Piper Cherokee and where they were met by Henderson and Chance.

  “I expected to see a beaten-down, sad, scared, and pitiful creature,” remembers Bordoni. “Boy, was I wrong! Chance may not have the use of his back legs, but it has not affected his spirit in the least. He may be one of the most loving and alert little guys I have ever transported.” Bordoni had made a bed for Chance in the back of his plane, but Chance wasn’t about to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime experience. He sat up and looked out the window all the way to Des Moines.

  Once on the ground in Iowa, Owens went into the fixed base operator to see if Heinz had arrived yet to meet them. “While Sarah was inside, I told the ramp guy Chance’s story,” says Bordoni. “The next thing you know, he had a baggage cart there to wheel Chance into the FBO.” Owens rode along to keep Chance company.

  Amy Heinz greeted the two pilots and their much-anticipated passenger and packed Chance up in her car for the last leg of his journey. At Sara Henderson’s freshly renovated house, his new Walkin’ Wheels and his very excited adoptive mother awaited.

  Chance deplanes in Iowa.

  PNP pilot Sarah Owens and Chance catch a ride to the fixed base operator on a baggage cart.

  A few months into his new life, Chance is thriving. Henderson, like everyone else who’s met him along the way, marvels at his spirit. “He’s just happy to be alive,” she says. “He’s smart, funny, and loyal as heck and doesn’t have a clue that he’s not perfect in every way.”

  Chance is already a fixture in the neighborhood doggie playgroup and took to his new wheels like a champ. “He loves playing with other dogs, and the wheels put him on more of a par with them,” says Henderson. “When he gets tired he just plops down. His upper body goes into a lay, and his back legs hang from the wheels, and he’s a happy kid.”

  Medical tests indicate that Chance does retain a small amount of mobility in his back legs, and Henderson has started him on physical therapy in hopes that he can regain some use of his hindquarters. “We’re not sure where it will go,” she says, “and he’s absolutely fine as he is, but if we can get him more use of his legs, we’re certainly going to try.”

  With his wheels on, Chance more than holds his own in the neighborhood playgroup. “You could never convince him he’s not perfectly normal,” says new mom Sara Henderson.

  As the mother of a special-needs pet, Henderson has a message for others who might be considering adopting. “I want other people to be able to consider an animal like him and not think, ‘Oh no, that’s too much.’ I realize it’s not for everybody, but honestly after the first week, the benefits are so much more than any of the challenges. It’s not the big drama I expected it to be.”

  “I’m just so grateful to PNP. They are such an awesome organization and have such dedicated people. They truly are angels to us down here on the ground.”

  —Amy Heinz, AHeinz57 Pet Rescue and Transport

  “We pilots are just the taxicab. The real heroes are the rescues and fosters who devote their endless time and resources to save these deserving dogs.”

  —Jim Bordoni, PNP pilot

  Preston

  NAME: Preston

  BREED: Chinese crested

  AGE: Unknown

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  530

  ROUTE:

  El Paso, Texas–Fort Stockton, Texas

  Fort Stockton, Texas–Austin, Texas

  Animal-rescue pilots hate to deadhead home, so PNP pilot Denise Pride was doubly happy to coordinate a two-way transport through central Texas in March 2010. She flew Wendy, a deaf poodle, from Austin to Fort Stockton, as one leg of a transport to the dog’s new forever home in New Mexico. In Fort Stockton, she met up with another PNP pilot and swapped Wendy for two small dogs, a Japanese Chin on his way to an adoptive home in the Northeast, and a Chinese crested headed for a rescue in Austin.

  In their short time together, the pint-sized Chinese crested, named Preston, claimed an outsized piece of Pride’s heart. “He had been seized in an animal cruelty case,” she says. “He had long nails, poor skin, wild hair, and no teeth, but was still the most loving dog one could ever meet. I fell instantly in love with the little guy.”

  Whether it’s an “against all odds” survival story or simply the soulful look in their eyes, some animals just seem to touch humans a little more deeply. Tom Navar, MD, was the pilot who handed Preston off to Pride in Fort Stockton. He had flown from El Paso, while his wife, Tracy, held the little dog in her lap. The flight had been Navar’s first as a PNP volunteer. In a postflight message to the others involved in Preston’s successful transport, the deep impact it had on him was clear.

  I had never flown animal rescues of any type before, but I wish to tell you how much I enjoyed meeting and working with you. Most of my flights are with cancer victims who need to be transported to treatment and are economically deprived. The most important thing I wish to share with you is that, even though I am not (in contrast to my wife and daughter) a dog person, I was, and will for a long time to come, be haunted by the look in the Chinese crested’s eyes as he gazed at Tracy’s face while she gently held him during the flight. There was no doubt that the
dog was expressing its absolute trust, love, and appreciation for those around it that were helping him. The wisdom in the gaze of this venerable, profound creature spoke of a centuries-old bond with man. This was a life-changing experience, and I wish to thank you sincerely for allowing us to participate in it.

  Preston with his Texas transport team. Above (from left): Dr. Tom Navar, Denise Pride, Reni Moczygemba, Tracy Estes Navar, and Maya Cameron Navar. Right: Preston with PNP pilot Denise Pride.

  Phoenix Rising

  NAME: Phoenix

  BREED: Doberman

  AGE: Five years

  TOTAL MILEAGE:

  650

  ROUTE:

  Meridian, Mississippi–Tupelo, Mississippi*

  Tupelo, Mississippi–Lancaster, Ohio

  * Ground (car) transport leg

  Years of abuse at the hands of her owners finally ended in outright abandonment. Neighbors say that when the family moved away, they literally threw the five-year-old Doberman out of the car on the outskirts of Meridian, Mississippi. A tough life seemed destined for a tragic end.

  The dog survived that final heartless act as she had so many before, and eventually made her way back to the only home she’d known. Desperation brought her back—not happy memories. Multiple scars and a profound fear of people would attest to that. It was here that her owners had docked her ears and cropped her tail when she was just a pup—a home job with a sharp blade and no anesthesia. She’d dropped a litter of pups a year or so before—eleven in all. None survived past eight weeks. As she wandered the woods near her former home, her belly had already started to swell with another litter. Neighbors threatened to shoot the dog if it kept showing up on their property. Never was a soul in more need of an angel.