DogTown

by Stefan Bechtel

Then Aristotle himself came into the examining room, and a volunteer set him down on the exam table. He seemed frightened and almost inert, as if by keeping completely motionless he could avoid whatever danger might lurk in the room. Despite the regrowth of some of his hair, he still looked a bit like a scared lamb, with comical patches of fur sprouting out of his pink skin here and there, like weeds. Dr. Angus began closely examining his skin.

  “I’m still seeing crusting pustules, but not the deep erosions that I see on this photograph, so that’s good,” he said. “The areas where his skin is still rough, that’s OK, we’ll get hair regrowth there. I’m not sure what’s going on with his eyes. It almost looks like he can’t close his eyes because of scarring or his disease state. Some of the scarring could be chemical scarring or primary disease.”

  Even though the initial culture had been negative for ringworm, the dermatologist suggested testing for it again, partly due to Aristotle’s breed. “Lots of times these terrier breeds will try to hunt like little vermin, burrowing down into a hole, and they’ll get ringworm spores on their faces. And then it will start in the face and just spread. I think we should repeat the ringworm cultures, even though the first test came up negative.”

  He was also still concerned about Demodex mites.

  “We had done the test from skin scrapes and they tested negative, but Dr. Angus brought up a good point that one or two negative tests doesn’t always mean it’s negative,” Dr. Mike said. “Sometimes you don’t see mites after the skin scrape but they’re still there. It might mean you just didn’t do the right spot (although on Aristotle, it’s pretty easy to find where the right spot might be). Or you didn’t scrape deep enough. Or, just due to dumb luck, the spot you picked didn’t have any mites. Or the mites can hide in their hair follicles and be a little hard to find. So he suggested that we also repeat a skin scrape to look for more mites.”

  Dr. Angus also recommended a biopsy, for a look beneath the surface of Ari’s skin. Rather than simply scraping tissue samples from the surface of the skin, the biopsy would punch a small, circular hole into the skin and extract a tissue sample from beneath the surface. Then the sample would be sent to a lab for a pathologist to read. Another sample would be sent for culture, to see if fungi or bacteria were contributing to Ari’s problems.

  Undeterred by negative results from the first ringworm culture and the skin scrapes, Dr. Angus felt that a biopsy might help get to the bottom of the problem. A skin biopsy was normally a fairly benign procedure, the main risk being the dangers inherent in sedating or anesthetizing the animal. Once the little dog was sedated, Dr. Mike would take a small, curved blade a bit like an apple-coring tool and lift out small samples of subsurface tissue. Then the samples would be put in formalin, a preservative, and sent to a lab. (Dr. Mike had not done the procedure earlier because he was afraid that any sutures he made to Ari’s flimsy, fragile skin after the biopsy wouldn’t hold. It would almost be like trying to sew up a damp paper bag.)

  Not long after the consultation with Dr. Angus, Dr. Mike sedated Ari to get him ready for the punch biopsy. When Dr. Mike laid him on the examining table, Ari had a cone-shaped oxygen mask over his face. He looked like an astronaut asleep on the moon. “We’re going to find out what’s wrong with your skin, once and for all!” Dr. Mike said affectionately to the dog. “OK, handsome?” Aristotle, already on the moon, did not respond. Once Dr. Mike had taken the biopsy sample and sutured up the wound—which did not burst after all—there was nothing to do but wait. “This is the hardest part,” he said.

  ANSWERS AT LAST

  When the biopsy results came in, they were both surprising and unsurprising. Aristotle turned to out to have an extremely severe infestation of the Demodex mites that cause demodectic mange. Dr. Mike had been right after all. For some reason, the skin scrape just hadn’t caught it the first time.

  But Aristotle’s problems didn’t end there. He also had a staphylococcal skin infection that was resistant to methicillin, the medication Dr. Mike had prescribed, so the vet decided to change his antibiotic. He also prescribed a new antiparasite medication, to mount a frontal attack on the infestation of mites.

  The Guardian Angel program at Best Friends profiles adoptable special-needs animals so that potential adopters can see pictures and follow their progress through updates.

  And he decided to recommend that Aristotle be fostered—taken home with a staff member or volunteer, rather than kept at the sanctuary. Kristi Littrell, Adoption Coordinator, volunteered for this happy task.

  Even though the housing for dogs at Best Friends is clean and spacious, and animals are regularly walked and provided with enriching playtime, fostering would help Ari on several levels, Dr. Mike said. For one thing, Kristi could more closely monitor the effects of the medication. Ari would get out of his cage at night, so he would have more room to run. That was crucial for a terrier, a breed with so much energy the dogs seem capable of powering a small city. And of course, there was the ineffable healing power of a human touch.

  “It feels good to help a dog like Aristotle, because he was such a miserable dog,” Dr. Mike said. “It makes you feel better about what you can do. We don’t give up hope on dogs here, and there’s reason not to give up hope. Aristotle went from being a painful, shy, scab-covered mutt to a crazy, bouncy, not-itchy monkey. That’s why we do this.”

  When Ari first arrived at Kristi’s house, he seemed sad to leave his former home in the laundry room. He quietly explored the house, not making much noise at all. But he quickly grew used to Kristi’s place and made himself at home. He barked from first thing in the morning until the sun went down, telling Kristi his opinion on just about everything. His energy level began to soar, and his love of play returned with a vengeance. Kristi happily observed, “He loves life—everything is a party to him.”

  FINDING A HOME

  Since his arrival, Aristotle had been a part of Best Friends’ Guardian Angel program. The Guardian Angel website (http://www.bestfriends.org/ guardianangel) features animals, often sick or injured, who need specialized care. It’s a place where Best Friends members are able to connect with the cases that benefit the most from their support of the society. Each animal gets his own page, and staff update the pages with photos and progress journals that tell how things are going. (Even after animals are adopted, updates from their new families are posted as well.) Members are able to sponsor specific animals.

  From his first days at Dogtown, Aristotle’s page was populated with update after update, detailing the remarkable recovery of the feisty little dog. Members could see for themselves how far he had come—from the photos of his earliest days when his skin was so painful to look at to the most recent photos where Aristotle sported a big smile and showed off his new, short coat of brown-and-white fur. Kristi knew that “there are people who, if there is not enough data on him weekly, they worry. They know he’s in good hands, but they live for the updates.”

  Aristotle’s biggest fans were inspired by his journey and sent many tokens of their appreciation to him. Gifts, notes, and well wishes poured in from all over the country, as well as Italy and France. Some people sent him food, stuffed toys, and little sweaters with “Ari” sewn onto the back. “Ari touches people,” Kristi said. “He’s a dog that would have been passed over in most places, but here he thrived. And he touches people’s hearts.”

  When he goes RVing with his new family, Aristotle must wear protective goggles to shield his eyes from wind and sand.

  The Guardian Angel program is also a way for animals like Aristotle to find forever homes. Allowing members to follow a dog’s progress gives them a way to connect and even to fall in love. And that’s just what happened with Aristotle. Applications poured in to adopt him, an embarrassment of riches.

  Kristi and the Dogtown team had a tough choice to make and seriously considered every candidate. Because of Ari’s skin, Dr. Mike thought a home in the northern states might be best to reduce the dog’s exposure to the s
un. Kristi knew from fostering Ari that he could be needy, so the ideal home would have a caregiver present most of the time. And Ari’s high energy level required an active home, preferably with other doggy siblings for Ari to play with.

  From all the applications, a strong candidate began to emerge. They were a family from Oregon who had adopted from Best Friends before, a formerly shy spaniel mix named Jolene (also a featured dog on a DogTown episode). The parents, Susie and Phil, had eight dogs in all and were happy to invite Aristotle to be part of the family. They had a big house and yard, complete with a saltwater pool (which is perfect for a dog with sensitive skin, as the salinity helps soothe the skin). The more they considered it, the more Kristi and the Dogtown team were confident that this home was the place for Ari.

  Once they learned their adoption application had been accepted, Susie and Phil brought their whole doggy menagerie to Kanab to introduce them to Aristotle before they took him home. Their first glimpse: a white flash of fur as Ari bounded out of Kristi’s house and introduced himself. Next, after a series of introductions with them, he tore around the yard with Susie and Phil’s dogs. The couple sat on Kristi’s porch to watch the fun while talking with Kristi about Aristotle’s needs. It was a perfect match for the little guy—he had plenty of playmates who shared his enthusiasm and energy, and he had two loving humans to look after him.

  After taking him back home to Oregon, Susie and Phil still post frequent Ari updates to the Guardian Angel website. Phil reports that the dogs have worn a muddy “racetrack” around the pool in the backyard, where they love to run laps. Ari is far and away the fastest of all the dogs. Ari’s fans and friends can learn about his latest adventures—whether it’s a trip to the groomer or his first camping trip, which included cruising in an RV over the dunes in a park (Ari needed to wear special goggles to protect his eyes, but he tolerated them like a trouper—once the vehicle started moving, he hardly noticed them).

  Aristotle’s high energy and joyful side might never have emerged if he hadn’t made it to Dogtown. The sick, frightened dog he was upon arrival is now but a distant memory, thanks to the dedicated team of medical experts there. Today Aristotle is radiant and healthy—a bundle of fun covered with a healthy new coat of brown-and-white fur.

  Shy Bingo dreaded meeting new people and other dogs.

  04

  Bingo: Opening a Shut-down Dog

  Bingo was one of those swap-and-switch mutts whose body looked like it had been assembled by a committee of children; none of the pieces quite fit together. He looked to be mostly a yellowish Lab, possibly a shepherd mix, but with gangly legs suggesting there might have been some Great Dane or even greyhound in the mix. He had big, lugubrious brown eyes, sad as Eeyore’s, as if to acknowledge how sorry he looked.

  But when he first arrived at Dogtown on a dusty spring day in 2008, those sad, frightened brown eyes, peering out of a box, were the only part of Bingo that could be seen.

  Dog trainer Ann Allums had just pulled into Dogtown after a long drive from Southern California with a truck full of 14 new residents. She’d made the trip to pick up dogs from an animal sanctuary that was in the process of shutting down. The owners of the sanctuary, called Sage Canyon, had grown too elderly to continue running their operation and were sending their 14 toughest cases to Dogtown. Now several trainers, including Ann and Pat Whitacre, unloaded the carrying crates from the trucks, let the dogs out, leashed them up, and introduced them to their new runs. All the dogs seemed happy and grateful to be released after the long trip.

  All of them, that is, except one—Bingo, who was so panic stricken he refused to be coaxed out of his box. Immobilized by fear, he just cowered in the back of his crate. Finally, after Bingo had spurned all treats and entreaties, Ann and Pat had to pick the crate up and carry Bingo into his new home at Dogtown inside his crate.

  “It was as if there were 14 crates but only 13 dogs—the other dog was invisible,” Pat said.

  When he was finally enticed out of his crate, Bingo emerged with his body hunkered down low to the ground, tail tucked between his legs. He nervously investigated the run, taking in new sounds and smells, before he bolted for the “dogloo”—an igloo-shaped fiberglass doghouse—at the far end of the run. He crept into the sheltering darkness and “hid” there. Except for his face and eyes, Bingo’s whole body was plainly visible through the doorway.

  “I don’t know what it was about Bingo, but as soon as I saw him, I said, ‘I want to work with that dog,’” recalled Pat Whitacre. That was the day Bingo got lucky.

  MORE THAN BASHFUL

  But what drew Pat to this quivering, quaking creature? “I think I was partly fascinated by the ‘mystery package’—the enigma in the box,” he said later. “What kind of dog was in there? What was he like? What had happened to him to make him so fearful? And how dramatically could he be changed?”

  Also, Pat has a special gift for working with shy dogs, perhaps because he shares a temperamental kinship with them. “I guess I’m kind of a hermit,” he said. “I don’t eat lunch in the staff room, don’t socialize much after work. These dogs who just do not reach out and form bonds with people—I understand them.

  “Shyness in dogs, especially dogs in shelters, is really an enormous problem,” Pat said. “Dogs that don’t express affection or come to people are much less likely to be adopted—so they’re much more likely to be euthanized. People go to shelters looking for a pet, but they’re also looking for an animal that returns a feeling of mutual warmth and connection, almost like a human friend. It’s only natural.”

  So in the life-or-death cuteness contest of trying to win the affection of an adoptive family, shy dogs, like Bingo, are at a great disadvantage. They’re too scared to shine. They don’t know how to display their sweetness. They could be warmhearted, playful, and obedient, an ideal pet, but without sufficient “people skills” to win a human heart, their lives are all too likely to be sad and short.

  One other reason shy dogs in shelters tend to be overlooked, Pat said, is that people assume that they are always going to be like that. They think such a dog is incapable of change. They don’t recognize that with love, patience, and training, even a dog like Bingo can be coaxed ever so slowly out of his box.

  Beyond his life at Sage Canyon, little was certain about Bingo’s background. But Pat didn’t see this as a setback at all. As a general rule, Pat said, one of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to train a shy dog is concocting stories about why the dog is shy. They “get stuck” in a story, he said. The usual story line goes something like: This was a good dog until somebody did something bad to him, and he can be fixed if I am good to him.

  “Actually, though,” said Pat, “the dog’s behavior often does not relate to what his experiences may have been as much as it does to his lack of experience. If a dog doesn’t know what to make of people and has to learn, in fact, that these strange creatures are OK as a group, that’s a slower process than trying to train a dog who had a traumatic experience that he’s trying to recover from.”

  In general, Pat said, whenever a new dog comes into Dogtown, “it’s best to assume that any or all of the information you have is inaccurate.” Following this strategy allows a trainer to focus on the dog’s current state of mind and address existing behaviors in the moment. But wherever Bingo came from and whatever he’d been through, Pat’s heart instinctively went out to him.

  SHY-DOG SPECIALIST

  Pat, with his gray beard, balding pate, and quiet, meditative manner, looks a bit like a garden statue of St. Francis. In a fast, frenetic civilization, Pat, 59, seems to be a man blessed with enormous reserves of stillness, patience, and calm. He’s always loved animals. When he was younger he used to like to sit quietly in the woods and watch birds and squirrels, to see how they behaved. People said he had a way with animals.

  Of course, there are a few ordinary explanations for Pat’s extraordinary patience. Pat said, “When you grow up in a family with seven kids a
ll waiting for the bathroom, you expect that good things will happen eventually, but maybe not as soon as you might’ve hoped. I’ve had to do a lot of waiting for things in my life, waiting to get results, for things to happen, so maybe my pace is a little slower than some folks might go.”

  He is also, he said only half-jokingly, “a person without direction.” By this he means that he got to Best Friends not so much because he set out to arrive there, but because his life seems to have been guided by a series of “holy nudges” that caused all the puzzle pieces of his fate to fall into place. Pat likes to quote Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt therapy, who used to say, “Don’t push the river, the river will push you.” What happens will get you there. That’s how Pat Whitacre got pushed to Best Friends and Dogtown.

  On average, three million to four million animals are euthanized in shelters every year because they don’t have a home.

  After getting his BA in psychology at the University of Kansas, Pat spent 30 years working as a mental health counselor. Most of his career was spent at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, an inpatient treatment center near Kansas City, working with the “chemically and persistently mentally ill”—human beings who found the world so terrifying and uncertain they had trouble coming out of their shells.

  Later he earned a master’s degree in biophysics and genetics at the University of Colorado. He was fascinated by the continuing nature versus nurture debate about what shapes animal (and human) behavior. His undergraduate degree trained him in the notion that it’s primarily learned behavior, or “nurture” his work in genetics, that it’s mainly hardwired in the brain and body, or “nature.” “It’s helpful for me to see animal behavior from both sides,” he said.

  Pat, who is unmarried and has no children, was at one point persuaded by a girlfriend to drive from Kansas all the way to Utah, to volunteer for a few days at the Best Friends sanctuary. When he got to Kanab, he realized that he had actually been there as a child: He remembered the statue of a cowboy on a white horse that stands on Main Street, framed against the red-rock canyon walls.