DogTown

by Stefan Bechtel

  “For me it was important for him to know that someone cared whether he made it or not,” Michelle said later. When she said this, remembering the moment, her voice broke and she brushed away tears.

  “I think that what struck me about him was the way he looked at me. You know, here was a little dog who had been injured, basically left for dead, and his eyes were actually pretty clear and he still wanted to try. His little tail wagged, and—I don’t know—I felt like he had a lot of drive to live.”

  A RACE AGAINST TIME

  The Dalmatian pup’s only chance of survival was immediate medical attention. But there was no veterinarian with the Dogtown team, and the nearest vet was almost two hours away. Given Gabbs’s extreme remoteness, there was also no cell phone service, so there was no way to call ahead to let the vet know a dying dog was on his way.

  The only solution was to load the dog into a vehicle and hightail it across the desert in hopes that the vet would be available when they arrived. That job fell to vet tech Jeff Popowich, an immense man with a permanent three-day growth of stubble and an incongruously soft voice, who loaded the injured dog into a carrying crate and hit the road in a race against time.

  “I was scared this was a dog that was not going to make it,” Jeff said. “Just the smell and the sight of those wounds—it was bad. I was really worried about infection, that was the big thing. He just wasn’t responding well, he had a fever, he was swollen all over. It did not look good.”

  Animal hoarders are people who, besides having more than the typical number of pets, are unable to provide the most basic animal care, which includes sanitation, nutrition, shelter, and veterinary care.

  When Jeff arrived at the vet’s office, the animal doctor, unfortunately, was gone. A female assistant let Jeff into the office, and he lifted the carrying crate with the dying dog inside onto an examining table. “Whew—that’s some strong smell there,” Jeff said to the assistant, almost apologetically. Jeff sighed, seemingly overwhelmed. “On the inside of his groin he’s got two more big holes. They’re really foul.”

  But because there was no veterinarian on site, Jeff and the assistant were almost helpless—they couldn’t administer pain medications, start an IV line for fluids, or do much else.

  “There’s nothing we can do right now, nothing except stay here and stare at him,” Jeff said impotently, peering into the crate where the young Dalmatian lay sprawled. Death was on its way, and there was little Jeff could do to stop it.

  Rather than sit and wait for the vet, Jeff decided to help the dog in whatever way he could. He got some paper towels and medical disinfectant and began removing the caked-on mud and excrement from the dog’s fur and wounds. It seemed a weak gesture, but there was another kind of medicine he was also administering: a healing touch. The pup with the black patch over one eye slowly lifted his head and looked up at Jeff, licking his chops, and then weakly lay back down. The dog’s small gesture seemed to indicate that he appreciated what Jeff was doing for him, even though there was little the dog could do to show it outwardly. “Hang in there, buddy,” Jeff said. “Maybe this’ll make you feel a little better.”

  While Jeff cleaned up the dog’s fur, an idea for a name came to him: This Dalmatian pup was a fighter, a tough animal with an invincible will to live. He had been through terrific pain and injury in the dogfight, and there was no telling how many hours or days he’d been lying there before he was found. Yet he was still—barely—alive.

  Later that night, Michelle called Jeff to find out about the Dalmatian pup. Had he made it? When Jeff answered his cell phone, he told her that the vet had finally arrived, cleaned the little dog’s wounds, administered pain medication, and hydrated him with intravenous fluids. So far, at least, the puppy was alive, and they hoped he would make it through the night. Oh, and by the way, Jeff said, the tough little puppy’s new name was Tuffy.

  DR. PATTI TAKES OVER

  Tuffy made it through the night and then made it all the way back to Utah. When Tuffy was brought to Dogtown, it was with some other dogs rescued from the hoarder in Gabbs—a group of puppies who seemed to be healthy and bouncing around, as well as a dog named Toey who had a strange mass on his groin. But Tuffy was the one who needed the most urgent attention, and he was the one who Dr. Patti Iampietro, one of the Dogtown vets, looked at first.

  When Tuffy arrived, he’d been cleaned and bandaged, and he had an IV catheter in place. Even so, Tuffy was “very, very subdued, especially for a puppy,” Dr. Patti said. He just lay quietly on the table, his limbs swollen, his body listless. Still, at least he was somewhat responsive—he wasn’t comatose or in a state of severe shock. Dr. Patti credited this to the work of the Nevada vet.

  An oversize plastic collar around his neck and snug bandages around his middle protect Tuffy’s skin as it heals.

  But Tuffy was clearly in distress. Ten to fifteen percent of his body was an open, infected wound that was several days old. So Dr. Patti’s first mission of mercy was to give him pain medication to make him comfortable. Then she slowly, carefully peeled back the bandages. Underneath them she found what she later described as “horrendous wounds.”

  There were three major lesions. The largest was an enormous tear on Tuffy’s right side, 12 to 15 inches long, which had been pulled open all the way down to the underlying muscle. The wound was gray and smelled foul and necrotic (full of dead tissue), and the edges of the skin were starting to blacken and die. The other two wounds were three-to four-inch-long gouges on the insides of Tuffy’s back legs. They, too, were very deep, gray, and necrotic, with black edges.

  Even after the Nevada vet had cleaned them somewhat, the wounds were grossly contaminated with dirt, debris, and dead tissue—like the wartime wounds of a soldier who has not seen a medic in much too long. Normally, Dr. Patti explained, these tissues should be “nice and pink,” and in a fresh wound they would be bleeding. But their brownish gray color, accompanied by the putrid smell, meant the tissues were dead or dying. “Gray is definitely not a color you want to see,” she said.

  After graduating from vet school at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Patti had worked for ten years as an emergency room vet, and she had sometimes seen wounds this bad—after dogfighting confiscations or after animals had been hit by cars. But what she’d never seen before were severe wounds that had been neglected and left to fester this long. If the Dogtown team had not intervened, it was certain that Tuffy would have died of his wounds.

  Still, she believed that Tuffy now had a better than even chance of survival, if only for two reasons. One, he was young, and young animals have a remarkable capacity to heal after injury. And two, like Jeff and Michelle, Dr. Patti had seen something in Tuffy’s eyes that might well make all the difference: his ferocious will to live.

  ADDRESSING THE WOUNDS

  “When I’m faced with wounds such as Tuffy’s, the instinct is to jump right into those wounds,” Dr. Patti said. But she did not know this little dog. She did not know how stable he was or how he might respond to the trauma of having his lesions surgically cleaned. So Dr. Patti wanted to go slowly. She would take it one step at a time and assess all his vital signs—temperature, heart rate, and pulse—to make sure that he was stable before trying to heal Tuffy’s injuries. “Wounds like this take a really long time to deal with,” Dr. Patti said. “I can’t just clean it up and sew it up—I’ll never get all that infection out at once.”

  After Tuffy had stabilized, Dr. Patti treated his wounds in careful stages. After her first assessment of Tuffy’s overall condition, she began by putting fresh bandages on his wounds with some sterile saline. The bandages were special debriding bandages that, when removed, would help to gently pull away some of the gray, infected tissue. Then she put him on some intravenous antibiotics and tucked him away in a crate in the clinic with a pain patch. If he was stable the next day, she’d consider anesthetizing him and addressing his terrible wounds more aggressively.

  Vet tech Jeff Popowich and Tuff
y shared a special bond that strengthened as the dog recovered from his wounds.

  The next day, to Dr. Patti’s delight, Tuffy actually stood up and greeted her, tail wagging weakly, when she came to visit his cage. It was a great sign. And when she put him on the table and pulled back the debriding bandages, Tuffy’s wounds looked a little bit cleaner and pinker. “See, it looks better than all that nasty gray stuff yesterday,” she said to Tuffy.

  Then she gave the little dog a physical—checked his heart rate, his temperature, and his gum color, and then drew a little blood. It all looked good. He seemed to be rebounding nicely, and Dr. Patti felt he would be stable enough to withstand anesthesia and surgery.

  “Ideally, should we wait a little bit longer until he’s stronger to do surgery? Yes,” Dr. Patti said. “But I’m very concerned about his infection also, and I think [the benefit of] removing the infected tissue outweighs the risk of the surgery.”

  When Tuffy was anesthetized on an operating table, a clip was placed on his tongue to monitor his blood and oxygen levels. A tube was slipped down his throat, attached to a green bag that inflated and deflated with each breath. Dr. Patti peeled back the latest bandages and began working to cut away the gray, necrotic tissue from Tuffy’s wounds. She kept an eye on monitors to keep track of his blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygenation levels. Dr. Patti noticed a slight arrhythmia on the electrocardiogram, but other than that, Tuffy seemed to be coming through the procedure like a trouper.

  According to the Humane Society of the United States, “The general consensus is that animal hoarding is a symptom of psychological and neurological malfunctioning, which might involve dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

  With Tuffy fully sedated, Dr. Patti was able to get a better sense of his awful wounds. She found that she could stick her entire hand under the flap of skin on his side, since there was so much “pocketing” where the skin tissue had literally been ripped off the underlying tissue. The good news was that, even though the wounds on his side and legs were deep and ugly, they had not penetrated any major cavities in Tuffy’s body.

  With the puppy stretched on the operating table, Dr. Patti said later, she had to fight a strong instinct to just clean him up and sew the wounds closed. But that would be a mistake. The wounds were still so dirty, and so infected, that if she closed them, the infection would continue to fester underneath the skin and could burst open later like an overcooked pie. Instead, she patiently planned several more days of bandage changes and medical management with antibiotics. Once the wounds looked really clean, then she’d close them up. This strategy was not without a different kind of risk, though: The longer the wounds stayed open, the greater the risk Tuffy had of contracting other, more serious infections. “He’s certainly not out of the woods at this point,” Dr. Patti said.

  INFECTIOUS HAPPINESS

  When Tuffy groggily woke up after the surgery, he found Dr. Patti cradling his head in her hands. “Hi, handsome!” she said. “I told you I would be here!”

  Tuffy sported a bright blue bandage around his middle, looking as if he’d just stepped out of the shower at the spa. Although he came through the surgery with flying colors, the post-op would still be extremely painful. Dr. Patti and an assistant lifted Tuffy on a blanket into his crate, where he whimpered in a high-pitched whine, confused about where he was and why it hurt so much.

  Dr. Patti ordered another dose of morphine. And she had a comical plastic collar, shaped like a megaphone, fastened around Tuffy’s neck to keep him from chewing on his bandages. After Dr. Patti closed the door to his crate, Tuffy lay back on the mat. Then he reached over and tugged his blue blanket up around his chin, tucking himself in like a child home sick with the flu.

  After a few more days of bandage changes, Dr. Patti grew increasingly optimistic about Tuffy’s chances. He was healing “remarkably fast,” she said. “What I thought was going to take weeks is taking several days.” Tuffy’s recovery, in fact, was turning out to be one of the quickest transformations in Dogtown history.

  During his recovery, Tuffy’s optimistic personality began to shine through. Covered in his bandages, he still wanted to prance around and wag his tail despite being in pain; his spirits were high even though his legs were swollen, as though he knew what a lucky break he had caught. Tuffy’s joyful disposition won the hearts of everybody he met, making him a favorite at the clinic. One of the volunteers described him as “the best dog in the world. You just take one look at him and you fall in love with him.” What stood out to Dr. Patti was how Tuffy “holds no grudges. Regardless of what has happened to him, he still loves people.” His tough spirit had not been broken by his history. He’d been well named indeed.

  Tuffy’s valiant and likable spirit could well have come from his bloodline. Dalmatians have a proud, dauntless history, having originally been bred in Dalmatia (a part of Croatia) as dogs of war. They guarded the borders of their country, and to this day they still have a strong guarding instinct. But their most important role was as coach or carriage dogs, running alongside horse-drawn buggies with stately and athletic grace. Later Dalmatians’ instinct to run in attendance with horses transferred to horse-drawn fire engines, which is why they are still known and loved as firehouse dogs.

  One can tell the approximate age of a dog by checking the wear on his incisors. This method is somewhat accurate until the age of six, but beginning at seven years of age, it’s unreliable.

  As part of Tuffy’s treatment, Jeff Popowich started taking Tuffy home with him almost every night, partly to make sure his bandages stayed on and were sterile, and partly because human company was healing for Tuffy—the same way canine company was healing for Jeff. “I love that little guy,” Jeff said, his big face lighting up. “He’s a cool dog!” Even though he was still bandaged and healing, Tuffy was “an easy pup—he loves meeting other dogs, he loves meeting people. His happiness is infectious.”

  ON THE MEND

  After six days at Dogtown, Tuffy had reached an important milestone. He’d healed enough to have his wound sewn shut. Dr. Patti was still concerned that there might not be enough healthy skin to stitch the wound closed, after so much had been lost to injury and infection. If she couldn’t close the wound, there were other options, like skin grafts, but Dr. Patti was hoping that wouldn’t be necessary. She couldn’t really tell what the situation would be until she got Tuffy on the operating table and took a look inside.

  When she did get in there, she found to her relief that she was able to suture the wound, though she worried that a smaller, secondary wound raked open by dog teeth might later partially break open. She’d close up the wound as well as she could and just keep an eye on it. Dr. Patti also implanted several small, flexible, sterile tubes, or drains, in the wound, to allow fluid from the wound to drain off rather than accumulating under the skin.

  A few days later, after a few more bandage changes, she opened Tuffy’s dressings and found that the tissue around the stitches had returned to a clean, healthy pink. “Oh, that looks beautiful!” she said. “Well, maybe not to the average person, but I’m happy with that!”

  Dr. Patti had played a critical role in rescuing a dog from the precipice of death—a dog who in almost any other animal shelter would have been dead within a matter of hours or days. Most ordinary shelters, overwhelmed and underfunded, could not have offered the time, attention, and heroic effort that led to Tuffy’s survival—much less the free, top-notch vet care and loving post-op recovery, which amounted to the difference between life and death.

  But Tuffy was not the only doomed dog who came to Dogtown and was healed. One of many other dogs that came to mind, Dr. Patti said, was a little dog named Gilbert, who was named after the police officer who brought him in after he’d been hit by a car. He was in shock, and he had a fractured pelvis, a fractured femur, and bruising on his lungs—he was basically dying. Dr. Patti was called in after hours,
and she and an animal control officer worked together for hours to bring this little dog around, giving him fluids and pain medication.

  “But slowly I saw the little personality in this dog come out. I just thought, wow—I can fix this dog! He deserves a chance. Eventually he was adopted into the best home, and they are in love with him now. This dog, in my opinion, wouldn’t have made it anywhere else in the country.”

  Tuffy’s future family found their way to adopting him after seeing the National Geographic Channel show DogTown.

  Which is why Dr. Patti, Jeff Popowich, Michelle Besmehn, and everybody else at Dogtown do what they do. And why Tuffy was so lucky that they found him.

  HEADED HOME

  Tuffy found his forever home thanks, in part, to the National Geographic Channel show DogTown. During its first season, an Arizona family was so touched by an episode that they went to the Best Friends website to learn more about the organization. There they found Tuffy’s picture and his story. The mother, Jody, said she was brought to tears by Tuffy’s tale—which was no small thing, considering that she was a former animal cruelty investigator for the Arizona Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and had seen her fair share of sorrow. The family decided to file an adoption application for Tuffy, and it was accepted.

  Then the family—Jody, her husband, her daughter, and her two sons—drove all the way from Arizona to pick up Tuffy at Dogtown.

  “Tuffy, you’re so much bigger than I thought!” Jody laughed through her tears when she first met him in the clinic lobby. Tuffy couldn’t stop licking her, as if she were a big, human-size lollipop. “Oh, man!” she said. “I can’t believe I’m crying!”

  Then, to her teenage son, she said, “It was a long drive to come get him, wasn’t it?”