DogTown

by Stefan Bechtel

  “It was worth it,” the boy said.

  Tuffy sprawled on the floor of the clinic while Jeff Popowich pointed out the still-healing scars to Tuffy’s new family.

  “When I first saw Tuffy, I didn’t even know if he was going to live through the day,” Jeff told them. “But now he bounces around, playing just like a puppy should. Compared to where Tuffy was when he came in here—it’s a complete 180. Now he’s a different dog.”

  The smaller boy asked Jeff where Tuffy usually slept. “He sleeps with me in the bed every night, right next to me,” Jeff said.

  “That’s OK, all our dogs sleep in the bed too,” the little boy’s older brother said.

  Everyone walked out to the car, and then Jeff knelt to say goodbye to the tough little spotted puppy. Tuffy licked Jeff’s face, not realizing it would probably be for the last time.

  “Thank you for what you did for him,” Jody said to Jeff, reaching up on her toes to get her arms around the big man.

  “Spoil him rotten,” said Jeff.

  Then the family got in the car along with Tuffy, the little Dalmatian with the invincible will, and drove off toward a new life.

  Anxiety issues plagued Rush after he survived the 2006 shelling of Lebanon.

  08

  Rush: Dog of War

  The original Rin Tin Tin was a shell-shocked German shepherd pup found by an American serviceman in a bombed-out dog kennel in France, a couple of months before the end of World War I. The serviceman, Lee Duncan, named the beautiful, dark-eyed dog after the little puppet that French children gave the American soldiers for good luck. Duncan took the pup home to California, where a film producer saw him performing at a local dog show. The rest, as they say, is history. Rin Tin Tin starred in a series of hugely popular films (in which he often played a wolf) and is said to have died in the arms of screen goddess Jean Harlow.

  Almost a century later, another shell-shocked dog was rescued from a bombed-out animal shelter in Beirut during a conflict between Israel and the Shiite group Hezbollah. During what came to be called the 2006 Lebanon war, 34 days of shelling killed over a thousand people and displaced 1.5 million Lebanese and Israeli civilians. As in every other war, huge numbers of animals were also among the victims, whether they were pets in bombed-out homes, livestock on farms, or homeless animals in shelters.

  War had not changed much in a hundred years, at least not for animals. But like Rin Tin Tin before him, this dog was lucky enough to find rescuers who would help him make his way from the bombed-out streets of Beirut to the peaceful Utah canyons of Dogtown.

  RESCUING RUSH

  Many of Beirut’s war zone animals were rescued by a small group of heroic, unpaid volunteers who called themselves Beirut for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or BETA (no relation to the U.S. animal rights group PETA). It was Lebanon’s only animal welfare organization, desperately trying to save the innocent as the bombs fell.

  One of BETA’s two founders, Maggie Shaarawi, who had a full-time job at the United Nations in Beirut, blogged from the war zone: “Once I finish my job, I do the rescue work and go to shelters. We do everything.

  We work until midnight. We don’t have personal lives.” Why did they do what they did? The reason was simple, Maggie said: “It feels so good to save a life.”

  One of the animals they saved came to be known as Rush. A beautiful shepherd mix with golden, almost sun-blond fur, a dark, pointed muzzle, eyes so dark they were nearly black, and delicate, expressive brows, this dog was constantly on the alert, scanning his surroundings for potential threats. When he was first rescued, Rush’s front left leg was badly injured, and BETA vets determined it was too damaged to save. They amputated his leg, leaving him with three good ones. But Rush’s lack of a leg didn’t slow him down; his fear did. Rush’s up-close experience with the sights and sounds of war left him terrified, startling at loud noises and sometimes biting in response to fear.

  Some veterinarians suggest dogs do not suffer the psychological distress of losing a limb the same way a human does. The primary purpose of the limb is movement. Because dogs do not need to perform fine-motor skills, most easily adapt to having only three legs.

  There were only a dozen people in BETA, all doing this selfless work in addition to their day jobs. They rescued not only abandoned or escaped dogs and cats, but also workhorses, donkeys, and zoo animals. To raise money, they would buy movie tickets in bulk and sell them in the street and hold fund-raising dinners (mainly for their own families), and they maintained an email list of about 200 supporters.

  So when a well-known, well-funded, and well-staffed organization like Best Friends Animal Society volunteered to help with the animal rescue in Lebanon, the brave hearts of BETA were overjoyed.

  BEST FRIENDS REACHES OVERSEAS

  Michelle Besmehn, Dogtown Manager, was part of the Best Friends team that flew to Lebanon to help with the animal rescue operation in the summer of 2006. The effort was complex, expensive, and dangerous—in fact, it was the largest international rescue operation Best Friends had ever attempted at that time. The primary mission was not to rescue dogs and cats from the streets, but to help BETA by taking animals out of their shelter. The organization’s cramped space was filled to capacity, there were no adoptive homes available, and countless more dogs and cats were still in need.

  In some ways Michelle’s job forced her into the uncomfortable position of having to play God, choosing which animals would be taken back to the sanctuary and which would not. (A Best Friends committee assisted in this difficult task, but it was always heartrending to leave an animal behind in a war zone.) When Michelle and the team got to Lebanon, they found the animals, mostly dogs and cats, in various conditions. Some of the animals, mostly the ones who had been at the shelter the longest, were in good condition, but more recent arrivals were not doing well at all. Some had fresh, open wounds. Others showed signs of past illnesses, like distemper, which can cause neurological problems, or old injuries that had not healed properly. Others had new illnesses. Michelle remembers the whole experience as “very rushed, very exciting, and kind of scary,” not only because they were in a war zone, but also because there was so much work to do.

  “We had to get the dogs out to vaccinate them and do blood draws and deworming and microchipping, so it was quite a production because the shelter did not have electricity or running water. They had to haul all of their water, and they had to use generators for electricity. We had to just make do with what we had.”

  In the process of choosing which animals to bring back, Michelle could not resist the three-legged shepherd mix with the expressive eyes, the regal stance, and the tawny, sun-blond fur. He was the sort of dog that Best Friends was specially suited to help. For one thing, his leg, fairly recently amputated, could potentially pose a medical problem, and Best Friends was superbly equipped to deal with veterinary challenges of all kinds. For another, he was a beautiful dog who most likely would be highly adoptable, and placing dogs in adoptive homes was the ultimate intent of the sanctuary. Michelle couldn’t help but notice that he also seemed extremely shy, perhaps shell-shocked, and she knew that Dogtown’s staff of trainers could often work magic with traumatized animals like this.

  Ultimately, the Best Friends team loaded up almost 300 crateloads of animals (about as many dogs as cats) for the 7,000-mile flight home to the United States. It was very much like a military operation, large in scale and stripped of frills, except that the cargo plane wound up filled not with soldiers, arms, and explosives, but with an amazing variety of animals, peering out of their crates with a mixture of alarm and curiosity.

  TURNING OFF THE MENTAL MOVIES

  When Rush arrived at his new home at Dogtown, he was withdrawn, fearful, and distrustful. Loud noises terrified him. He startled easily. And worst of all, he was still inclined to bite when spooked. Even though he was galloping around on only three legs, his most grievous injury was not visible to the eye. It was a wound to his psyche.

&nbs
p; Rush’s symptoms of fear resembled those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that many humans suffer from after living through a traumatic experience. Dr. Frank McMillan, Director of Well-being Studies at Best Friends and author of the book Unlocking the Animal Mind, often sees psychological problems in animals that resemble PTSD in people. He defines the condition as “a type of emotional scar, caused by such traumatic events as combat, sexual abuse, crime, and natural disasters. Humans suffering from PTSD generally fear and avoid whatever caused the trauma for months and sometimes years after the event, often experiencing recurrent emotional episodes that can be severely distressing. They also may have difficulty sleeping and have frequent nightmares.”

  Dogtown’s trainers observed that encounters with unfamiliar places, new people, and loud noises all frightened Rush.

  One of the reasons these traumas are burned so deeply into animals’ brains is that fear serves an evolutionary purpose, Dr. Frank explained. “When the ancestors of our modern dogs and cats encountered such terrifying situations as an attack by a predator or a natural disaster, only those who acted quickly to save their own lives survived, while the slower ones perished. This resulted in greater survival of those animals with brains best able to form enduring memories of danger. For these animals, when something similar happened in the future, their fear memories would immediately motivate the animals to take action.”

  In other words, if Rush were still living in the war zone, his fearful reaction might save him from a bomb blast. But Rush was no longer under fire; his mind had just not caught up to his circumstances yet. Rush’s survival reaction wouldn’t turn off, and he continued to live in the world of war that he had left behind.

  As a way of explaining why these traumatic experiences can be even more crippling to animals than to humans, Temple Grandin, the autistic author of a series of remarkable books about animal behavior, writes that “mental images are far more closely connected to fear and panic than words.” And since animals do not remember traumatic experiences as a verbal narrative, as some (but not all) people do, but instead as a kind of vivid mental movie, they are easily traumatized by scary experiences—sometimes for life.

  In her book Animals in Translation, Grandin describes several scientific studies that lend support to this claim. In one study by Ruth Lanius, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario, Lanius scanned the brains of 11 people with PTSD from traumatic experiences. Then she scanned the brains of 13 people who had suffered the same experiences but had not developed PTSD. The biggest difference was that, when people with PTSD remembered the trauma, areas of their brains associated with visual experiences lit up. When people without PTSD recalled their trauma, verbal areas lit up.

  It may be profoundly true, in other words, that a picture is worth a thousand words, even when it comes to animals. The bottom line is that “a visual memory of a scary thing is more frightening than a verbal memory,” Grandin observes, even though “no one knows why or how words are less frightening, or how this works in the brain.” Whatever Rush witnessed in Beirut may have formed a frightening mental image in his mind, one that he continued to see over and over again.

  THE HEALING BEGINS

  It would fall to Dogtown trainer John Garcia to begin the work of helping Rush overcome the psychic damage done by the war. “In the past I have worked more with high-energy, outgoing dogs, because their energy meshes with mine,” said John, who is 27, laughs frequently, and has a jolly, moon-shaped face and a tiny goatee. “So shy dogs like Rush are a challenge for me.”

  From the beginning, Rush faced some very high hurdles, as seemingly ordinary circumstances could throw him off. His first visit to the staff room—just an ordinary room filled with tables and chairs—paralyzed Rush with fear. As John attempted to lead him into the room, Rush balked at merely crossing the threshold. He tucked his tail low and turned from the door. Everything about entering the room filled Rush with dread. But by gradually, gently coaxing him into the room, and staying inside it only briefly, John began helping Rush take the first tentative steps into a new world of fearlessness. Every step was rewarded with a chicken treat, a scratch behind the ears, or some other positive payoff that would encourage Rush to keep moving in the right direction.

  Being hit by a car is perhaps the most common injury resulting in a dog’s leg needing to be amputated. Cancer, tumors, infections, and other diseases may account for most of the remainder.

  John felt that Rush may have had a bad experience with a closed room—perhaps in the clinic where his leg was amputated—so he wanted to make sure that the dog understood that when he went into a room, he wasn’t going to be poked with needles or hurt in any way.

  On the other hand, John’s theory may not have been true at all. It was equally possible that Rush simply had little or no experience of being inside a closed room, and that’s why he was frightened. Or perhaps it was something else entirely. As is so common when trainers try to penetrate the mysteries of an animal’s mind, John simply had to take an educated guess about what was causing Rush to behave the way he was, and work with that.

  During his time in Beirut, Rush’s left front leg had to be amputated due to injury. He gets around quite easily on three legs.

  Traumatized dogs often resist being touched at all, so John started with simple handling exercises in order to build trust. He also began feeding Rush by hand. He was extremely careful to avoid doing anything that might provoke the dog to bite.

  “When you’re working with dogs like this, safety is the number one priority,” John explained. “But it’s not only the safety of the person, it’s the behavior of the dog. If he bites me, not only will I be hurt, but he will be hurt also, because he is practicing that behavior. And the more he practices that behavior, the better he’s going to get at it. The less he practices it, the more likely that behavior is to go extinct.”

  One day Rush actually did bite John, though not severely. While John was working with him, Rush nipped him, apparently because he was spooked and not so much because he was intending to attack. Nevertheless, it was worrisome, and it meant that for the time being Rush would wear a red collar (meaning that only staff members were allowed to handle him).

  Gradually, John began to notice new behaviors, signaled in dog body language, that suggested an increasing sense of relaxation. Once or twice he saw Rush yawn deeply. He saw him lower his chest almost to the ground while raising his tail and hindquarters toward the ceiling in a luxurious, full-body stretch. When he began to relax, it was evident what a beautiful dog Rush was—graceful, long, and lean. German shepherds and shepherd mixes are beautiful in the same way that wolves are beautiful, with a look that combines ferocity, wildness, and power.

  A POSITIVE APPROACH

  Next, John turned his attention to grooming, as a way of desensitizing Rush to being touched and handled, and as a way of further building trust. At first, Rush was a “bit skittish,” John said. “He wasn’t really thrilled by the idea that I was touching him on random parts of his body with a brush—a strange, scary object—in my hand. When you’re working with a dog with fear-based behavior, if you pick something up, that is potentially threatening to that dog. If I pick up a poop scooper, if I have a brush in my hand, that’s something that a dog may consider very threatening.

  “So initially working with Rush with a brush was, uh, very interesting because I wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to react to it. He definitely needed to be groomed, but at the same time, I didn’t want to just start brushing him all over the place and have him have a bad reaction. So we had to work into it.”

  John began using a training technique called targeting. If Rush touched something or investigated something, he got a treat or a reward for it. So when Rush started targeting the brush, getting familiar with something that had been strange and threatening, he got a reward. Then, very briefly, John began using the brush on Rush’s back. Each time, the experience was nonthreateni
ng and positively rewarded, so that over time John actually could begin grooming Rush’s tawny coat.

  “I think he understood right away what we were doing, and pretty soon I was able to just brush him all the way,” John said.

  In the coming weeks, John began teaching Rush to sit, stay, and come. Bright and attentive, Rush learned quickly. As the two continued their partnership, the bonds of trust and affection began to blossom and grow. One day when John, seated on the grass, gave Rush the command to come, Rush rushed up and snuggled John, rolling forward so that his chest and face were in John’s lap. John petted and scratched him affectionately; when John stood up and walked away, Rush came pedaling after him with his curious three-legged gallop.

  The next step was to help Rush overcome his fear of sharp noises. John loaded the big, tawny dog into his truck and took him down to Kanab Creek, a stream not far from the sanctuary. The creek had steep, sandy banks. It was peaceful and quiet, and nobody was around. The only sounds were of distant birdsong, wind in the trees, and the drowsy slap of water on water. It was, in other words, the polar opposite of war.

  The original Rin Tin Tin amazed audiences in 1922 with his ability to jump—one vertical leap measured 11 feet, 9 inches.

  John took off his socks and shoes and led Rush down to the water, holding his leash in one hand. John waded in to just below his knees. When John held out a treat, Rush, his body tipped at a steep angle up the sandy bank, gingerly took a few steps into the water to get the treat. Rush kept flicking a wary glance around, tongue hanging out, as though scanning the landscape for enemies.

  John moved slowly and deliberately into the mental war zone that Rush had brought with him to the river. John started by snapping off small twigs, which made a barely perceptible popping sound. When Rush did not startle, John rewarded him with a treat and a back scratch. “Good boy, Rush! Good, Rushy-boy!”