The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

by Jim Gorant

  Racer blew in the dog’s face, and he vacuumed up the scent, twitching his nose and moving his snout to and fro as he followed the aroma. He pressed his snout against the gate and tried to lick Racer’s face. As Racer took the dog from the kennel and started walking him across the floor, the scarred dog showed no fear or trepidation, pulling ahead, not even looking at the other dogs that barked and whined around him. He moved straight toward the door at the far side of the room.

  Outside, the scarred dog tried to greet the other people that stood there, but the leash held him back. Instead he followed Racer to the center of the courtyard and stood there panting from the heat, tail working back and forth like a windshield wiper. He waited.

  What came next was petting and playing and eating. This dog didn’t care if someone put a hand in his bowl, and he didn’t care if someone tried to pull his rawhide away. He wasn’t giving it up, but he wasn’t mad about it, either.

  He perked up when other dogs came out. He circled to one side as he approached them, sniffing the ground first and then sniffing up the dog’s front leg and down his body. He was happy to be with the other dogs and happy to joust as Racer pushed him. He bounded back toward Racer and waited for the next shove, giving a little play bark.

  When they showed him the baby doll, he approached slowly and sniffed it up and down. His tail wagged. He raised his head and licked it. Right on the face.

  Racer and the others examined the network of deep scars that crisscrossed his chest and front legs. They knew so little about him. What he’d seen and done, where he’d been. It was possible those marks came from something other than fighting. Perhaps he’d tried to climb a barbed wire fence or been dragged by a vehicle. But considering where he’d come from, it was a safe bet that he had been through some serious battles. But for whatever reason, the remnants were strictly physical. Emotionally and psychologically he had remained unscarred. Even through the months of confinement, he’d kept it together. That was probably not a coincidence. He was a little older than many of the other remaining dogs and he clearly had a lot of experiences. He must have had numerous encounters with people. He must have been trained and handled a lot.

  If he was still alive he must have been successful in the pit, which meant he’d received a lot of positive reinforcement. He probably lived in the kennels closer to the house where he heard and saw people more frequently. His personality would have been fully developed and he would’ve had a good idea of who he was.

  Still, it was mindboggling. He clearly had to have been a fighter, but here he was now, playful and gentle as a poodle. He liked people. He liked other dogs. He responded appropriately to each in a variety of situations. Would that hold up in the real world? Could he live with people and other dogs without a problem, without something causing him to snap, as PETA contended would happen? Dr. Z’s team of experts thought he would do fine. They thought the scarred dog was a rock star.

  They led him back to his pen. After the gate closed he stood with his face against it and watched them walk away. He barked at them.

  19

  DOGS HAVE BEEN COMING and going all morning. The brown dog- Sussex 2602-lies flat in her pen watches them go by. Some prance by on leashes, some walk with uncertainty, some have to be carried. Now, it is her turn. A man squats outside her pen. He look at her through the gate and makes soft noises. He sticks a finger through the chain link and wiggles it slowly.

  The brown dog shifts back and forth, lifts her head, and sniffs the air; her tail lifts to the side and then flops back down. She settles, shrinking even farther into the corner of her pen so that her hind leg and one side press against the fencing.

  She freezes and hopes that the man will leave. She’s done this many times, and she knows that when she simply ignores them they will often go away. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, they will pull her out. This man is not going away. He is still there, still speaking softly.

  He opens the gate. The brown dog’s heart begins to race. The man sits on one side and leans his head and shoulders into the pen, but he does not reach forward to grab her collar. He rests on an elbow and continues cooing. The sounds are gentle and flowing and for a moment the brown dog can block out the barking that fills the background like daylight and concentrate just on the sounds the man is making. There is peace in that.

  She can catch whiffs of his breath, too, and the sweet moist scent provides further distraction. He slides a little farther forward, still talking. The brown dog shifts again. She raises and lowers her head. Her tail thumps the ground once. The man is very close now. Close enough to reach out and grab her if he wanted to. Her body begins to tremble.

  He blows in her face. She sniffs then licks her snout and turns away. The man reaches toward her head, still talking. She ducks, pulls her neck in and presses her chin against the ground. His hand keeps coming. It touches her head. He strokes a few times. She lets out a little whine. He keeps at it for a minute or two, then reaches out with his other hand. He places one hand under each of her shoulders, then lifts and slides her out.

  He is carrying her across the room, past the cages where the other dogs sit or stand and bark. He is heading-they are heading-for the rectangle of light cut into the far wall. The barking seemes to intensify as they near the door. The dogs at the end of line of kennels jump up and stand on their hind legs, pressing their front paws against the chain, barking and barking.

  Finally, they duck through the door and the world changes. Smells rush up from the ground. The sky stretches above them. The barking recedes into the background. The brown dog sniffs enthusiastically, then blows a little air out through her nose.

  The man puts her on the ground. She lies down flat. It is hard concrete like the floors inside and she can smell some of the other dogs that have been here, too. Other people stand around looking at her. Behind and around them are other fences like the ones that make up her cage. It is incredibly hot and the people gather in the sliver of shade near the building.

  The brown dog feels the heat press down on her. She likes it, she feels like it hugs her and pushes her even farther down into the concrete. She looks at the trees in the distance.

  The same man who came to her pen appears before her. He begins petting her. At first just a little, then more. She continues to look at the trees. She can smell them and she remembers the trees from the clearing. She remembers the squirrels and the rabbits and the heavy chain around her neck.

  The man is in front of her now, bouncing a little, excitement in his voice. She lifts her head for the briefest instant. He claps and encourages but she puts her head back down. She moves it only a few times. When he puts a bowl of food in front of her, she sniffs but does not eat. When other dogs are brought out, she looks at them with both wariness and curiosity. Her tail swishes a few times and she shuffles forward on the pavement, craning her neck to get a sniff, but that is it.

  She does not open up. She does not relax, even when they bring her back to her pen. It doesn’t smell funny this time. It smells the same as when she left. She burrows back into the corner and tries to ignore the tide of barking around her.

  The evaluations had started out better than anyone could have hoped, but that didn’t mean there weren’t low points. In all, eighteen of the dogs had reacted the same way as Sussex 2602, flattening out on the ground and trying to ignore what was happening around them. One was so stressed that he puked when Racer tried to pull him out of his cage.

  Many of the dogs had no names, but two that had been singled out were Lucas and Jane. Vick’s only known champions-a dog that has won three straight times-showed troubling reactions to some of the tests.

  Lucas was confident and great with people but when the test dog was brought out he showed another side. The test dog had been used numerous times, and he knew the drill. He trotted out toward Lucas, who stood on the concrete. As the test dog approached, Lucas simply turned and looked at him. Something about his stare or the way he held his body told the test do
g everything he needed to know about Lucas. The test dog stopped in his tracks, turned, and went back into the shelter.

  Jane was the dog who had made a habit of shredding metal bowls. She had a condition that had caused many of her teeth to fall out, but she ground the bowls across the floor with her paws, air-hockeyed them around her pen, and gnawed at them so relentlessly that they eventually succumbed. Jane, whose face was a highway map of scars and whose mouth permanently hung open from where her jaw had been broken but never set, had a bad reaction to the food test, latching onto the fake hand and shaking it ferociously.

  There was something about Jane that Racer admired, though. She made the best of what she had. Lock me up in a kennel for four months with nothing but a metal bowl? Fine, but I’m going to have as much fun with that bowl as I can. Put me next to another dog with nothing but a chain-link fence between us? Okay, but like an older sibling trying to entertain himself on a long car ride, I’m going to rattle that fence, shake it with my mouth and push on it with my paws, pester that little sister next to me until I get a reaction. Will I break down and cower in the corner? No chance.

  Charming as that spunk could be, it was also evidence that Jane had an attitude problem. Part of that had come from her treatment: She had been aggressively and forcibly overbred. That was enough to turn any dog sour on the world, and it no doubt played a role in Jane’s response to stimuli.

  An even more heartbreaking example of how such mistreatment could harm a dog lived in the kennel next to Jane. The black female that inhabited that space had been overbred to the point that she had simply lost her mind. Her body sagged and swayed and she growled through gritted teeth at everything around her. She wanted to attack anything and anyone that came near. She was the only dog that Racer didn’t actually handle. No testing was necessary.

  Two other small dogs seemed friendly enough with people, but as soon as they were put into the testing area they displayed an aggressiveness common to fighting dogs. They had a heightened sense of awareness, a certain tension in their bodies, and they searched the area for another dog. Racer realized that the team had unintentionally re-created a fight scene: They had placed these dogs in an enclosed area with people standing around gawking. The evaluators were pushing the dogs’ buttons. These two little guys had been down that road before, and they knew what to do. Both of them attacked the stuffed dog. But pushing buttons, intentional or not, was part of the deal. The testers weren’t after false promise; they wanted reliable results.

  When the day was done, the team had tested all but five of the dogs. The members gathered for dinner at a diner across from the hotel. The evening was filled with much excited talk about what they had experienced during the day. What they had found so far were anything but the most viciously trained dogs in the country.

  Instead, they’d encountered American pit bull terriers and Staffordshire bull terriers with a broad spectrum of temperaments. A few of them had that fighter’s instinct, a visible willingness-almost desire-to go after other dogs that dog men refer to as gameness, but not many. No more than twelve.

  Beyond that there were the pancake dogs, creatures so stressed out from life first at Vick’s and then in the shelters that they had largely shut down. Even those dogs, though, could be very sweet. One of them stayed flattened to the ground through all the tests, until the examiners brought out the child-size doll. The dog grew visibly interested and slowly but surely it crawled across the concrete floor to reach the doll. When it got there, it sniffed and wagged with glee.

  Then there was a group of what were simply dogs. They were not socialized, they had no manners and no idea how to behave, and many of them had likely experienced at least fight-testing sessions if not outright fights, but they remained largely sound of mind and body. They needed only direction, affection, and companionship.

  The court documents showed that Bad Newz had not been terribly successful at breeding fighters. With the exception of a few dogs like Jane and Lucas, most of the Vick dogs had underperformed. That was why so many were being killed: The crew could not get them to fight. Most of the dogs that remained almost certainly would have fallen into that same category, and if not for the raid on 1915 Moonlight Road, almost all would have suffered some sort of hideous demise.

  This was to some degree a matter of pedigree. Breeding no doubt plays a role in dog behavior. There are border collies that are better at herding and retrievers that are better at retrieving because they’ve been carefully selected to perform that task over time. By the same logic there are pit bulls-so-called game-bred dogs-that are more inclined to fight and are potentially better at it than others.

  The Bad Newz crew, it seemed, had not been willing or wise enough to spend the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars more it cost to buy dogs from such elite lineages. Instead they rolled the dice on adult dogs that showed promise and when they found a few good ones, like Jane and Lucas, they attempted to start their own line of champions. That’s why Jane was so criminally overbred, and why so many of the dogs rescued from 1915 Moonlight Road had the same sandy brown coat as both she and Lucas did. Many, if not all of them, could probably claim one or both as a parent or grandparent.

  However, breeding a good fighting dog isn’t as simple as taking the offspring of two champions, throwing them in the ring, and counting the money. The process is a subtle blend of nature and nurture. How the dog is trained and treated, how it’s kept, how it’s socialized, at what stage in its life it is introduced to certain stimuli all contribute to how it develops. Some pit bulls could be raised by the most caring, loving family in the world, who do everything by the book and those dogs might still have an inclination to go after other dogs. Some dogs can be raised in the harshest way possible and still have nothing but happiness and companionship to share with the world.

  And breeding a dog to fight is different than breeding it for other traits. There’s nothing about herding or retrieving or pulling a sled that goes against the dog’s internal drives. But creating a dog that wants to attack other dogs is at odds with twelve thousand years of evolution, a period of time in which dogs were instilled with the instinct to work together in a pack to survive. Centuries of breeding based on mutual dependence goes far deeper than fifty or even one hundred years of manipulation to encourage a desire to do harm.

  Even Louis Colby, a renowned breeder and reformed dogfighter, has said that if you mated two champion dogs and harvested a litter of twelve pups, there might be one champion in the group. Certainly, if you raised pit bulls in an atmosphere of hostility, frustrated and angered them, honed their aggressiveness, and then put them into a situation where they felt challenged, some of them would fight, but so would most other dogs. The Vick dogs showed that even under those circumstances many of them still did not prefer to fight, and even when they did, the simple fact that they were pit bulls did not guarantee that they would be good at it. The truth, in the end, is that each dog, like each person, is an individual. If the Vick dogs proved nothing else to the world, this would be a significant advance.

  20

  STEVE Z STACKED THE evaluation sheets on his desk. One per dog. Forty-nine sheets of paper that would determine what became of the last vestiges of Bad Newz Kennels. One by one he tabulated the results and compiled them in a chart showing each dog and how it performed in each test.

  In their earlier conversations the team had decided that each dog would be placed in one of five categories: Foster/Observation, Law Enforcement, Sanctuary 1, Sanctuary 2, and Euthanasia. Foster dogs were the best of the lot. These dogs seemed to be well-adjusted and capable of living as a family pet. In a foster home they would live with experienced dog owners who’d done previous rescue work, and those people would begin to train them and integrate them into household life while observing them for six months to a year. If no issues arose during that time, the dogs would be eligible for adoption.

  The Law Enforcement category was for healthy, high-energy dogs who showed
the drive and motivation to get through the rigorous training that was required of dogs that did police or other investigative and patrol work. The Sanctuary 1 label went to dogs that had long-term potential but needed a lot of help. They would go to some sort of animal sanctuary that had the facilities to provide them with a comfortable and rewarding life while working with them to overcome their problems. If these dogs improved, they could eventually be moved to foster care and then to adoption.

  The Sanctuary 2 dogs were those that were good, healthy dogs but because they had either shown aggression toward people or other dogs could probably never live outside managed care. They could live in a sanctuary but would likely never leave it.

  The final category, Euthanasia, needed no explanation.

  Dr. Z drafted a report, placing each dog in what seemed like the best category. He e-mailed the chart and the report to everyone on the team. Comments and suggestions came back. He tweaked a few of the recommendations. For any dog that was questionable, they went with the more conservative category. If a dog was borderline between Foster and Sanctuary 1, it went into Sanctuary 1, etc.

  Finally, after a few weeks of back and forth, the report was sent to the Department of Justice and the USDA. On September 19, Dr. Z flew to Washington for a meeting with officials from both agencies to explain how the team had come to its conclusions. As an academic the most pressure-packed meeting Zawistowski had ever attended was a faculty Senate session, but now he was before a roomful of government attorneys and agents. Everyone in the place was armed with either a law degree or a gun or both.

  As nerve-racking as that was, Dr. Z stuck to his program. He took the officials through the report, explained the process and the concept of each category of care. He showed the videos of the evaluations. There was some push back. Questions emerged about how dogs were differentiated, and Dr. Z answered by showing examples of how certain dogs reacted differently to the same stimuli and what that indicated about them.