DogTown (14 page)

A
s anyone who comes over to my house can tell you, there is a motley crew of animals that live there with me. All my animals are special, but visitors all seem to gravitate to Miles, my eight-pound, incredibly cute Chihuahua mix. Everyone seems to want to get their hands on him and pick him up. But if Miles isn’t in the mood, he may bite a well-meaning person. I find that I’m on guard for this behavior and take care to explain to first-timers that not every dog wants to be petted and picked up by every person they meet every day.

Miles’s zest for life and intelligence are obvious to everyone. He can show amazing bravery by running up to any other animal without a second thought for his own safety. And, despite his occasional crabbiness, he can also be astoundingly gentle: When I was fostering some baby rats in our home, Miles learned to be careful with them as if he knew they were vulnerable and needed special care. When I think back to how Miles came into my life, I think that might be where he acquired these two sides of his personality. He had a rough start, one that required both gentle care and bravery.

It all began with a call for help. A local woman was experiencing maximum stress and called up Dogtown. In addition to caring for her elderly, sick mother, the woman was left to care for two dogs and the four-year-old child of her daughter, who had disappeared. To add to the woman’s woes, one of the dogs, a purebred Chihuahua, had delivered a litter of five puppies three days earlier. The mother dog had stopped nursing the pups, and the woman didn’t know what to do about it. “They’re all going to die,” wept the woman, who was clearly overwhelmed. The receptionist at Dogtown forwarded the call to me.

I gathered supplies and headed out to her home. I thought my job that night would be simple: provide her the skills and supplies to supplement the litter with formula since the mother dog had stopped feeding them. Was I ever wrong.

Upon arrival, I walked into pandemonium. Two elderly women were wandering around the house, the dogs were barking, the four-year-old child was screaming…and the caregiver, the woman who had called, was frazzled and exhausted. She was definitely trying to keep it together but was losing the battle right in front of me.

We sat down, and I started asking questions about the mother dog’s medical history. Unfortunately, she had no history. She had never been to the vet, never had been spayed, and had given birth to four litters of puppies. They had let her wander and breed, so they had no idea who had fathered any of the litters. All of her previous puppies had been sold for profit. The family had a sense of pride that the mother dog had never required any additional medical attention. But many problems and sicknesses can be invisible to the average person. Mama dog could have had a host of health problems that her owners had never detected. To my great surprise, they didn’t see this situation as problematic at all.

At this point, I could not believe what I was hearing, so I offered to take the mother Chihuahua and her five puppies back to Dogtown. I wanted to get them to our vet to be examined as soon as possible. When I met the mother dog, I realized she had raging mastitis (inflammation of the breast) and was in pain, which I realized was why she had ceased feeding the puppies. I reached to pick her up, and, like a lot of dogs who are in pain, she bit me.

I asked the woman to find a box and bring it to me. Then I carefully loaded the mom and her five mouse-size puppies into it. We agreed that I would find homes for any puppies who survived, and I would return the mom after she was spayed.

I was (and still am) lucky enough to work at Best Friends Animal Society, where the vet staff, after a quick phone call, was waiting for my arrival. Driving to the clinic, I realized that I would not be going home that night. At the time, I was the manager of Dogtown, and there were many nights when I did not go home because I needed to care for a newly admitted dog around the clock. In fact, I considered my office a second home.

Because my office already contained animals, I asked Faith Maloney, one of the founders of Best Friends, if I could borrow her office for the mother and her pups. As it turned out, she lent it to me for the next few weeks. I moved in too to care for the pups!

When we arrived at the clinic, the veterinarian confirmed that the mom had extreme mastitis and was running a high temperature. Her parasite load was so heavy that she had shared it with her pups, and they were passing blood instead of stool. Two out of the five puppies were barely hanging on to life. We fed all five with syringes, since they were too weak to suck from bottles. I provided warm compresses in between feeding the puppies every three hours around the clock. At this point, the mama dog was still not my friend—she was still snapping at me.

Mom was put on medication. Within a few days, she began to feel better and three of the puppies were back to nursing part of the time, supplemented with bottle-feeding. Two puppies remained very weak and were being syringe-fed by me around the clock. Mom, now answering to the name Jenny, had begun to trust me and had made it extremely clear that she would no longer care for the two ailing puppies. She started removing them from their bed and placing them on the cold office floor. Whenever I found them there, I picked them up and gently placed them back, beside their mother and siblings.

Despite all my attempts to keep the two sick pups in the bed with their family, Jenny persisted. I starting having conversations with Jenny about her puppies, but I would still return to find the two sickly pups on the office floor. So I set up a second bed with a heating pad and a beating-heart toy, which one of our members had donated, for the two smallest pups. By this time, each of the puppies had a name. The largest boy was named Bernard, after one of our trustees in Dogtown, and the smallest was named Traveler. I named the two girls Cascade and Pixie. The remaining boy, Miles, was named after one of my personal favorite dogs in Dogtown. A kind and gentle shepherd mix, Miles the elder was the epitome of a good dog but often was overlooked by adopters.

Despite my best efforts and numerous visits to the clinic, the two weakest puppies, Traveler and Miles, were struggling. At one point, I fed them and left the office; when I returned about a half hour later, I discovered that Traveler had lost the fight and was gone. Miles was still hanging on, and I had to find a way to save him.

Miles, who had an open fontanel (space between the bones of his skull), had been deemed different by his mother. Even though he looked so small and alone, I knew he could make it with his mother’s help. It was at that moment that I decided to start negotiating with Jenny again. This time, as we talked, I promised her that if she would allow Miles time with her and with his siblings, I would care for him for life. My true belief was that she knew he was special, and if she understood that he would be cared for, she would accept him.

That day, I was a good dealmaker. Jenny never put Miles out on the floor again. As the weeks passed, I was amazed at the change in physical appearance of each puppy. They grew healthier and stronger, but as their appearances began to change, there was no doubt that the mom had been allowed to run around: Mom was a purebred black-and-tan Chihuahua. Both surviving males, Bernard and Miles, were becoming long-haired. Pixie and Cascade were wire-haired. Bernard was the biggest, and Miles grew larger than Pixie, who was now the smallest and was taking on the appearance of a werewolf.

Even though I knew the puppies wouldn’t be ready for spaying or neutering for quite some time, I started screening homes for them. At Best Friends, we do spay or neuter when dogs are at least eight weeks old and weigh over two and a half pounds. It would be a while before these puppies reached that weight.

I contacted Jenny’s original caregiver to give her an update on the family’s progress. Her own personal situation had not improved enough to take Jenny back into her home, so I offered to find Jenny a new home as well as finding homes for all the surviving puppies. She agreed that would be the best situation for Jenny and her litter.

It didn’t take too long for Jenny and her family to find wonderful places to live. Jenny and her daughter Cascade both went to live with a Wisconsin family who had adopted from Best Friends in the past. Pixie was adopted by a staff member, and Bernard, still growing fast, was adopted by a Best Friends founder. As for Miles, I honored my promise, and it couldn’t have worked out any better for me. It turned out that he was very special. His cuteness, his spirit, and his bouncy manner have made him a fun addition to the animals who live at my house.

To this day, I am thrilled to give Miles the constant supervision and protection that he requires. For the most part, he has enjoyed good health since his difficult delivery into the world. His size makes him easy to manage—I can scoop him up if other animals are approaching. I love Miles very much and think of him as a gift from Jenny. I hope to enjoy sharing my life with him for many years to come.

Because Best Friends Animal Society provides a lifetime commitment to every dog adopted from Best Friends, including Jenny and her pups, we are able to keep up with adoptive families and arrange the occasional family reunion. One Mother’s Day, Jenny and Cascade traveled back from Wisconsin to reunite with their family. It was a happy reunion, and I had the chance to thank Jenny for striking a deal with me all those years ago. I wanted her to see that I had held up my end of the bargain—that Miles was healthy, safe, and loved.

I
f a person were trying to find the smack-dab middle of absolutely nowhere, Gabbs, Nevada, would have to be close. It’s the sort of place people go in order not to be found—and they generally succeed. It is a flat, relentless emptiness not far from such scenic wonders as Cactus Flat and the Humboldt Salt Marsh, though distantly one can see eerily beautiful, dead-dry mountains, like mountains on the moon. It was here that Dogtown rescued a resilient young Dalmatian mix they named Tuffy. Tuffy never gave up on life, and Dogtown never gave up on him. It was the perfect combination to bring the young dog back from the brink.

THE PROBLEM OF HOARDING

In December 2007, Dogtown got a call about a horrific hoarding situation near Gabbs. A woman contacted Dogtown after her aunt, who had been keeping hundreds of dogs on her isolated property, passed away. The deceased woman had started out as a rescuer, taking in abandoned dogs. But the situation overwhelmed her, and she wasn’t able to look after all the animals properly. Conditions at the property deteriorated, and the dogs were surviving in terrible circumstances.

Animal hoarding is a complex issue, and it is sometimes hard to recognize. Often people who hoard animals believe that they are helping and protecting them, which leads them to take in too many. As the number of pets grows, the hoarder becomes overwhelmed and unable to provide the minimum care necessary: food, sanitation, shelter, and medical care. Beginning with good intentions, hoarders end up abusing their animals through neglect. Such behavior is remarkably common: Researchers at Tufts University have estimated that there are 700 to 2,000 new cases of animal hoarding in the United States every year.

Dogtown Manager Michelle Besmehn eases the wounded Tuffy into a crate to transport him to safety.

In one typical hoarding case investigated by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), a couple in Maryland started a shelter for cats called Chubbers Animal Rescue, complete with a cheerful website. Though the couple’s original intentions may have been good ones, when HSUS volunteers entered the house in May 2003, they found more than 300 cats, of which more than 70 were dead. In one part of the house, volunteers found themselves stepping on heaps of feces and skeletons. “It was disgusting,” said one volunteer. “The amount of filth was unbelievable.”

Yet, like many hoarders, the couple was convinced they had been caring for the animals properly, and they seemed in complete denial that their animal “refuge” had turned into a house of horrors. The pair were well educated and well spoken, and they had the uncanny ability to attract sympathy to their point of view. Their justification was that they loved animals intensely and were afraid the cats would be euthanized if they went to a shelter.

Psychiatric studies at several institutions have suggested there is some greater mental illness involved in hoarding. The most likely candidate is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder in which people develop an overwhelming sense of responsibility for something like taking care of animals even after they are no longer capable of doing so.

A SURREAL SITUATION

A small rescue team from Dogtown flew from Utah to a tiny airport in the Nevada desert, drove almost two hours, and then took a dusty dirt road 13 miles into the desiccated backcountry. They would be working on-site with other rescue groups to help assess the dogs and network them to other groups where they could be adopted. When the teams finally arrived at their destination, the scene that greeted them was “surreal,” Dogtown Manager Michelle Besmehn recalled.

In this weird, alien landscape, with its pitiless desert sun and sense of utter desolation, was a decrepit house and a rundown collection of kennels and cages containing 150 dogs. The dogs—multiple breeds, ages, and states of neglect—all seemed to be howling at once. Most of them were in individual kennels, while several others were running around in small packs in larger enclosures. Outside the cages, a few dogs simply roamed freely. There were ratty-looking dogs trying to jump the fences, and some dogs were attempting to mate with other dogs. It was chaos.

When Michelle entered one of the larger enclosures where a pack of dogs had formed, she found a scene that stabbed at her heart. Among the cacophony of the other dogs, a young Dalmatian mix, not much more than six or eight months old, lay quietly on the dirt, immobile and still. His dirty fur bore the signs of a savage attack by the other dogs; his side and back legs were covered with gaping, open wounds and were slathered in dried blood, mud, and excrement. Too weak even to raise his head, his shallow panting was his only detectable motion.

Michelle examined the dog and noticed that his heartbeat was weak and rapid. His gums were pale. His skin was cool to the touch. And then there was his smell: the putrid odor of infection. Michelle knew those signs meant the dark rider of death was on its way and due to arrive in a matter of hours. Whether the little dog actually knew this, it’s impossible to say. He looked pleadingly up into Michelle’s eyes, and she simply could not resist this canine soul, so young and so full of suffering.

She sat down on the dusty ground in her blue jeans, cradled the little Dalmatian’s head between her legs, and comforted him. Despite his injuries, it was easy to see that this little guy was a cutie. He had a sweet and comical coloration, with black ears, a scattering of white spots on the right side of his face, and a big black patch over his left eye. Dalmatians are sometimes called plum pudding dogs because of the random way blobs of black are scattered over their skin. The big black blob over one of this dog’s eyes had a particularly striking appearance. Michelle could see that the dog was in shock, but she also felt that he seemed grateful for the attention and the thought that help might have arrived at last.

“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.”

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.