DogTown (8 page)

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.

B
ingo 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 all 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.

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.

The river was pushing him.

When he got back home to Kansas City, he said, “I realized I had driven 2,400 miles to walk dogs, when there was a shelter about two miles from my house.” So he started volunteering at the local shelter and gradually became “one of those hard-core volunteers who show up when the gates are locked for snow days.” His background in mental health was helpful in working with dogs, because “even though the way human behavior develops and changes is not the same as what happens in dogs, the law is the same, or similar.”

Two years later, he found out there was an opening for a dog trainer at Best Friends. His girlfriend encouraged him to apply. “I said, ‘I’m not a dog trainer, I’m a mental health counselor who walks dogs!’” But he applied anyhow, arranging to come to Kanab for the two-week trial stay required of most applicants. Pat arranged to get two weeks off from work at the hospital, and he was almost ready to go when he realized he didn’t have a travel alarm clock, which he’d need for the trip. That same day, a free travel alarm clock came in the mail, as part of a fund-raising appeal from the Humane Society of the United States.

It was the river again, pushing him in the direction he needed to go. Now, four years later, Pat Whitacre’s office is a 10-by-16-foot room at the Dogtown sanctuary.

BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY

When he first got to Best Friends, Bingo’s whole approach to life was “Better safe than sorry.” Pat said, “There’s no sense to go boldly charging into things you don’t know about, or that you aren’t convinced are going to be safe for you. So it’s a fairly wise choice for a dog like him. His challenges are to find out that the world is, in fact, OK.”

Showing signs of nervousness, Bingo, right, tucks his tail and turns away from his trainer, Pat Whitacre, and Peanut.

Shyness in dogs can express itself in different ways, Pat added. Some dogs deal with their shyness by fleeing scary situations as fast as they can—running away, hiding, and avoiding. Other shy dogs express their feelings with what he calls the “puffer fish” approach. They try to puff themselves up as big as possible, to become frightening and aggressive. Make the enemy flee first; don’t let anything get close enough to hurt you. If anything gets too close, bite—a damning behavior in a world run by humans, because it’s inclined to get the dog killed.

Bingo had chosen the first shy-dog approach—luckily, the easiest one to work with. When Pat approached him, he would slink away and try to hide, tail tucked between his legs, hunkered down so low it was as if he were trying to melt into the ground. He didn’t show any biting behavior. His whole demeanor was passive—he seldom even avoided people with any real force.

At first Bingo did not readily respond to Pat or anyone else. There was no evidence that the dog had ever developed a real relationship with a person. Instead of responding to humans, Bingo reacted with a behavior Pat called shutting down. Bingo would try to turn into an inanimate object, like a rock or a plant, in the hope that he would go unnoticed. He would lie down or hide in his doghouse, holding very still and staying quiet. Pat describes it as “almost like hitting the switch in a power plant and the whole thing just shuts down.”

FINDING BINGO’S REWARD

But Pat saw Bingo’s shutting down as an advantage for a trainer. His strategy of keeping still meant that he wouldn’t bite or run away, so it was easier for Pat to get close to him, to touch him, and eventually to slip a leash over his head—to take the first tentative steps toward molding his behavior. And with shy dogs, every step may seem small, but even these little things can be considered big successes. Pat would build on these moments to try to bring Bingo out of his shell even more.

Bingo’s shyness was not as extreme as that of some dogs Pat had seen. He was easier to work with than a dog who isn’t comfortable with people being close at all, or with people touching him, because trying to teach such a dog to sit is “a hopeless and futile task,” Pat said. “You’re talking to him—he hates that. You’re close to him—he hates that. You offer him a treat—he’s too nervous to take it, so you can’t reward the behavior. The only real reward with some extremely shy dogs is to go away and leave him alone—which is the technique you sometimes have to use.”

Bingo, by contrast, was at least approachable, which meant he was teachable.

Even so, Pat knew there were special difficulties in working with shy dogs. The more behaviors a dog offers to its trainer, and the more relaxed the dog is, the easier it is to shape that behavior, he said. A confident, expressive, outgoing dog, one who offers many behaviors, even if they are undesirable behaviors, is easier to train than a shy, shut-down dog. If a shy dog is doing nothing, it’s very hard to reward the behaviors you want to see, especially if he or she is too nervous to accept the rewards you’re trying to offer. That was the challenge with Bingo. He was so shy, so shut down, so trapped in the box of his own fear, that he had trouble making progress.

Still, one of the great rewards of working with shy dogs, Pat said, is that although it’s “real easy to just see the problem behavior and not realize there’s more to the dog than that,” there’s enormous soul satisfaction in those moments when an animal begins to show parts of himself that may at first have escaped notice. Who knew what winsome and endearing qualities Bingo might be hiding inside the box of his own shyness? Pat knew that the key to the whole process would be finding out what Bingo liked and then using it to reward him.