Saving Gracie (12 page)

Linda and Gracie take a moment to share each other’s company. They bonded quickly. (
Eric Walter
)

Watching Gracie emerge from her trauma gave Linda a feeling of contentment, too. There was a lot about this little dog she didn’t know, but she could see that Gracie approached each new day with a sense of optimism and hope. Gracie’s tail said it all. It swished back and forth, back and forth, as if she were thinking, “You know what? Life’s not so bad after all.” And the more the family praised her, the harder it wagged. Before long, the Cavalier had earned herself a new nickname: Miss Happy Tail.

Chapter 15: Learning to Trust

Linda wasn’t the only person to experience difficulty rehabilitating a survivor from Mike-Mar Kennel. Many other adopters struggled with their new pets, as well. Pam Bair adopted Jolie from the Berks County Animal Rescue League, and the dog seemed distant and dazed. Alycia Meldon’s dog, Abby, was so petrified of people that she hid beneath chairs. Mike and Laura Hewitt ran up thousands of dollars in veterinary bills treating their dogs, Baxter and Duffy. And Susan Krewatch battled a series of illnesses with her two Cavaliers, Lily and Bella.

Pam had kept her eye on Jolie, the most pitiful of the twelve Wolf dogs she’d taken care of at the Animal Rescue League. If Gracie was puny, Jolie, believed to be 7 years old, was worse. Months after her rescue she was still underweight, her skin scabby and itchy, her coat patchy and dull. She had a heart murmur. She suffered from dry eye. She was deaf, the result of too many untreated ear infections. She’d been debarked, a procedure in which the vocal cords are severed or removed. Puppy mill dogs were sometimes debarked by shoving a plastic or steel tube down the dog’s throat. And Jolie had so many of her teeth pulled that her tongue hung like a limp lollipop from one side of her mouth.

On top of all that, Jolie was an emotional wreck. Like Gracie, years of bearing litter after litter had rendered her withdrawn and shell-shocked. Pam wondered if dogs could suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. If so, Jolie was a textbook example. During the dog’s entire stay at the Animal Rescue League, Pam worried that when the time came to adopt her out, Jolie’s new owner might find her too much of a challenge, give up on her, and turn her back in. The only way to prevent that from happening was for Pam to take Jolie herself.

Divorced for a couple of years, Pam already had a houseful of pets: two rescued cats, Rudy and Boomie, and two Basset Hound rescues. The Bassets, Dudley and Odie, were appealing in a laid-back sort of way. They radiated that air of gratitude all rescue dogs seem to exude. Now, to Pam’s surprise, she had overcome her bias against toy breeds and fallen headlong for the Cavaliers. She couldn’t help it. They were such cheerful, optimistic little creatures. They loved everything and everybody. An unfamiliar dog could be growling and barking two feet away, and a Cavalier would waltz right up and say hello.

“You can’t pick who you fall in love with,” Pam reminded herself.

She liked the fact that Cavaliers seemed thoroughly attached to the people in their lives. The healthy ones acted that way, at least. She had to admit, she hadn’t detected that quality in Jolie. But she suspected that if she worked hard enough, she could crack the shell that encompassed this disturbed little dog. She was prepared to give Jolie all the affection in the world to bring her around.

To Pam’s relief, the Bassets welcomed the Cavalier, and the cats were indifferent. From day one, everyone seemed to understand that the newcomer in their midst was a little needy and more apt to take up Pam’s time. Dogs and cats alike were willing to give Jolie as wide a berth as she needed to adjust to her new home.

Pam dived into her new project. Priority number one was to make the Cavalier as comfortable as possible. Pam put drops in her eyes daily, as she’d done for the last several months. She soaked Jolie’s dry food to make it easier to chew; she’d started that practice in the shelter and it had made a difference. She began mixing ground flaxseed into her food to relieve her itchy skin. In a matter of weeks, Jolie stopped scratching and her coat began to thicken and shine.

The tougher challenge was to rehabilitate the Cavalier emotionally. Pam was determined to make up for lost time, to give Jolie the kind of attention she’d gone without those first seven years. That meant hugs and kisses—lots of them—copious amounts of lap time, and plenty of sweet-talking of the sort that had pulled some of Wolf’s other dogs out of their shells.

In the morning when Pam left for work, Jolie would curl up on the couch and fall asleep. When Pam came home at the end of the day, Jolie was often in the exact same spot, still nestled and still napping, as if for the first time in her life she felt safe enough to really relax. Sometimes Pam left her undisturbed for an hour or so while she started supper and tended to her other pets. Once Jolie was awake, Pam dropped everything to spend time with her. She could see the little dog starting to respond and didn’t want to ease off now.

Pam’s devotion to rescue dogs—this need to try to compensate for their dismal past—was draining at times. But she derived every bit as much meaning from the relationships as she put into them. More, really. Dogs saw people at their very worst. They didn’t mind how bad you looked when you got up in the morning or were sick. They loved you anyway.

For the first six months, Jolie remained distant. For better or worse, she seemed to have no expectations whatsoever. She was no trouble at all—so well-behaved that a month after Pam adopted Jolie, she began accompanying Pam to work three or four days a week. The Cavalier would while away the day in the kitchen of the Rescue League’s boarding wing, dozing contentedly in Pam’s chair. The only thing that roused her was the scent of a treat—a pig’s ear, a rawhide chew, or a marrow bone filled with meat and fat. The treats felt good to her gums; she gnawed on them for hours. Pam delighted in seeing Jolie enjoy something so intently. “If this dog wants ten pig’s ears a day, by God, she’s going to get them,”
she decided. At this stage of Jolie’s life, Pam wasn’t about to deny her anything.

The treats helped draw out Jolie’s personality. She was unaccustomed to such culinary luxury and willing to do whatever it took to keep it coming. At home, all three dogs got bones, but Jolie was obsessive about them. If Dudley happened to leave his bone on his bed for even a minute, Jolie would jump off the couch, race into the dining room, steal the bone, and hop back on her perch, purloined treasure clamped firmly between her jaws. If Dudley came looking for his bone, Jolie would growl and Dudley—easily three times her size—would give up the fight.

Jolie wasn’t housetrained, but she learned the rules by watching Dudley and Odie go outside. If Pam was going to be gone all day, she put down a potty pad for Jolie and the little dog quickly adapted to it. After years of being mired in her own excrement, she seemed eager to have a separate place to do her business. It wasn’t necessary to put her in a crate to prevent her from soiling the house.

The outpouring of affection and a safe, loving environment made all the difference. Six months after she came home with Pam, Jolie seemed liberated emotionally. She carried herself with a newfound sense of pride and confidence. Overnight, it seemed, Jolie wasn’t frightened of anyone or anything, including Sullivan, the Husky next door. Despite their difference in size, the two dogs hit it off. Jolie would walk right up to Sullivan and sniff his snout, and he would let her. For the first time, Jolie began to wag her tail and approach life with a Cavalier’s trademark blend of curiosity and cheerfulness.

•  •  •

Twenty-three miles away, in Wilmington, Delaware, 56-year-old Alycia Meldon had a more difficult experience.

Alycia was looking for a Pekingese to rescue. She’d taken in two before and fostered others, one of them a stray who’d been struck by an Amish buggy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and tossed into a ditch. Alycia was drawn to the glorious autumn-colored coat and gentle nature of the Pekingese breed, and the needier the dog, the better. Alycia lived alone and liked working with animals who’d been abused or thrown away. She’d choose a mistreated animal over a healthy, well-adjusted puppy any day.

A friend of Alycia’s who’d been following the raid on Mike-Mar Kennel urged her to check out the dogs who were seized. Wolf was known for raising Pekingese, and who knew? Any number of his Pekingese might be in need of new homes.

When Alycia found out there were no Pekingese among the Wolf rescues, she began looking elsewhere. But none of the Pekingese rescue groups within an hour’s drive of her had any dogs available, and the groups that were farther away had a standing rule against adopting out dogs to anyone living more than fifty miles away.

After several months of searching, Alycia was ready to give up. “Maybe I’m not supposed to have a Pekingese this time around,”
she thought. She read more about the Wolf case. Wolf no longer had Pekingese, but he did have several dozen Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Cavaliers were known for being sensitive and caring—the perfect lap dog. And in a matter of days, some of them would be in need of a home. Alycia’s interest was piqued.

The morning of July 6, she arrived at the Chester County SPCA at 7:30 a.m. for round two of the adoptions, hoping to get a Cavalier. Twenty-five people were ahead of her. She waited seven hours, but when she finally reached the front of the line the Chester County SPCA staff announced that the last available Cavalier had been taken. Feeling like a bride abandoned at the altar, Alycia left.

Despite her disappointment, she was impressed by the compassion the SPCA had shown in caring for Wolf’s dogs. Two days later she drove back to the shelter with a bouquet of sunflowers to give to the staff. When she explained her situation—how the Cavaliers had all been taken by the time her number was called—the woman behind the desk looked up at her and smiled. “We’ve got one,” she said. An adoption had fallen through the day before. A Cavalier was available after all.

The staffer ushered Alycia into a private room and went to get the dog. She was a Blenheim, but her chestnut and white coat was cut short and stained yellow, and she was thin. The little dog crouched beneath the chair the staffer was sitting in, a look of utter terror on her face. She refused all entreaties to come out. Unaccustomed to attention, she urinated on the tile floor.

Alycia was undeterred. She got down on the floor, too, talking to the employee and the dog in the gentlest possible tones. Finally, the Cavalier inched out from under the chair, but only to try to crawl up the legs of the kennel worker. Tenderly, Alycia reached out and lifted her up. The dog stiffened her legs and drew her head as far away from Alycia as she could. Alycia continued to speak to her softly. It seemed only natural that a dog in this circumstance would be fearful and shy. She’d take her, Alycia told the staffer. The woman carried the dog back to her pen so that she and Alycia could finish the paperwork.

On the ride home, the Cavalier cried the entire way. Alycia carried her crate into the kitchen of her Cape Cod house, unlatched the door, let the dog out and informed her that she had a new name: Abigail. For the first time, the little dog glanced up at her. A few minutes later, Alycia took her to the backyard and set her down. Suddenly, Abigail was curious. She began sniffing the air, the ground—the dozens of scents humans can’t begin to distinguish. The smells were new to her, and she was entranced. Within minutes she dropped on her back and rolled around on the fresh, cool lawn. “This is the first time she’s ever been on grass,”
Alycia thought. She watched her explore with a combination of pity and wonder, tears rolling down her face.

There were the usual physical ailments. Abby’s teeth were so rotten they hung loose. Alycia’s veterinarian initially thought Abby’s jaw was broken; he wound up pulling all but seven of her teeth. And housetraining her was an ordeal. Abby eventually learned to go outside, but teaching the 4-year-old dog the fundamentals of cleanliness took every ounce of patience Alycia possessed.

Abby’s emotional issues, though, were more serious. All of Alycia’s previous rescues had struggled to overcome various problems, but it soon became apparent that Abby was way more disturbed. She frantically fought any attempt by Alycia to clean her ears—as if, in a previous life, she’d been handled roughly around her head. If Alycia reached toward her hind end, Abby curled up into a tight ball, terrified. And she was extremely protective of her space. She would consent to lie on the sofa next to Alycia as long as Alycia heeded an ironclad rule: no eye contact. If Alycia sat perfectly still and fixed her gaze elsewhere, Abby might edge close or crawl up Alycia’s shoulders, but only under those conditions. Yet Abby suffered separation anxiety, too. If she sensed that Alycia was getting ready to leave the house, she would retreat to the farthest corner and shut down.

Her aversion to being touched from behind, her refusal to make eye contact, and her desire to hide out in a corner from time to time are typical behaviors of puppy mill dogs, Michelle Bender and Kim Townsend wrote in “Rehabilitation of a Puppy Mill Dog,” a paper that has been widely published on the Internet. Rescue veterans with years of experience, they wrote that dogs living in puppy mills are seldom handled, and when they are, the experience is unpleasant—they’re being vaccinated, dewormed, or carried to a new cage to breed or whelp puppies.

“Many mill dogs will try to always face you, not trusting you enough to give you easy access,” Bender and Townsend wrote. “The most common posture we see in mill dogs is the ‘freeze’; the dog will initially try to escape you, but when they realize there is no escape, they simply freeze up—rigid like a statue—and accept their ‘fate.’”

Alycia understood all that. But Abby wrestled with deeper emotions her owner couldn’t begin to fathom. She would sometimes whimper all night long, inconsolably. Alycia wondered if her distress had anything to do with the fact that the gestation period for a dog is sixty-three days. Was Abby conjuring up memories of being bred or of giving birth? There was no way to tell. Dogs live in the present as best they can, Alycia knew. But she also believed that bad experiences could become ingrained in an animal’s psyche and never completely fade away.