The Lost Dogs (18 page)

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 dog 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.

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.

Several of the officials didn’t see the upside of keeping any of the dogs alive. No one really expected these dogs to be spared and there was no political risk to following precedent. There was no way to know for sure how the dogs would fare. If just one of them failed, it could be a huge liability issue for the government. Headline writers and talk show hosts would have no mercy on anyone responsible for freeing a fighting dog that then went on to attack someone. Compassion and empathy were laudable instincts, but this situation called for pragmatism and responsibility, they argued. On the other side, some of the agents spoke about past cases, where they’d seen good dogs die without ever getting a chance because of a “destroy all evidence” policy; it would be encouraging to try something else.

Dr. Z suggested that if the government was going to attempt to save the dogs, it would be wise to hire one person to oversee the process. The DOJ and USDA had already received calls and letters from rescue groups and sanctuaries offering to help. This person would need to devise a formal application process, screen the applicants, and oversee the actual disbursement of the dogs. The officials asked Zawistowski to recommend someone.

It was a difficult question, as the person needed to be an expert in animal issues who did not have a stake in the outcome; who had a proven ability to understand and administer the legal aspects of the job, including the transfer of liability; and strong organizational skills. The person would also have to be capable of dealing with the government bureaucracy on one hand and the passionate advocates who ran the rescue groups on the other. They would need to determine if an applicant was truly capable of taking on one or more dogs and to make judgment calls about which facilities were the best fit for each dog. He or she would need to devote significant time to the task and be willing to stand up to the inevitable sniping that would follow any decision.