Last week my neighbor and I drove to Spokane to pick up two great Danes named Juno and Satina; the dogs had been declared dangerous after killing another dog on a neighbor's property, and they were facing an uncertain future with their usual pet-sitter leaving town and their guardian having an out of town job approaching. The dogs had been imported from Germany and were being bred, pretty regularly from the look of Satina, the older of the two. Satina was outgoing and happy to meet us, but Juno was shy at first, and did his fair share of growling and lunging. Once we got the dogs into the truck, they settled in nicely, and from Spokane, we headed south.
I dropped my neighbor off in Oakland, CA to visit with his family for a few days while I went on to Los Angeles, where I would visit friends and family and meet with some producers to talk about a possible TV show. Juno and Satina traveled well and seemed to be enjoying the ride. Satina was old (for a great Dane -- six years) and overweight, so she needed help getting in and out of the truck, but seemed otherwise content, so you can imagine my surprise when I returned to my truck after eating lunch at a Carl's Jr. in Chatsworth and found her dead in the back seat. The temperature was cool in the truck and as I replayed the last thirty hours in my mind, I couldn't think of anything that had happened that would have caused her to die. A bit in shock, I made a few phone calls, postponed my first meeting, and drove to the office of the veterinarian I had always gone to when I lived in southern California, so that he could perform a necropsy. Getting 160 pounds of deceased dog out of the truck wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but we managed, and I left Satina on the operating table, still a bit in shock, but more worried about poor Juno, who had just lost the only remaining thing from his prior life.
Juno surprised me a bit. I took him to my mom's place in San Juan Capistrano for about half an hour before we had to return to LA, and he seemed relaxed, even playful. We drove back north and arrived at the Hell's Kitchen set for our first meeting, and Juno was a hit. I had initially considered not taking the Danes to my meetings because I felt it might be too stressful, but with all that had happened to Juno, I wasn't going to leave his side. In the meetings, he did what big dogs usually do -- he slept.
I got a call from my vet about Satina; he had found cardiomyopathy to be the cause of death -- the walls of her heart were twice the thickness they should have been. He also found a diseased spleen and a large tumor on Satina's bladder that had spread to the spleen. The doctor asked if I wanted him to continue pulling tumors from the dog or to send tissue samples out for analysis, but there was no point -- the dog was essentially full of little time bombs. Had I known, I wouldn't have taken her to California, but I had no way of knowing. I was upset to have lost Satina so quickly; she never even saw the Sanctuary, but I had to focus on Juno, who was still very much alive and well.
We had two meetings that day and three more the following one, and Juno was a star -- a perfect example of why dangerous dog legislation is ineffective. Juno, who, if he was in Washington at the time, would have had to have been leashed and muzzled for the protection of the public, was a gentle, shy, quiet dog, and in the meantime, in Astoria, OR, a little girl was killed by her family's Rottweiler, who had no such restrictions placed on him. It was a tragedy that probably could have been easily averted, and as one family mourns their terrible loss, legislators and 'concerned citizens' are no doubt devising ways to prevent such an awful event from happening again, and the laws they are writing will no doubt punish dogs for the irresponsibility of those who possess them, and this tragedy will reach much farther than Astoria. It is already taking a toll; not until I looked up the story myself did I learn the breed of the dog involved -- everyone who had told me about the incident had said it was a pit bull. More bad press for pits.
But I'm getting off track. Juno, the "dangerous dog" was proving himself to be anything but. It was Friday and my meetings were all over; I gave some brief presentations to three elementary school classes at St. Margaret's where I had gone to school as a kid, and brought Juno out to meet my mom's fourth grade class, with a fence separating him and the children. He wasn't allowed on the campus, but being a little afraid of children, Juno was happy to keep his distance.
From the school we headed off for lunch with my friend Bob from high school and then back to LA where I had two rescues waiting. The first was Jill, a wolf-dog that had ended up at SPCA Los Angeles after no one could handle her in a home environment. Jill was shy, smart, scrutinizing. It was hard to gain her trust. I ended up spending about an hour at the SPCA with her until I was able to walk her on a leash, but even then getting her into the back of the truck was going to be a problem, so I opted to crate her and transfer her into the transport cage from there.
Next we went to a dog training facility where I met some previous clients and some new ones; I was there for Tesla, a doberman pinscher who had been accumulating a significant bite record and for whom the style of training the facility was using had not worked. The facility's owner and I had had an argument on the phone the day before that essentially amounted to her insisting that my methods would not work in an urban environment because the dogs needed to be under more control. In short, I can only do what I do because I live in rural Washington. I still don't understand the argument -- I have the same safety concerns that people in 'the big city' have, and I grew up in southern California, remember? I'm not some yokel who just rolled into town.
When we met in person, it was more of the same. I started out by badmouthing punishment-based dog training, to the delight of half the people there and the chagrin of the rest. Once inside the part of the facility where the dogs were housed, I saw a number of the items I had just finished disparaging: shock collars, spray bottles, choke chains -- Items used to cause pain and discomfort. I watched a yellow Lab jump and spin when he was shocked by his collar; his crime -- barking. The dogs weren't allowed to put their feet up on the fence when they greeted visitors. They weren't allowed to mount each other during play. They weren't allowed to communicate vocally. It was all about control and dominance. It was disgusting. Tesla was so stressed in that environment that she ran around nervously with a tennis ball in her mouth; she wanted to interact with people, but it was clear that she was on edge. I attempted to work with her a bit, but my gentle methods were entirely foreign to her -- she seemed to be waiting for the punishment to start, and the presence of her 'trainers' wasn't helping. The dog was a wreck.
I opted to just get Tesla the hell out of there. I took her out to the truck and had her jump up onto the tailgate, but she was afraid to go into the cargo area at first; I asked one of the young staff members to hold onto her for a moment while I grabbed some treats from the cab. He took hold of her so sharply, almost violently; it occurred to me that it wasn't only the dogs who were being trained inappropriately. Tesla went into the back of the truck on her own and I ended up not needing the treats. I stayed for awhile and talked with my new clients, got some firsthand accounts of a certain celebrity dog trainer's shortcomings, then got on the road. We got as far as Buttonwillow, CA before I was too tired to keep going.
Juno stayed in the hotel room with me, while Jill and Tesla slept in the back of the truck. Tesla had gotten into a bag of Juno's dog toys, which she had gathered around herself and made a sort of nest. She seemed stressed and didn't want to come out of the truck, but once I offered her a treat, it became clear that she wasn't stressed at all, just very comfortable. When I took her up to the hotel room for a little while, I realized what was really going on with Tesla -- she was feeling safe and secure, maybe for the first time in her life. Tesla was coming to me because of a history of biting; she was didn't like her head or feet touched, and she was a severe resource guarder. In the hotel room with me, she rolled around on the bed, and I touched the top of her head, pinched her toes, and tested her limits. She never bit me -- never even growled.
The next day we visited my friend Jason in King City, where I spent the night before heading to San Francisco to hang out with Melissa and Rick, then over to Loomis to see my cousin Tim and his wife Ali. I spent the night in Davis before going back to Oakland to pick up my neighbor, Chuck, and head north again. We made it back to Forks early the next morning, and I promptly got sick for about a week. The dogs settled in nicely; Jill got along great with the male wolf-dogs, and Juno and Tesla got along with everyone.
I wish I could say things slowed down, but with a little wild basenji mix from eastern Washington coming in, along with the last five of the Kennewick Eskimos, and Jack... sick or not, I stayed pretty busy. Maybe I'll get some rest next week.
