I call it the big hurt because my shoulders are about six inches wider than an airplane seat, and I can never straighten my legs, even for a moment, so after about an hour on a plane, I begin to get sore unless there's an empty seat next to me -- an increasingly rare phenomenon, although it did happen on two of my four flights this time. If I sit on the aisle, I get tagged by every drink cart and flight attendant's hip that goes by, plus I'm not thrilled with having some guy's crotch in my face while he rummages through the overhead compartment, or having old ladies use my headrest as a hand-hold as they make their way to the lavatory. I like the window seat, because besides liking to look out the window, I only have another person on one side of me and I can lean my head against the side of the plane to sleep, which I have to do because the headrest isn't high enough for me to just lean back, and my legs are too long for me to sit lower in the seat. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a big guy, but I'm not abnormally large; that I can't sit comfortably on a plane shows the airlines' decided lack of respect for their customers, and what's more, the airport is the only place I ever go where I'm the tallest person there, which means that people bigger than me who can't afford first class simply don't fly, and they never get to travel overseas. I think it's discriminatory and that tall people should file a class action suit against the entire airline industry, run the airlines out of business, and usher in high speed trains as our preferred mode of transport. What it really comes down to is that flying is stupid, and America not having the world's fastest trains is ridiculous. Moving on...
My flight to Seattle was shorter than originally planned, by about an hour, for which I was very grateful, even if the tiny Asian girl sitting next to me made for a more comfortable flight. I had time to go to the airport food court for a burrito before picking up Phoenix from baggage services; he seemed content with the experience, but glad to get out of the crate. Once in the truck, he alternated between sleeping and quietly looking out the window, and was totally unphased by Bradley barking and snarling at him fromt the front seat.
Phoenix is kind of an old man, although I don't think he's actually that old. He's from Long Island, where he was abandoned presumably as a young dog and found by the guy that originally turned him over to me in March, after living with him for about five years. Unfortunately, the guy was kind of a dumbass -- nice guy, but just... yeah. He didn't tell me the dog's knees were blown out until I got there and saw his limp -- when you're about to drive for two weeks with an animal, his health problems are a good thing to know about ahead of time. But that was mildly annoying; what was really frustrating was that even though the guy knew his dog had joint problems, he continued to both overfeed him and to play roughly with him, so there I was watching this fat, gimpy dog getting slammed onto the concrete by this dipshit who thought that was how you showed a dog affection. I'm not sure which one of them I felt worse for, truthfully. This poor guy was crying and it was clear that it was really painful for him to give his dog up, but he had also been abusing the dog and just didn't know it.
The reason I was asked to take Phoenix was that the guy he lived with was moving to a third floor apartment in Kentucky and with his bad knees, Phoenix wouldn't have been able to go up and down the stairs. That alone wouldn't have been a problem in terms of placing him with someone, but Phoenix had also bitten several people, usually strangers reaching out to pet him, which is a totally inappropriate thing for a person to do, but under the law, dogs are expected to just take it. Instead of bringing Phoenix back to Washington, I took him to a shelter in Orange County, New York, because I didn't feel that his behavior warranted him coming to live with me. I also gave them a German shepherd with hip dysplasia, and took a golden retriever that had been beaten with a cane and burned with cigarettes for a few weeks by a degenerate alcoholic after her husband overdosed, leaving the dog with some 'people issues' that made her unsafe in a traditional home environment.
The people at the shelter loved Phoenix, but unfortunately he didn't love some of them and racked up more bite incidents while he was there, so four months later, I had to make good on my promise that I would take him back if he turned out to be non-adoptable due to behavior. And that's why yesterday afternoon, I found myself in the position of having to remove a big pit bull mix from his crate for an airport security check, with about a thousand people around me and nothing between them and the dog, having just realized that I hadn't seen the dog in months, that even when I did have him, it was only for a few hours, which he spent in the back of my truck, that I had no idea what kind of kennel stress he'd developed at the shelter, that I had spent no time walking him or familiarizing him with me at the airport before he was put into his crate and wheeled to the ticket counter by a skycap, that his issues at the shelter involved being in confined spaces, and that he had already snarled, lunged, and tried to bite me through the wire frame door of his crate. I wondered how badly I was about to be bitten and how much blood the airport bystanders were about to see, how many camera phones would soon be documenting my 'skill' with dangerous dogs. Fortunately, Phoenix did everything he needed to do, and I'm not a punchline on YouTube just yet.
Picking up from where I left off, Bradley came from a rescue in New Hampshire that works mainly with dogs that aren't quite ready for adoption; they're a new organization with no facilities (foster care only), but from what I saw, they're doing a good job. They're also young, which isn't common. The one thing they screwed up was the dog carrier -- they forgot to get one until yesterday, and it was too small for the dog. We had to make a stop at Petco this morning to get a bigger one.
The first leg of my flight today was smooth; the dog fit under the seat and was pretty quiet. Now I'm at JFK, where I picked up the second dog; he made it through security without much trouble, but he was doing a little snarling and lunging, so I hope he'll be OK with the rest of this process, when i can't be there to look out for him. This next leg, New York to Seattle, is likely to be pretty awful, especially if I have someone sitting next to me who's normal size or bigger.
I'm about to board again. Highlight of todays airport experience: slobby women who, despite having been dressing themselves for 30 or 40 years, can't figure out how to keep their lady garbage in their shirts. Disgusting and hilarious.
I read the sign in Seattle that said my flight boarded at 9 AM (even though it was supposed to leave at 8:20) so I didn't rush to get on the plane; at about 9:05 I walked over to the gate, only to find that everyone else had boarded and they were calling my name over the PA. Off to a great start. I got onto the plane and was fortunate to get one of the few seats with no one next to me. The flight was pretty good; we flew right over a property that I really want to buy someday, although it's not for sale at the moment and even if it was, no chance at this point.
In San Francisco, I had enough time to make my connection, although it was close. Once on the plane, we sat for an hour before it took off. Also on board, about thirty high school kids from Boston who were returning from an overseas trip somewhere in Asia. Draw your own conclusions about how awesome that must have been. My favorite part -- the girl with the potato chips walking up and down the aisle, giving chips to everyone from the high school group, but not to anyone else who might have smelled them and wanted to eat some.
After about five hours in the air, we flew a few S patterns before landing, thanks to congestion. We landed in Boston and waited awhile longer while they fixed the broken walkway that connects the plane to the gate.
I found my ride and headed to their home for the night, met the dog I was taking, Bradley, and after dinner and hanging out a bit, I finally got some sleep -- while the Bradley wasn't barking or pooping on the floor.
My flight is loading; gotta go.
It's about 8:20 AM and I find myself embarking on another rescue trip, this time by air to pick up a Pomeranian in Boston and a pit bull/Lab in New York -- a dog that I've rescued once already, having taken him to a shelter in March along with a German shepherd, trading the two of them for Shirley, the golden retriever who had absolutely no chance of ever being adopted thanks to her biting episodes. It turns out that the shelter doesn't feel comfortable letting anyone adopt Phoenix, either, so I'm on my way back to get him.
As usual, I didn't manage to get much done before I left, but I did get on the road on time; getting to bed was another story -- that didn't happen. Between the Hood Canal and Gig Harbor I have no idea how many times I fell asleep while driving, but I know at least twice I woke up just before my truck straddled the concrete wall along the median. You'd think that would have helped to wake me up, but being calm under pressure has its disadvantages.
I made it to the airport alive and went to the American ticket counter, getting there just in time to see a ticket agent scold a kid for not helping his mom with her bags, at which point the kids mom pointed out that her son had no arms. You'd think that after a blunder like that, the agent would try to be a little less impulsive and maybe assess things more fully before she reacted, but apparently this woman doesn't learn from her mistakes. I had tried to do self check-in, but was denied because I had a reservation for a pet; I went to the counter with the printout the ticketing computer had given me, to make sure that my reservation was booked correctly, because I am not taking a pet on this leg of the trip. Instead of listening to me, she took the print-out and threw it in the trash after barely glancing at it and said, "You're on Alaska -- you need to go down to their ticket counter at the other end of the terminal." I had booked the ticket with American, but Alaska was the carrier -- no problem. But I still needed to check on the dog situation. I said, "OK, but I have a question..." She cut me off and told me to go to the Alaska counter again. I said again, " I need to ask you a question first..." Again she cut me off and said, "You're ticket isn't with American -- I can't help you." So I said again, "I have a question for you before I go." Finally she listened, and I asked her first if the pet reservation was booked for the right leg of the trip, and then if I was going to hav tocheck in again in San Francisco, because my San Francisco to Boston flight is on American. So she ended up digging the print-out out of the trash, checking my reservation, and printing up my boarding pass for San Francisco, which she could have done sooner if she'd just shut up and let the customer ask his damned question. But as rude as she was, she was still friendly, if that makes any sense.
Time-out: I just saw a woman slip and fall on a spilled drink in the food court that no one had bothered to mop up. She almost took out a mother holding a baby in the process.
Time-in: When I checked in with Alaska, I found out that my flight is delayed about an hour, which is why I'm sitting in the food court typing this instead of sitting in a tiny airplane seat wishing the person next to me would go to the lavatory and get lost on the way back.
I recently got a request to take a pit bull mix from a rescue in Chicago; the dog has been overly protective of family members in her foster and adoptive homes. When visitors come over, she corners and intimidates them, and in one instance, she did the same thing to a member of the family she was living with; in each case, the family has returned the dog to the shelter. It's the kind of thing that wouldn't be an issue here, but I don't have the space for any more dogs (besides two that I'm already committed to taking later this month) so the best I could do was to put her on the waiting list. In the course of my email correspondence with a representative of the shelter, I learned that a pit bull rescue had chastised her for not killing the dog, because the animal's behavior was further blemishing the breed's already tarnished reputation.
There is a perception of the animal rescue community that we're all united for a single cause, and that we're all in this field with the same goals and for the same reasons. We're not. Clearly, in the situation described above, there are significant philosophical differences between various organizations: mine is founded on the principles that animals are not morally culpable for their actions and that human beings bear the responsibility for tending to the messes made by their own species; the organization in Chicago probably has a similar philosophy to a point, but if they can't find suitable placement for the aforementioned dog, either with me or elsewhere, she will be killed - something I find unconscionable; for the pit bull rescue, the breed's reputation outweighs the right to life of any individual animal.
The breed's reputation - you've probably heard people say that dogs' behavior is wholly the result of their environment, that pit bulls are unfairly targeted as dangerous dogs, or that they are loyal, trustworthy, and great with kids. The question these proponents of the pit bull's good reputation fail to ask is this: why, when there are so many larger, more powerful breeds out there, are pit bull terriers far and away the number one choice of dog fighters?
If I told you that the golden retriever is a gentle, intelligent dog and a great family pet, you would probably accept that statement without questioning it; if I told you that one of my most dangerous dogs was a golden retriever, you'd probably chalk it up to the abuse she suffered before I came to be her caregiver. People have no trouble believing that a dog breed can be developed for what we typically consider to be positive behavioral traits, but for some reason, they simply don't want to believe that a breed can be developed for behaviors we don't like so much - fighting, territoriality, predatory drives.
Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev demonstrated that foxes could be selectively bred to be docile and easy to handle, but Belyaev also bred foxes that were extremely fearful and prone to biting. These behaviors were genetic, not learned; the animals received identical treatment, but were bred only to others with similar temperaments to produce extremes at either end of the spectrum. And yet, there are those who flatly deny that this could have been the case with pit bulls and other dogs that have gained the reputation of being dangerous over the last few decades. Maybe people should pay more attention to the breed's name, the American pit bull terrier: terriers are a diverse group of dogs developed for killing vermin and for hunting and killing game; bull terriers and bulldogs were developed for bull baiting, a 'sport' in which a bull is chained to a stake and attacked by dogs; pit bull terriers were developed for pit fighting, the pit being the name of the contained area where the dogs fight for the amusement of sadists. You wouldn't market something called an exploding accidental death machine as a children's toy, so why are people marketing pit bull terriers as safe, docile, family pets when even their name says that they were bred to be killing machines?
When I found Abbie, a fighting dog, abandoned at a truck stop just north of the Grapevine in southern California, I expected that the litter she would give birth to a month later would be like any other puppies I had raised over the years. Imagine my surprise when they began trying to kill each other by the time they were three months old. They were the most fearful dogs I had ever seen (at the time) - terrified of new people, of noises, of other dogs. Imagine if you saw a cute, four month old puppy being walked by its owner, and when you approached and asked to pet the dog, it snarled and lunged at you repeatedly, bent on ripping you apart - you might assume the dog was being abused, but in the case of Abbie's puppies, they weren't. They were just born that way.
Of course, that pit bull rescue would have told me to have the puppies killed for the benefit of the breed's reputation, and I would have told them to go to hell. I don't kill animals for their behavior - I learn how to keep them safe and happy in spite of it.
So what, exactly, are these pit bull rescuers trying to do? Are they interested in saving dogs, or in saving dogs' reputations? If you have to kill all of the dogs that don't behave according to the reputation you want their breed to have, isn't that reputation a lie? Are you helping the breed by promoting pit bulls as safe and reliable family pets, when you know damn well that they have a greater chance of injuring someone than a retriever?
Any dog can bite, and will bite under the right circumstances. Smaller dogs tend to bite more, probably because they are more easily intimidated. Any dog can do permanent damage, and most dogs can cause life-threatening injuries under the right conditions, especially to children. But some dogs can mess you up a lot faster, and some dogs are a lot more likely to do so; changing their reputation doesn't change their DNA. It doesn't weaken their jaw muscles, or make them let go of another dog's throat. It just encourages people to make misinformed decisions that usually result in dead dogs.
I have sixteen pit bulls and pit bull mixes, and I love them all, but I also recognize that life isn't easy when you're so strong that you hurt yourself, when you're so full of energy that you can scarcely control yourself, and when you're so musclebound that you can't even sit down. It must be terrible when your first inclination in a stressful situation is to attack, and to have a hair trigger. For some, the answer to the pit bull's troubles is to adjust the breed standard - the set of guidelines that dictates what is and what is not a pit bull terrier. I'm not sure how that would help anything; it's been done before, and it simply results in dogs that don't meet the standard being called something else. The American Staffordshire terrier, for example - it's just a small pit bull (American pit bull terrier), the distinction having been created when people started breeding bigger and bigger pit bulls. Another problem with changing the breed standard is that it promotes breeding, and as long as we're killing half a million unwanted pit bulls in shelters every year, I don't think anyone should be breeding more of them. And finally, breed standards are physical, not psychological - changing a dog's appearance doesn't necessarily also change its behavior.
I suspect that if we saw a day when pit bulls became rare, while other breeds continued to experience overpopulation and were still being killed by the millions in US shelters, many of today's pit bull rescuers would become pit bull breeders, because deep down, their devotion is to the particular animals they wish to possess, not to animal welfare as a whole. Not me. I love my terriers, my hounds, my snow dogs, but I'd love to see those breeds all fade away in favor of the plain, old mutt, or the pariah dog that's developed independently on the fringes of human settlements for millenia - the original dog, the real thing. For thousands of years, human beings have been using selective breeding to alter those original dogs for specific purposes, and as the modern world dispenses with the tasks for which these specialized dogs were intended, all that remains is companionship, a purpose for which so many breeds are poorly suited, and the challenges of which so few dog lovers understand.
I was having trouble coming up with a closing for this piece, so I took a short break to bring in a group of dogs that had been outside playing and to take the next group out. I've come back to my desk with fresh puncture wounds in my left leg and bits of denim embedded into them, courtesy of a dog I've raised since birth and had almost five years. As is always the case, human error was to blame; my mistake this time was allowing Rosie, one of Abbie's puppies, to have brief contact with another dog with whom she hadn't played lately, but who she had always liked and to whom she had always been submissive before today. The dogs are fine - no wounds or other injuries (to them); the entire incident took about three seconds before I had them separated, at which point I was bitten. These things happen. Granted, Rosie's from a fighting bloodline; in fact most of my pit bulls aren't what I'd consider normal for the breed, but I would say that they possess typical pit bull behavioral traits, amplified. Without trying to blow my own horn, I'm very good at what I do, and today, I'm bleeding. It's something to think about the next time someone tells you pit bulls are sweet natured, good with kids, or that it's not the breed, it's how you raise the dog.
We've all told our share of lies. Some people lie more than others, and some claim not to lie at all; of course, they're lying. I try not to lie for two reasons: you don't have to worry about what other people know if you don't try to hide anything, and the truth is usually much more offensive.
Working in animal welfare bears a similarity to being a social worker or a police officer in that you spend a lot of time being lied to, usually by people who would benefit if they just told the truth. At the very least, it would make my job easier if I didn't have to scrutinize every word spoken to me, and while I'm on the subject of making my job easier, I wouldn't mind not dealing with rednecks anymore.
There are people I like dealing with - usually people from other rescue organizations who understand what I do and are serious about helping me do it more effectively. They've read the placement guidelines on my website, which include things like "Please don't try to entice us by telling us how wonderful the dog is, or how much money it is worth - if it was so wonderful, you'd be keeping it, and if it was so valuable, you'd be able to sell it." Or this one: "We're very good at figuring out the truth, and you'll only end up being caught in your lie - that doesn't mean we won't take the dog, it just means we'll think you're an idiot."
Unfortunately, the locals I deal with don't get online much, and they haven't read my guidelines. They think they're dealing with the same kind of naïve, trusting person they've met at other rescues. They're morons. On rare occasions, an individual places a dog with me and I'm not completely repulsed; I've even liked a few of them. But most of them make me physically ill. Whenever I take in a dog, I try to spend some time talking to the person placing the animal with me, despite my overwhelming urge not to do so. The longer I talk to them, the more they slip up, and the more I find out.
One trick to knowing when people are lying is to pay attention to the choices they make; I don't ask people if they beat their dogs, but if they make a point of telling me they don't, I know they probably do. I let them decide what I need to know about the animals they're handing over to me, and that gives me a list of doubts to work from before I've even seen the dog's behavior - it's very helpful, even if it's not as helpful as the truth would have been.
It's also good to see the person interact with the dog; a few weeks ago a local couple brought a dog to the Sanctuary, and instead of taking him right away, I sat and talked to them for about ten minutes while the woman held the dog's leash. At one point, out of nowhere, she started screaming at the dog to sit, and jerking as hard as she could on his leash. That was all I needed to know, so I took the leash and sent the people on their way, with instructions to drop off a copy of his rabies certificate; they said they would, but I knew they were lying. Today I saw them at the grocery store and asked them again for the rabies certificate; the woman's daughter was there as well - apparently it was her dog. She didn't know who I was or that I had taken the dog, and when she found out, she said, "I want to see him before he goes to Alaska." I asked, "Who's going to Alaska?" The girl turned to her mom and yelled, "You lied to me!" What a surprise.
