DogTown

Foreword by Mickey Rourke

Introduction by Faith Maloney

Chapter 1:
Georgia

Chapter 2:
Ava

Essay:
Becoming a Dog Person, Patti Iampietro, DVM

Chapter 3:
Aristotle

Chapter 4:
Bingo

Essay:
A
Is for Atticus, Pat Whitacre

Chapter 5:
Parker and Mei Mei

Chapter 6:
Annie

Essay:
Jenny’s Gift, Sherry Woodard

Chapter 7:
Tuffy

Chapter 8:
Rush

Essay:
Barnum and Sadie, Michelle Besmehn

Chapter 9:
Bruno

Essay:
Kaiser and Sherman, Jeff Popowich

Chapter 10:
Knightly

Chapter 11:
Meryl

Essay:
Positive Reinforcement, Ann Allums

Chapter 12:
Johnny

Chapter 13:
Scruffy and Vivian

Essay:
Infamous Spikey Doo, John Garcia

Chapter 14:
Wiggles

Essay:
A Dog for Your Lifestyle, Mike Dix, DVM

Chapter 15:
Mister Bones

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Further Resources

I
raised some eyebrows when I thanked my dogs when I accepted my Golden Globe for Best Actor in The Wrestler. I said, “I’d like to thank all my dogs. The ones that are here, the ones that aren’t here anymore. Because sometimes, when a man’s alone, that’s all you’ve got is your dog. And they’ve meant the world to me.” It was the truth, and I was thanking my best friends.

No bones about it, I am an animal lover, and, more than that, I have been an advocate for animals when they have needed a voice, so I was pleased to have this opportunity to write a few words about Best Friends Animal Society and DogTown. I know from personal experience how much a dog gives and how deeply the bond that they create with us affects our lives and our well being. That’s why it’s truly painful to me to know that millions of beautiful dogs are dying in shelters across the country every year for no good reason.

I believe in second chances, and who deserves a second chance more than a dog who is just down on his or her luck? And of course, that’s what DogTown is all about and why National Geographic’s coverage of Best Friends’ work on television and now in this book is so important.

There are a few very simple things that we can all learn from dogs that would make the world a better place—loyalty, commitment, trust and unembarrassed affection are just a few. If you like dogs, you’ll love DogTown.

Mickey Rourke

Actor and Best Friends Member

I
will never forget the day when, standing on the porch of the Old Town Hall, one of the buildings at Dogtown, a chink of light shone through my consciousness, and in a flash, I could see Dogtown through the eyes of the dogs. I saw that they had created their own society in spite of our attempts to control every aspect of their lives. It was easy to assume that we humans were calling all the shots. After all, we arranged who lived with whom, what time food appeared, and when cleanup happened. But what became clear to me in that instant was that at Dogtown, dogs rule.

I am one of the co-founders of Best Friends and Dogtown’s first manager. When we were fortunate enough to build our facility in Kanab, Utah, we knew it was a special opportunity to change how dogs were sheltered. Right from the beginning, all of us knew we didn’t want to replicate the concrete-and-wire prisons of traditional shelters at Dogtown. We all had groups of dogs living in our homes, so why not have them live in groups at the sanctuary? As a result, we came up with new building designs to accommodate dogs living in family groups.

I had always been fascinated by the interactions and relationships between dogs. Dogs speak a different language, and it takes a while for people to pick up on the subtleties. But once those of us who started Dogtown got the hang of it, we started to see how they relate to each other, who leads, who follows, who hangs back, and who needs some manners. We had to learn new dog-to-dog introduction skills to keep things peaceful in their groups. And we had to become adept interpreters of this language—for instance, when is a growl a good thing, and when is it a bad thing? When does that bark mean “Hello, let’s play!” or “Get out of my face!”?

We learned that each dog presents a set of behaviors different enough from another to be unique. What works for one dog might not work for another. It’s easy to want to group dogs by breed, by general characteristics, by size, even by color, but if you are around dogs long enough, you get to see that no two dogs are alike. This has kept us on our toes from day one.

And not only do we help the dogs, the dogs teach each other. A frightened dog would arrive, and within a short time he or she would calm down after being around some other residents. I knew that the others passed the word: “They feed you regularly,” “No one yells at you,” and “You get to run around free—no chains here.” We will never know all of the situations dogs have had to deal with in the past, but we know that Dogtown will be a new beginning for each one of them.

Dogtown grew and grew over the years. Residents came and went. Most left to go to new homes, while some lived their whole lives at the sanctuary. The place became a haven for the dogs no one else wanted to deal with for either medical or behavioral reasons. A visiting dog trainer remarked that we had a university here. Because the dogs come from such a wide variety of situations, a student of dogs would have enough material to study for a lifetime.

Indeed, dogs do rule at Dogtown. Being part of their lives is a privilege. Helping to make this a better world for them is an obligation. They deserve the very best from us as we share this time together.

Faith Maloney, Animal Care Consultant

Best Friends Animal Society

J
ohn Garcia is under attack. With single-minded focus, a playful, tawny pit bull named Georgia is staging the assault of a thousand licks. She launched the affectionate assault as John, her trainer at Best Friends’ Dogtown, entered her enclosure, and now her wriggling, joyful body pushes its way through the 27-year-old’s upraised forearms to find his face with her warm, wet tongue. Then she playfully pins his arms and licks some more.

“Oh, baby! Oh, darlin’! You’re killin’ me!” John laughs, breathlessly. “Oh, Georgia!” But Georgia does not stop. She seems intent on covering every square inch of John with her tongue, finding his ears, his nose, his cheeks, his lips. John cannot stop laughing and surrenders to her affection. Victory secured, Georgia joyfully bounds and jumps around him, her body dancing with happiness. It’s plain to see that Georgia and John share a special bond, one that will be crucial in helping her overcome a traumatic past.

Georgia first came to Dogtown in January 2008. She and 21 other dogs were rescued from a large dogfighting operation run by former NFL quarterback Michael Vick. Immediately, the big brown dog’s relationship with John Garcia was special: “From day one, I just absolutely loved Georgia,” John says. And the big dog appeared to return the feeling: People joked that John must have been carrying a pork chop in his pocket, the way Georgia followed him around.

One look at Georgia’s trusting brown eyes reveals just how much John’s affection means to her and what she will do to earn it. This is all the more remarkable considering Georgia’s dark history with people, which is written all over the rest of her body. A network of deep scars crisscrosses her dark muzzle and trail up very close to her alert brown eyes. Her upright triangular ears are cropped short and close to avoid being torn during a fight. The short brown fur on her hindquarters and legs is pockmarked by numerous scars. Her tail had been broken and has healed in a crooked zigzag. The remnants of these old wounds are the legacy of Georgia’s past as a champion dogfighter, a survivor of many bloody encounters.

But the most sinister sign Georgia’s body bears is in her mouth. When she play-smooched John’s face, there was no danger of a bite because she doesn’t have any teeth. Vet techs at Dogtown first theorized that some had been torn out during a fight, but when her jaw was x-rayed, incredibly enough, every tooth turned out to be missing. And they had been pulled out so cleanly that it appeared only a veterinarian could have done the job.

Georgia’s toothless grin is a sign that she was a champion fight dog who then became a champion breeder: Her teeth were pulled so that she could be bred without attacking the male dog. Her sagging belly and teats show that she has borne an enormous number of pups (which may have sold for as much as $10,000 apiece). Her beaten-up body sums up the world Georgia so recently escaped from, where dogs were treated as nothing more than prime meat meant to breed, to fight, and to make money for their owners. Those that didn’t want to fight were simply killed.

But now, with the help of dog trainer John Garcia and the staff and volunteers at Dogtown in the red-rock canyon lands of Utah, Georgia is being given a second chance at life. Here at Best Friends, the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States, this former fighter and breeder has the chance to become a “complete cupcake,” as John describes her. But Georgia’s troubled past may be difficult to escape. Although the exact details of her life as a fighting dog may never be known, the circumstances surrounding her case paint a grim picture.

THE HOUSE ON MOONLIGHT ROAD

Georgia’s story begins in a white house at 1915 Moonlight Road, a lonely country lane in rural Surry County, Virginia, outside the tiny town of Smithfield—tucked away, safe from prying eyes. The house, pale and spectral, was surrounded by a high fence concealing 15 acres of scrubby woods and a network of black-painted buildings behind it.

But on the afternoon of April 25, 2007, a small armada of official-looking vehicles converged on the house. Tipped off in the course of a minor drug bust involving one of the home’s occupants a few days earlier, Surry County animal control officers and police swarmed over the property, where they discovered 66 dogs chained like inmates in dank kennels. Many of the dogs were covered with scars, especially on the muzzle and hindquarters. Inside the house and in the kennels, the police found grim relics of what they quickly concluded was a dogfighting operation, and a large one at that.

Most of the dogs were described as pit bulls.
Pit bull
is a common name for dogs like Georgia, but it is imprecise. The breeds most commonly referred to as pit bulls are the American Staffordshire terrier (the term used by the American Kennel Club) and the American pit bull terrier (the term used by the United Kennel Club). But “pitties” or other “bully breeds” are often interbred haphazardly to produce animals with massive, muscular forequarters, an enormous head, and powerful jaws. These dogs are very strong, very intelligent, and very loyal; this loyalty and their desire to please their masters has made them the current favorite of illegal dogfighting operations.

In addition to the battle-scarred dogs, investigators discovered more evidence that pointed to the existence of a dogfighting business: They found “rape racks,” crude contraptions used to restrain females for forced breeding; pry bars, used to open the jaws of a dog that has latched on to another; treadmills, used to build up endurance in the dogs; and discarded syringes, for injecting the dogs with steroids and stimulants to jack up their power and aggression. In an upstairs room, the investigators found a blood-spattered fighting pit, where the animals were forced to fight to the death in grim battles that could last as much as two hours.

“These dogs lived very minimal lives,” Surry County Animal Control Officer Bill Brickman, who participated in the raid, said later. “Most of them were kept chained or in cages and released only to train or to fight. We found some places where the dog chains had worn a track in the ground that was six inches deep. These animals were not trained to give love or affection, but only to kill another dog.”

THE DARK WORLD OF DOGFIGHTING

Dogfighting, unfortunately, is not an isolated problem in the United States. At its heart, it is a gambling operation, where spectators typically bet thousands of dollars on a match; because of its covert nature, it also attracts myriad other social problems. For example, at about the same time Vick’s operation was discovered, Texas state police revealed shocking details about dogfighting in rural Texas after a 17-month undercover investigation. Fifty people were indicted and 187 pit bulls confiscated, including a champion female known for ripping off opponents’ genitals. Although some people may imagine dogfighting as a genteel, misunderstood form of blood sport once practiced by the landed gentry, like the running of stags, foxhunting, or cockfighting, what the Texas agents found was anything but.

“It’s like the Saturday night poker game for hardened criminals,” one of the agents told the
New York Times.
The fights, which drew up to a hundred people, were held in remote places like an abandoned motel in a run-down refinery town, a horse corral in a Houston slum, or a barn at a remote farm. Tens of thousands of dollars were wagered on the fights. Although the illegality of the fights led to their being surreptitious affairs, requiring an invitation, they were amazingly well organized, taking place weekly or semimonthly at eight different locations. The fights attracted not only older, more experienced dogfighters, but also a newer, younger breed of thugs, who participated in drug dealing and gang activity and carried guns. In addition to screaming obscenities at the bloodied pit bulls in the ring, people were observed by agents popping pills and making side deals selling cocaine and firearms and fencing stolen property. Dogfights are not only cruelly abusive to animals; they are also magnets for criminal activity of all kinds.

An aerial view of the Vick property shows the dogs’ pens and doghouses, which had been painted black to avoid detection.

“I believe dogfighting is on the upswing,” John Goodwin, deputy manager of the Animal Cruelty Campaign for the Humane Society, told ESPN. “And I believe that certain elements of pop culture have glamorized dogfighting and glamorized big, tough pit bulls.”

THE CASE AGAINST THE QUARTERBACK

These gruesome, almost medieval, discoveries would have been enough to make statewide news. But the story instantly exploded into national headlines when it became known that the owner of the house on Moonlight Road was Michael Vick, the 27-year-old star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons.

One of the ten richest athletes in pro sports, Vick came from humble beginnings. He grew up in a public housing project in the tough, crime-ridden East End neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia, an area known in hip-hop slang as Bad Newz (the dogfighting operation came to be known as Bad Newz Kennels) that was plagued by drive-by shootings and drug dealing. Vick said later that as a kid, “I would go fishing even if the fish weren’t biting, just to get out of there.”

Vick’s athletic talent took him out of the projects and sent him to college at Virginia Tech. After only two years in college, he turned pro, being selected as the first overall pick and the first African-American quarterback ever taken first in the NFL draft. When he signed a $130 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons in 2004, he became the highest-paid player in the NFL.

It would later emerge through the testimony of anonymous cooperating witnesses, though, that Vick was also a star in the dark and savage world of dogfighting, a world filled with blood, violence, and cruelty against creatures who came to him filled only with trust and the desire to please.

At first, Vick professed to know little about the dogs and equipment found at the house on Moonlight Road. He claimed rarely to have been at the house, and said that his cousins and other family members lived there. But as the investigation continued, it became increasingly clear that Vick was very much involved in the brutal business of Bad Newz Kennels. In a damning interview on ESPN, a man who said he’d been fighting dogs for 30 years described Vick as “one of the heavyweights” of the dogfighting world: “He’s a pit bull fighter. He’s one of the ones they call ‘the big boys.’ That’s who bets a large dollar.” The man said Vick would bet as much as $40,000 on a single dogfight.

The government’s cooperating witnesses painted a much grimmer picture. In one case, a witness said Bad Newz Kennels put up a female pit bull against a dog from New York. After Vick’s dog was defeated, she was taken outside and shot. Later, when another of Vick’s dogs lost a match in which the purse was $26,000, the dog was electrocuted. Nonperforming or unaggressive dogs had apparently been hanged, drowned, electrocuted, shot, or slammed into the ground until dead. When authorities raided the residence, the remains of eight dogs were found buried in a shallow grave behind the house.

This “culling” of nonaggressive animals is a kind of sadistic Darwinism, meant to select only traits that lead to savage victory in the dog pit. Dogs who don’t want to fight are used as bait dogs, killed, or abandoned to the streets, where they end up in already overcrowded shelters. (In fact, Best Friends estimates that more “bully breed” dogs—pit bulls and their kin—are euthanized in shelters than any other breed.)

In July 2007, Vick and three other men were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring “to travel in interstate commerce in aid of unlawful activities and to sponsor a dog in an animal fighting venture”—a felony. In August Vick pleaded guilty and admitted to operating an interstate dogfighting ring, financing the operation, and participating directly in some dogfights himself. He also admitted that he knew some of the other participants had killed several underperforming dogs but denied killing any dogs himself. (In the end, Vick also admitted that “collective efforts” by him and two others resulted in the deaths of at least six dogs, by being hanged, drowned, or slammed to the ground.) He apologized to the NFL, his fans, and his teammates. The only ones to whom he did not apologize were his victims, the dogs.

The lawyer for one of Vick’s co-defendants, Quanis Phillips, tried to soft-pedal the charges by making the argument that his client came from a culture in which dogfighting was an acknowledged sport. It was, he said, a way for young men to prove their virility, adding that “dogfighting was an accepted and acceptable activity in their world.” And when Phillips’s friend Michael Vick signed a lavish NFL contract, suddenly they had plenty of money to buy, train, and bet on dogs.

But U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson would have none of this argument. He sentenced Phillips to 21 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised probation, a term considerably higher than the recommended sentencing guidelines. “You may have thought this was sporting, but it was very callous and cruel,” the judge said. “I hope you understand that now.”