Dog Is My
Copilot
for anyone who has ever helped give a dog a better life
“O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!”
—Walt Whitman
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Part One: A Dream of Flight
Part Two: Liftoff . . . and Navigation
Part Three: Flight Tales
Cassidy Rides Again
Home at Last, Home for Good
Appetite for Aviation
Angel Gets Her Wings
Mojo and Mom
A Sweet Southern Girl
Pups on Approach
A Pilot’s Pilot
Boxer, Undefeated
Runt Triumphant
Up in the Air with Uncle Jim
Pilot Sam Gets a Few Pointers
Hell on Wheels
Preston
Phoenix Rising
A Moving Story
All Species Airways
Honorable Discharge
Ernie’s Journey
Chance Encounter
Dorie’s Story
The Round-Tripper
Out of New Orleans
Saving Christmas
Learning to Fly
Afterword
Appendix
How You Can Help
Photo Credits
Copyright
Author Bio
Acknowledgments
For every dog there’s a story; and for every story in this book there are multiple people who helped me tell it. Though the names are too numerous to list here, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to every pilot, rescuer, transport coordinator, and adopter who shared his or her favorite rescue tale with me.
Certain people must be recognized by name. This book began, as Pilots N Paws did, with Debi Boies and Jon Wehrenberg. Your generosity, spirit, and commitment to a worthy cause will forever be an inspiration. Thank you for trusting me to share the story.
Among the many pilots and rescue volunteers interviewed for this book, several warrant special mention: Lynnette Bennett, Mary Vitt, Stephanie Murphy, Amy Heinz, Mala Brady, Alla McGeary, and Teka Clark—if reincarnation exists, I’d like to come back as one of your dogs. Pilots Jeff Bennett, Jim Bordoni, Jim Carney, Brett Grooms, Rhonda Miles, Robin Lee, Sarah Owens, Pete Howell, Mike Gerdes, and Sam Taylor provided invaluable high-altitude perspective. Safe skies to you always.
The photos in this book appear through the generosity of dozens of different photographers. Thanks to all of you, and special thanks to Jim Carney and Linda Gail Stevens for providing particularly powerful shots.
Thanks to the editorial and creative team at Andrews McMeel Publishing, especially Patty Rice and Holly Ogden, for sticking with me through a logistically challenging book. Thanks also to my twin fonts of publishing wisdom: Michael Reagan and Tom Thornton.
Finally, love and thanks to Patty Regan, my first reader since first grade, and to Sarah, Will, and Luke, who perform the nifty trick of keeping me grounded while encouraging me to fly.
—Patrick Regan, 2011
Dog Is My
Copilot
PART ONE
A Dream of Flight
The altimeter’s hands spin slowly, steadily clockwise. When the dial indicates 3,500 feet, the pilot levels off, adjusts the plane’s throttle and fuel mixture, and trims her for cruise flight. His gaze alternately shifts from the instrument panel to the cloudless blue sky beyond the windscreen. The earth below is a patchwork of geometric forms—farm fields rendered in browns, grays, and irrigated greens. Stock ponds, broad-roofed barns, clumps of trees, and straight ribbons of roads—some paved, some not—are all easy to pick out at this altitude.
The pilot breaks the silence, and with it the low-level intensity that accompanies even routine takeoff. “It’s OK, girl,” he says, “You’re all right now.” With eyes still fixed on the horizon, he reaches his right hand back between the small plane’s two front seats and finds the shoulder of his backseat passenger. She turns forward, pushing a furry muzzle into the pilot’s hand. She’d been looking out the window too, wondering, perhaps, exactly how she ended up here.
To answer the question, you have to go back a ways. It all began with Carly—a gentle, intelligent Doberman pinscher, and an “old soul” from the day she was born. That’s how Debi Boies remembers her. Debi and her husband, Bob, had raised Carly from a pup. With acres to run and the company of two other dogs and a stable of Morgan horses, her life on the Boieses’ South Carolina farm should have been a charmed one. But when she was still young, Carly was accidentally poisoned when she drank rainwater from a not-quite-empty pesticide bucket left out at the peach farm next door. Within hours, the big, boisterous black-and-tan was foaming at the mouth and, as Boies painfully recalls, “losing fluid from every opening in her body.” Though rushed to the vet and given fluid intravenously, she was slipping fast and not expected to survive the night.
“I stayed up all night with her,” remembers Boies. “She was wrapped in blankets and on a heating pad with warm IVs going into her, but she was still cold to the touch.” The dog never stopped looking at Boies. “I kept telling her, ‘You can do this, girl. You can make it through.’”
During the overnight vigil, Boies’s mind played through the three short years of Carly’s life. And sometimes it wandered further, to other animals she had known and loved over her own lifetime—horses, cats, rabbits, chickens, and many, many dogs. But Carly was different. “She was a once-in-a-lifetime animal,” says Boies. “She was my heartdog.”
Carly survived that critical night and went on to live a good, long life for a Doberman. She battled dilated cardiomyopathy in her later years, and then in 2007, at age twelve, succumbed to large-cell leukemia—a long-term effect, Boies suspects, of the pesticide poisoning that occurred back when she was three.
Debi Boies is a nurse by profession and an animal lover by nature. She grew up in a suburb of Akron, Ohio, and her passion was obvious from an early age. When Debi was a toddler, her mother always worried when dogs were around. “She was terrified that I was going to get bit in the face,” explains Boies, “because I would just go right up to any animal I saw. I was born loving animals.” Despite her mother’s fears, Boies’s parents nurtured her love of animals, and gave her a childhood filled with loving and well-loved pets.
As an adult, Boies developed a special fondness for Dobermans, and over the years has spent countless hours working for Doberman rescue groups. She was an original board member of the national nonprofit Doberman Assistance Network (DAN) and served as that organization’s intake coordinator for its first two years.
“I feel strongly that it is our responsibility, as humans, to be the guardians for animals others have abandoned, abused, or simply can no longer care for. If we don’t, then who will?”
—Debi Boies, Pilots N Paws cofounder
A few months after losing Carly, Boies reached out to her network of Doberman rescue friends. She put the word out that she was looking for a new dog. A short time later she heard from a friend at a Doberman rescue in Tallahassee, Florida. She told Boies about a dog that desperately needed a home.
“This dog had been pulled from a high-kill shelter about three months earlier,” remembers Boies. “He had every parasite imaginable. He was heartworm-positive. His coat and skin showed multiple signs of abuse, and he had a long abscess scar on his back. He was in very bad condition.”
The four-
year-old male bore telltale signs of a violent life. The rescue volunteer told Boies that his teeth had been filed down until they were completely flat on top. “He had almost certainly been used as a ‘bait dog,’” says Boies. A bait dog is used to train fighting dogs. They’re strong but lack the killer instinct of more aggressive fighters, so they’re used as sparring partners—or more accurately, live practice dummies for dogs bred and trained to kill. A bait dog’s teeth are filed down to limit the damage it can do to the “more valuable” fighters. This young brown-and-black Doberman also had white hairs sprouting at multiple spots on its head—another indication of past physical trauma. “White hairs will grow back in on a dark-haired animal after a serious skin injury,” explains Boies.
The more she heard, the more certain she became that this dog should be Carly’s successor. But he was five hundred miles away in Tallahassee. Debi and Bob belong to a motor coach owners group, and she put out an e-mail alert to its members to see if anyone happened to be driving north and would be willing to ferry a four-legged passenger. Initially, she got no takers. But a few days later, she received an e-mail that caught her completely off guard.
“I got a message from Jon Wehrenberg, a friend in Tennessee who happens to be a private pilot, and it said, ‘How about if I fly down and pick him up for you?’” recalls Boies. “I read it . . . and then I reread it, and thought, ‘What?’”
Boies asked Wehrenberg if he was serious. “I’ll never forget what he said: ‘Pilots love to fly. We’re always looking for a reason. How about if I come pick up your husband in Greenville, and we’ll go down to Florida and pick up the pup. I’d be happy to do it.’” Still incredulous at her friend’s generosity, Boies replied, “Sure! Go for it.”
A few days later, Wehrenberg arrived back in Greenville, greeting his friend with the rescued Doberman, and with a question. “He asked, ‘Is there a big need to move rescue animals?’” Having been involved in the transport of dogs for years through her work with various rescue groups, Boies replied, “Jon, you have no idea.”
Pilots N Paws cofounders Jon Wehrenberg and Debi Boies.
Wehrenberg wasn’t alone in his ignorance of the nationwide, grassroots network of animal shelter workers and rescue volunteers that has for many years been quietly coordinating the transportation of otherwise doomed animals to places—hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away—where they are more likely to find a permanent home. Animal transports of this sort have gone on for decades, but the Internet has been a game changer. Online forums, chat groups, and social media have provided the perfect way for rescues, shelters, and potential adopters to find one another. The technology has effectively “nationalized” animal rescue, making it possible for an unwanted “death row” dog in a Statesboro, Georgia, animal shelter to find a loving home in Skowhegan, Maine.
But communication has been the easy part. The physical movement of animals via a network of volunteer drivers has always been the real challenge.
“Up until this point, we had moved these animals by car, and that’s generally one driver per hour and a car change every hour for the animals,” explains Boies. “It’s very stressful for the animals and one break in the human chain—one late rendezvous—can wreck the whole thing.” Having herself once coordinated a 1,500-mile ground transport with sixteen different drivers and an overnight stay, Boies was intimately familiar with the complicated logistics and inherent problems with over-the-road animal transport.
Jon Wehrenberg listened intently as Boies outlined the arduous business of volunteer animal transport. But he became even more engaged—shocked even—when she started reeling off statistics regarding animal shelters and euthanasia. Of the approximately eight million animals that enter shelters each year, more than half are ultimately euthanized. In the southern United States, where both Jon and Debi live, the euthanasia rate in shelters hovers near 70 percent. Only 10 percent of the animals received by shelters have been spayed or neutered.
Before parting ways, Boies directed Wehrenberg to a few ground transportation Web sites where he could learn more. Back on the ground in Tennessee a few hours later, Wehrenberg began a crash-course education in animal rescue and transport.
“I became a lurker,” says Wehrenberg. “It was an absolute revelation to me to look at these sites and discover what was going on. We have two shelter animals, but I didn’t even know there were things like animal rescues. I didn’t know there were people who work very hard to pull animals from shelters and get them moved to other locations.”
For several weeks, Wehrenberg monitored the animal transport forums. He watched the boards with a pilot’s eye, noting distances and noticing patterns. He observed that specific routes were more common than others. Most obvious to him was the disproportionate number of requests to move animals from the South and Southeast to the Northeast or Midwest.
He was awed by the obvious dedication of the rescue coordinators who planned routes, coordinated drivers, and scheduled transfers, but he could not get past the fact that there had to be a better way.
A retired entrepreneur and a general-aviation pilot for more than thirty years, Wehrenberg had long used a small airplane for business. “I used a plane to commute, so to me a plane is nothing more than transportation,” he explains. “It’s not a recreation vehicle—it’s a business tool. I think of it as a pickup truck or a car.” But Wehrenberg also knew that an airplane was something more—a way to compress time. The advantages of using light aircraft to move rescue animals grew more obvious in his mind as he watched the never-ending parade of online posts requesting transports.
“I’m sitting here looking at these requests for transport from a pilot and plane owner’s perspective. When Debi told me how many millions of animals were being euthanized, I said, ‘Oh, no. Not if I can help it.’”
—Jon Wehrenberg, Pilots N Paws cofounder
“There wasn’t a eureka moment,” says Wehrenberg, “It was more of a holy shit! moment. To move Debi’s dog it would have taken eight drivers all day and the puppy would have been handled at rest areas along the interstate and potentially have the risk of getting loose and running away.”
Boies remembers a phone call from Wehrenberg a few weeks after he delivered her rescue Doberman. “He called and said, ‘You know, Debi, we really have to do something about this. If we can connect these transport needs with general-aviation pilots, I really think we could make a difference.’”
Neither Debi Boies nor Jon Wehrenberg knew at that moment what their animal-rescue endeavor would look like, how it would be formed, or how it would function. But Boies did have an idea about what to name it. “I said, ‘How about if we call it Pilots N Paws?’” she remembers. “Jon said, ‘Sounds good to me.’ So off we went.”
It would take many more weeks of work to get the program off the ground, but at that moment, Pilots N Paws was cleared for takeoff. In the cramped kennels of animal shelters all across the country, tails began to wag.
PART TWO
Liftoff . . . and Navigation
The story of Pilots N Paws is ultimately the story of two worlds coming together. PNP’s founders each came into this union representing one of these two worlds. Debi Boies was a longtime animal rescuer and advocate. Jon Wehrenberg was a private pilot with more than thirty years of experience in the cockpit. Boies and Wehrenberg met each other through a common interest not connected to either animals or airplanes. But their meeting—and subsequent creation of Pilots N Paws—has led to a continued “overlapping” of two different worlds. This convergence has, in the years from 2008 to 2012, resulted in thousands of animals being spared euthanasia.
Before that could happen, Wehrenberg and Boies—the pilot and the rescuer—had to educate each other about their own esoteric worlds.
“She was not aware of general aviation or the extent to which pilots would jump into this type of thing,” says Wehrenberg. “She had to take my word on that at face value, and I had to take what she told me about rescues at
face value because I didn’t have a clue about that side of it. So the two of us were going back and forth translating things to each other. I learned about rescues and the difficulty they have with transports, and she started hearing from me things from the pilot’s perspective—things we would be concerned about such as weight and balance, weather, things of that nature.”
“General aviation” is a term unfamiliar to most nonpilots. What it means, most simply, is the world of aviation that exists outside of commercial airlines, military, and scheduled cargo flights. General-aviation airports and airfields are typically quite small but serve a broad range of customers, including private and sport fliers, flight trainers, air ambulances and police aircraft, and small-business and charter jets. There are more than five thousand “GA” airports across the United States, the majority of them unmanned.
“There’s no pilot I’ve ever been aware of who feels he has enough opportunity to fly, so we put two and two together and said, ‘Hey, if we can merge the rescues who are looking for transports with pilots who are looking for an opportunity to fly, we might have something here.’”
—Jon Wehrenberg
From the beginning, PNP’s founders were determined to keep things simple. “I have to laugh when people refer to PNP as an ‘organization,’” says Wehrenberg. “We set this up as a bulletin board—nothing else—a place where the two could come together, and we did that for a very specific reason. We knew that, as this thing grew, there would be a tremendous need for coordination unless we just let people arm wrestle among themselves to work out the transports.”
Dog Is My Copilot: Rescue Tales of Flying Dogs, Second Chances, and the Hero Who Might Live Next Door Page 1