Oogy The Dog Only a Family Could Love

by Larry Levin

  “Have a good day,” I tell them. “See you after practice.” Then I ask if either one of them has any requests for dinner. Neither of them does.

  “Love you,” they each say as they head out the door, and every time I hear that, I am surprised. That they can articulate it. That they direct it at me.

  Shortly after the boys have left, and while Oogy and I are still in the kitchen cleaning up, the trash truck stops at the foot of the driveway. In an instant, Oogy has wedged himself through the door and dashed into the yard, barking joyously, the resonance of his barks mingling with the trundling of the can being wheeled up the driveway, the shouts of the workers out in the street, and the grinding of the truck gears. Oogy barks at the man emptying our trash cans as though seeing this is the greatest thing that could ever happen to him. The man talks to Oogy the whole time he is dumping the contents of our several small cans into the one huge canister he wheels along. Oogy says good-bye and comes back into the house.

  When he sees me putting on my sneakers, he gets excited, starts dancing and barking, thinking I am going to take him somewhere.

  “Calm down,” I tell him. “I’m only going out for the paper.” He either does not believe me or wants to convince me otherwise, and as soon as we go outside, he starts for the van. “This way, lumpy dog,” I call. I head down the driveway toward the front of the house. Oogy runs up alongside me, his tail cutting invisible swaths out of the air, and I stop and rub his forehead; he leans into me, and I gently slap his muscular haunch several times. “You’re one strong doggy,” I tell him. “I sure am glad you’re on our side.”

  About halfway down the driveway, Oogy stops at the limit dictated by the electronic fence. His eyes follow me attentively as I walk toward the mailbox and pick up the paper off the lawn, and as soon as he sees that I am coming back up the driveway, he walks over to stand under the weeping cherry tree. He does this every morning; he clearly enjoys the way the long, thin tendrils feel against him. He emerges and accompanies me to the back door.

  Although he can push open the door with his head when he wants to, and does so routinely, this time he waits for me to open it for him before he scampers inside. He will often do this with the boys as well. I think he takes this action as reassurance that he is safe and taken care of.

  As I pour myself another cup of coffee, I look up to see the boys walking back to the house. They must have missed the bus. It is only a small glitch in the day’s plan and the type of thing one has to allow for with teenage boys. As they step inside, I gather my ring of keys and wallet without saying a word. Once in the kitchen they apologize, and I tell them it’s okay. Oogy is prancing around. The sound of the keys jingling in my hand tells him that we are going for a ride somewhere, and he cannot imagine that he is not going to be included. “You can go,” I tell him. He sneezes and wags his head, continues his Oogy four-step. Dan takes off the electronic collar and puts it on the table. Oogy barks once, the sound sharp and hard at the same time, reverberating in the kitchen like a piece of dropped steel.

  “What’s that, Oogy?” Dan suddenly asks. He drops to one knee in front of Oogy, staring into his face, and cups him under the chin. “You say Timmy’s trapped under the hay wagon and the barn is on fire? We’d better get going, then.”

  Dan rises and goes to the door, and Oogy follows, dashing past him outside. Oogy turns and waits till we catch up, and the four of us walk to the van. The boys go around to the passenger side. I open the rear door on the driver’s side for Oogy. He hesitates, afraid of getting a shock. Early on, there were several incidents, for reasons unknown to me, when the current from the electronic fence appeared to have traveled to the collar through the steel of the car frame and hit Oogy like a shovel, even though he was a safe distance away from the fence’s perimeter. As a result, he is always somewhat tentative in his approach to any vehicle. And, of course, he does not know that when the collar is off, he cannot get shocked under any circumstances. So I coax him along. He places his front legs inside and waits for me to boost up his rear end. I am not sure if Oogy does this because he knows I will or if it is because climbing into the van puts pressure on his surgically corrected rear joints. Dan, who had called, “Shotgun!” climbs into the passenger’s seat; Noah sits behind him. Oogy stands beside me with his forelegs balanced on the front-seat armrests, his rear legs braced on the floor, peering through the windshield for the ten-minute trip. After I drop off the boys, I open the passenger window halfway. Oogy climbs into the vacant seat and, front paws on the door handle, sticks the upper part of his body out of the window, his ear flapping in the wind all the way home.

  Once we are back inside the house, Oogy heads for the remainder of last night’s bone and I go upstairs to shower. When I am done, I gather up all the used towels I can find from last night and this morning, toss them and some of the boys’ sweatpants into the washer, and get a cycle started. I step into the bedroom to get dressed. Oogy is already there, lying on the bed. His eyes follow me. I tell him I need to go to the office and that I feel bad about it, but it cannot be helped. I pull on the clothes I am going to wear for the day and go over to the bed. I touch my nose to Oogy’s side and run my hands down his back to the soft skin of his narrow waist. “Time for me to go,” I tell him.

  As I walk into the hall, he uncoils himself and joins me on the landing, where he waits for me to start down the stairs. As soon as I take the first step, he barrels past me, rushing to the bottom of the steps before following me into the kitchen as though he’s attached to me like some white, furry sidecar.

  I pour what I promise myself will be my last cup of coffee, heat it in the microwave, and amble back into the family room. Once I am seated on the couch, Oogy climbs up beside me. This is our morning ritual, a few minutes together, just the two of us. He sits while I lazily trace a finger over his massive chest. His eyes close and open, then close again. Something in the street catches his attention; he stares through the privet hedge outside our house. Then, his curiosity satisfied, he turns around several times and lies down, his head in my lap. I like the way he stretches his massive body. He feels comfortable, relaxed. He feels secure. I am glad that we have been able to do that for him.

  With my index finger, I circle where his ear used to be, then run my hands down the muscle of his rib cage and back up to his neck. Lately, he has not been scratching the hole where his left ear was, which is good, because he has a history of infections there. Everything is quiet now. The cartoonlike fervor of morning rush hour has passed. I run through telephone calls I need to make at work, e-mails I must send, letters I should write. I have to mail a form for Noah’s lacrosse club; I put my keys over it last night so that I would remember to take it today. Oogy snorts softly several times and lets out a loud sigh. I place my lips just back of his ear hole and breathe into his neck. “Oo-gy pie,” I say. “Pie dog. Mr. Pie.”

  I have heard that when you leave them, dogs do not know that you are coming back, so every time I leave, I try to let Oogy know that I have every intention of returning. I need to go to work, I explain. I tell him I will be back in the late afternoon to take him for a walk. It will still be light out, I say. The boys will be home while it is still light, too. Mom won’t get home until it’s dark. I feel compelled to reassure him. I think it is important. Absentmindedly, I trace the scar from the surgery that runs from the top of his skull to underneath his lower jaw.

  Oogy is asleep, snoring deeply, and I am reassured by his very presence, moved by the love with which he has repaid us.

  Some months after Oogy had come to live with us, Noah looked up at me from where he was lying alongside Oogy and said, “I really feel bad about what happened to Oogy, but if it hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t be here.” The worst thing that ever happened to Oogy was also the best thing. It is but one of the contradictions that have defined his experience. He was a fighting dog who would not fight, with a personality and character that led to the most horrific of experiences imaginable, then sav
ed him.

  This is Oogy’s story. It is, in the truest sense, a one-in-a-million tale. To tell it accurately necessarily intertwines other stories, those of the people who saved Oogy and all the people who love him, including my family. Part of the wonder has been how, over time, all who have come in contact with Oogy, learned his story, and experienced his genuinely gentle nature and noble bearing have been touched. And because I talk to people every day who have rescued many, many pets of their own, this is a testament to their collective efforts as well.

  “You’re here now,” I tell him. “It’s okay.”

  In his sleep, Oogy’s legs begin to twitch; he must be dreaming that he is running. I imagine the scene, because it is so common: It is sunny and late in the day at the dog park; the heat-dried grass scents the wind. Oogy trots across the plateau to where I sit at a picnic table, past a dozen other frolicking dogs, just so that I can touch his head. His distorted face seems to be smiling. Or maybe he really is. I touch my fingers to both sides of his head and kiss him on the nose.

  “Go on, you big galoot,” I tell him.

  Oogy turns to find another dog to play with a while longer.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

  the first time I met Oogy, a veterinarian told me that police had found him in a raid and were directed to take him to Ardmore Animal Hospital (AAH) in Montgomery County, PA, by the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Dr. James Bianco, the surgeon who saved Oogy, told me that he recalled the raid had been on a home because of suspected drug activity. For years, I took the story of Oogy’s arrival at Ardmore at face value. It didn’t matter to me how Oogy had gotten to the hospital that saved him; it was enough for me that he had been saved. I had no reason to question the explanation with which I had been provided. But eventually, prompted by the curiosity of a reporter friend, I started asking questions to see what I could find out about the chain of events that had culminated in Oogy coming to live with us. I found myself driven to see what I could discover about the actual events themselves. I had to know as much about the truth as I could find out. And even though I learned that it was unlikely the story I’d been told was what had actually happened, I also learned that discovering the actual events surrounding Oogy’s arrival might well prove to be impossible.

  It would not have been unusual for the police and the SPCA to work in concert during the raid in which Oogy was discovered. Experience had taught the police and the SPCA that wherever dogfighting occurs, there is a substantial chance that other illegal activities are going on, often involving drugs, weapons, and undeclared cash. As a result, the police routinely accompany the SPCA on dogfighting interventions, and the SPCA routinely joins police in, or is available for, drug raids.

  Drug dealers fight dogs for money and sometimes simply for bragging rights. They also keep fighting dogs around to protect the drugs and, on occasion, to scare away the competition. This type of operation represents the lowest level of what is now an industry generating over five hundred million dollars a year, commonly referred to as the “street-fighting” aspect of the business. The dogs involved in this lead the most horrific lives imaginable: They are brutalized to toughen them and to make them angry; their injuries are often either not treated or are treated in a rudimentary way (street-fighting dogs have been found with gashes, tears, and cuts stapled together); and they are bred, housed, and trained under the most barbaric conditions. There are also amateur and professional levels of dogfighting, in which an increasing amount of time and money is spent to breed and train the dogs and even to provide some basic medical care for them. Recently, a fourth level of dogfighting has emerged, combining significant financial resources with street-fighting sensibilities.

  Fighting dogs who will not fight or who lose fights are occasionally released, but more often than not, they are destroyed in a variety of inhumane ways: They are shot, drowned, bludgeoned, electrocuted, garroted, hung, stabbed, or, as probably happened to Oogy, given to other dogs to be torn apart. The fact that when we first met Oogy we were told that he was a pit bull suggests to me that the dealer who most likely used him for bait thought that he was a fighting dog who would not fight.

  When police find fighting dogs in a raid in which they are not accompanied by the SPCA, standard procedure requires them to have the dogs transported there. The SPCA in Philadelphia told me that the Philadelphia police would not have been in Montgomery County, nor would they have taken an animal seized in a raid in Philadelphia to a shelter in Ardmore. According to the director of operations for the Montgomery County SPCA, when police find an injured animal and call while the facility’s operations are open, the animal will be brought there, where two surgeons are on call to provide emergency treatment. Given the extent of Oogy’s injuries, had he been taken to that facility following the raid in which he was found, it is a virtual certainty that he would have been destroyed. The surgeons would have been faced with hours of costly procedures that, given the severity of the wounds and the myriad other medical problems they would have had to deal with, might well have proved futile. On top of that, the SPCA did not have unlimited resources to rehabilitate fighting dogs, particularly at the expense of the other animals in its care. There was no way of determining in advance whether rehabilitation efforts would be successful; after these efforts had been made, a fighting dog might still pose a threat to other animals, or even humans, in which case it could never be made available for adoption. Since time, effort, and money spent on rehabilitation attempts meant that resources would be denied to other dogs with a real likelihood of being adopted, fighting dogs almost invariably would be destroyed. The chances of a mutilated fighting dog being rehabilitated, even if it could have been saved through hours of surgery and postsurgical treatment, and then adopted were beyond remote.

  At the time of Oogy’s rescue, Ardmore was the only animal hospital in the immediate area to offer after-hours emergency room treatment. Had the police called the Montgomery County SPCA after hours, when the facility’s operations were closed, a dispatcher would have had the authority to direct the police to take a wounded dog to Ardmore’s ER. The Montgomery County SPCA has no record of that happening, and no follow-up report, which would have been generated had they directed the police there. In fact, the SPCA did not pick up or receive any fighting dogs at all on the weekend that Oogy was found. When I asked the SPCA’s director of operations whether the presence of a bait dog would have necessarily meant that there had to have been fighting dogs at the site, and wondered why none had been taken to the SPCA as a result of the raid in which Oogy was found, the director told me that very often the owners “drop the dogs” — let them loose so that they will not be charged with animal cruelty. “The dogs usually turn up in a couple of days,” he told me, “either as strays or when they corner somebody on the roof of their car.”

  I later learned that another possible reason no other fighting dogs were found in the raid is that dogs being used for street fighting are often kept at a different location from where they are fought. Since those who fight dogs are usually not concerned with providing proper care for them, the dogs are often stashed in abandoned properties so that if they are discovered, there will be no way to find the owners. And to make detection more difficult, dogfighters also regularly change the locations where they train the dogs and hold the fights.

  The fact that no other dogs were found in the raid in which Oogy was discovered also suggests that Oogy may have been abandoned after he was attacked. Since there were no other animals in the house, there would have been no reason for anyone to stay there with a dying dog, especially a dog that had been abused when it was alive.

  In the absence of any evidence that the Montgomery County SPCA directed that Oogy be taken to the Ardmore ER, I’m left with only one explanation as to how Oogy got to the hospital — and although it is speculative, it makes the most sense to me. I believe that Oogy was found in a local police operation, which i
s consistent with Dr. Bianco’s recollection, and because the raid was local, the police knew about the emergency services that were available after hours through Ardmore. My best guess is that some animal-loving cop found a mutilated, dying puppy and, on his or her own initiative, brought the dog to the emergency services at Ardmore to try to save its life.

  In the end, the only important thing is the fact that Oogy was discovered and brought in for treatment. I can never know why the fighting dog that attacked Oogy, and that would have been or was being trained to kill, did not in fact kill him. The emergency room services were eliminated several years after Oogy was found, and all of the ER records are gone, so I have no way of knowing if its staff ever wrote down which police department brought him in. I was told that the ER staff would probably not have bothered to note the department because it wouldn’t have been relevant to treatment. I tried to locate the two doctors who had operated the ER to see what, if anything, they remembered, but I couldn’t track them down. As a result, I cannot determine how the police came to learn about and raid the drug-dealing operation, or where exactly the raid occurred, or what actually happened during the raid and what was found. I can’t learn the fate of any people who may have been there when the police burst in. I can never know how long Oogy lay in his cage and suffered or what that suffering consisted of. I will never know why his keepers did not kill him and put him out of his misery when they saw that the dog being trained to kill had not finished the job.

  My investigation into the events that culminated in Oogy coming to live with us also revealed that after the police rescued him, Oogy survived largely because of one woman’s refusal to let him die and the efforts of a surgeon and veterinary staff who operated out of the purest of motives: to save the life of a helpless creature before them.