I’ve often thought my next search-and-rescue dog would be a rescue. These are the dogs I’d like to work with in psych assistance and therapy too—the homeless ones, the last-chance dogs. I’m not the first to think of rescues for service, certainly; there are fine assistance dog organizations that have used dogs drawn from the rescue population for years. Many groups acquire pups from respected breeders or have developed breeding programs of their own in hopes of achieving a greater percentage of graduate success, but the assistance dog programs that use rescues have chosen a different option, adding the complication of unknown backgrounds and genetic histories in many of the dogs they assess. It’s a fiddly proposition. Evaluating rescues for service is a difficult process involving a population of dogs in need and a responsibility to the people those dogs will serve—heroic and heart-rending work. I understand the difficulties, and I take them very seriously, but having seen rescued dogs successfully chosen, trained, and released to jobs they enjoy and new lives in which they thrive, I’d like to try. I want to find a good rescue candidate and train him for service.
Talented shelter dogs are not new to my friend Tom. He’s an advocate for homeless dogs, and years ago, on a small scale, he assessed them in animal-control facilities for search-and-rescue and accelerant-, drug-, and explosive-detection work, with good results. He’s also one of the best 360-degree thinkers I know. When I tell him I’m interested in working with rescued dogs to train them for psychiatric service, emotional support, or therapy, he has to consider it a moment.
He says I’ll probably find some dogs that might be candidates for therapy work. But rescued dogs for psychiatric service? Tom remembers the dogs he encountered in pounds. Many of the ones he saved were high-energy dogs surrendered by overwhelmed owners who’d been unprepared for all that intensity or the hungry, homeless adolescent dogs that worried neighborhoods with their prey drive but that had not yet gone too feral. Such dogs needed strong handlers, but they were often perfect for detection work. The other dogs . . . the other dogs he saw were timid. Or reactive. Or unpredictable. Or sick. Or old. Some were aggressive. Some had bad hips. Some, he admits ruefully, were just not all that bright.
He says you need smart, trainable, self-disciplined dogs who like people. They should be solid—motivated, but calm too. But calm dogs make great pets. Even in a recession, how often do great dogs end up in shelters? Tom looks at his own rescued golden retriever, Camel, named for the cigarettes Tom gave up after a heart attack. Camel was surrendered to a shelter at a year old by an owner with a health condition who was too frail to give the big, amiable dog any exercise. Camel is, in fact, the very kind of shelter dog we are discussing. I don’t say it. My friend doesn’t say it, but he rolls his eyes and winks at me as we both overlook the great-dog obvious whose tail is thump-thumping on the floor.
Tom warns me. Here’s the deal about pound evaluations: Very few shelters have good spaces for evaluation. Very few shelters have the time to give you with multiple dogs. In some pounds, the conditions are so desperate that no dog will test well; they’ll be too strung-out from the tension. While some shelters will allow dogs to be taken elsewhere for evaluation, plenty will not—most of them will not. Very, very few allow the option of returning a dog that ultimately can’t do the work.
So at the shelter, a dog often has to be some kind of genius on the spot. Genius on the spot is asking a lot of the dog. Can an evaluator make wrong calls? You bet.
Out of nowhere, Tom says that finding and training rescues is worthy work. But he isn’t sure that I’m the one to do it. He knows my history. He looks at me thoughtfully. “This doesn’t take a hard heart,” he says, “but it does take a resilient one. I wonder about you walking away from euthanasia-tagged dogs in cages. Susannah, do you really want to go there?”
That’s all he says, and it’s enough. No. I don’t want to go there. All of the pets I had as a child and most of the ones I’ve gotten as an adult came from shelters—I gamely walked in and came out again a little later with a new furry family member in arms. But since that 2003 experience with those caged dogs left to die in the woods, I’ve found shelter visits almost unbearable. I don’t want to even think about leaving more doomed dogs behind. Yet in this kind of work, that’s inevitable. There will be dogs that don’t evaluate well, and I’ll have to walk away.
“Think about it,” my friend says evenly, leaving the caution at that.
The next morning it’s clear he spent the evening on the Internet. He mentions a handful of local dogs he found on Petfinder that might be good candidates. We are both saddened to read how many of these dogs are owner-surrendered. The reasons for the surrender—the owners’ job losses or home losses among them—don’t seem to matter; write-ups from volunteers suggest that even the smart, good, well-behaved surrendered dogs are getting little time. The kennel space and budget don’t allow it. Shelter staff know these dogs aren’t lost and that no one is going to come in and claim them. Tom muses about the dogs he had noted. If the write-ups by volunteers are even halfway true, with careful evaluation, some of these dogs might well be candidates for service. Not a lot, he says. Expect one in thirty. He notes a few on his list that might be better suited for ESAs or therapy.
Good has already come of this. My friend says he and his wife are going to check out a blind chow–Irish setter mix he found at a shelter not five miles from home, a bright red beast who’s out of time and bound for euthanasia. “We’ll bring him home. We’ll call him Chili Dog,” Tom says—another rescued dog named for something else my friend gave up.
On the other side of the country, a retiree walks the cages of animal shelters. She’s an evaluator for dog rescue, a second-chance gal. Paula pulls dogs that need safe harbor while rescue volunteers try to find them permanent homes. She finds pets mostly, and she finds working- dog candidates every now and then. Paula’s in these shelters often enough that the staff know her name and her blue canvas bag of tricks: the leashes and harnesses, clickers, treats, and toys, the rather horribly realistic rubber hands, made for testing dogs that might bite a human over food bowls. (Paula sometimes leaves the fake hands in the passenger seat of her car as a crime deterrent. They’ve been around the block a few times; they always stop people cold. The fingertip of a pinkie is missing from one of them, testimony to the jaw strength of a dog that did not pass the test.)
We are friends who have never met face to face. Paula and I became acquainted online about fifteen years ago through a dog-rescue transport group’s Internet message board. In an environment of high stakes and higher emotion, the sky was always falling. Paula was all business on that board. I admired her frank, straightforward posts, her compassion coupled with practicality, and her refusal to take part in interpersonal dramas of any kind.
As with many others online, Paula uses a pseudonym. She is wary of anyone who seems too interested in when she’ll be away from her house. She is away from her house a lot, on one road or another, pulling dogs from pounds when possible, taking them to rescue groups or new forever homes. She sometimes gives up holidays with her family to do it, a practice her grown daughter tolerates rather than admires, a practice that puts her one inch closer to being the Crazy Dog Lady in her neighborhood. With her drive to do a thing outside convention, Paula reminds me a lot of the search-and-rescue folk I know. We get along. We are similarly covered in dog hair. But in the area of evaluating dogs for service talent, I am the novice and Paula the expert. She has been going into shelters for years, and if anyone can make peace with the mix of hope and futility to be found there, she can.
Paula has evaluated enough of these dogs that she expects failures. She grieves the lost causes anyway, the ones who can’t pass the test for service and, even worse, show themselves to be unadoptable even as pets. She says you have to learn how to grieve and get over it. There will be new dogs in equal jeopardy tomorrow. There are always more dogs than cages, and shelters move so damn fast. The young, stable dogs that come in without too much ba
ggage earn a little more time.
Paula always keeps an eye out for the special dogs, dogs with intelligence and stamina, dogs who’ve had a less rough time of it or who, in the surprising depth of their resilience, have had a worse time but who make better choices beside humans. She is looking for dogs who are eager, responsive, and willing to learn, who might make working matches of any kind for partners who need them. She wears a brown jacket that doesn’t show dirt and hides the dog hair that she rarely lint-rolls. The smell of pee and bleach has stopped making her nose run.
She says it would be easier if she didn’t love dogs. She has dreams where every one of them takes the test and passes. But that is never true in real life. Paula takes all evaluations seriously. Pet evaluations are grounded in safety. Evaluations of potential working dogs are a life-and-death matter on both sides, really. Sometimes she has a day or two to evaluate, sometimes an afternoon, and sometimes it’s a ten-minute-per-dog judgment that calls for more head than heart.
Paula describes watching the dogs’ response to her as she walks between the cages. Who has bright eyes and perked ears? Who moves toward her with a confident, upbeat gait or a calm walk? Whose tail is wagging? Who stretches forward to sniff and, even through fencing, petitions for petting? The situation isn’t always fair. In overrun, impoverished facilities, when stress on the intakes is high, sometimes even good dogs become reactive.
Paula feels the time and long experience in her knees when she kneels down on cement and extends her hands flat before kennel fencing, a hairsbreadth away from the chain link. She doesn’t stare; she speaks softly, her voice low. Show me who you are.
Sometimes she’ll go weeks before finding even one dog that seems right for service of any kind. Sometimes there are surprises, and a high-traffic city pound—a cinder-block noise box—will produce a handful of dogs that show their best selves on greeting, on leashes down the walkway, and out the door. Big dogs and small ones. White, black, brown, and every mottled variation in between. These are good pet candidates with something extra. They’re highly motivated. They will sit on command or show they’re up to learning it quickly. They’ll bring a ball all the way back for a throw. They’ll find a hidden treat. They’ll submit to human handling and still come up cheerful. They are outgoing and aware. They don’t snap at other dogs in passing. And, most important, they like humans a lot.
These are the possible service, detection, or therapy dogs, and in the space of just a few minutes, they’ve earned their way out of the pound. They will be scheduled for further testing and training, potential matching for jobs, and, if they do not measure up, re-homing as pets after obedience training has been completed. So there is life for them ahead. Good life. Activity, discipline, care, and kindness.
In the pound, Paula double-checks the numbers on the cages against the numbers on the collars. She notes their names, sometimes supplied by surrendering owners, often created by staff members who hope a great name might seal the deal on an adoption. Paula describes one rare day when she found a couple of mixes and a purebred: Dolly, Peanut, and Bud Lite. Dolly was a Chinese crested with a very good nose; Peanut was a nimble terrier with great dexterity; and Bud Lite—well, he might have been anything. A small, sociable retriever crossed with a cocker spaniel, he looked like he should be in a movie called Honey, I Shrunk the Golden. All of the dogs had crates, collars, tags, microchips, and foster homes waiting.
And then there was Jasper. Jasper was going home with her.
Jasper was an old hand at being rescued. He’d been adopted in another town three years before, a shelter success story. In 2007, puppy Jasper became the big-city lap dog of an elderly owner who loved him a great deal but whose illness moved faster than anyone had been prepared for. When his owner died, Jasper lived briefly at his vet’s office, and for a time it appeared he might have a soft landing, the late owner having a son and daughter-in-law in the same city. Jasper moved in with them. But the daughter-in-law was pregnant, and Jasper’s rich, curly, multicolored coat went everywhere. She was also very much allergic, and Jasper had to go. No one the couple knew wanted a dog, and they learned quickly that posting free-to-a-good-home listings on the Internet brought out only the creeps.
With reluctance, they took Jasper to their city pound, where polite but overworked volunteers told them they could make no promises, but they would try to find him a home. Small dogs had a little more hope, a higher adoption turnover; they got longer at the shelter. The couple left with these assurances and never inquired again. This time around, homeless Jasper was on day 43 of 45, a red tag on his cage, when Paula evaluated him. He looked like a good pet prospect for someone who liked offbeat charm. He was a friendly, spotty guy who didn’t seem to find anyone a stranger, a terrier–Shih Tzu–poodle–something that defied even experienced dog fanciers’ guesses, uncharitably called “fugly” by the people at the pound. Jasper looked like a jack-o’-lantern covered in dryer lint; he had a pronounced underbite and good teeth.
Sitting in the Port-A-Crate beside Paula on the drive home, Jasper exhibited the same quiet awareness of his surroundings that he had shown during the test. He sat upright in the crate, peering out the window. He was interested but not overstimulated, calm without being subdued. When she rolled to a stop and turned to look at him, Jasper looked back with the steadiest eye contact she had ever seen from a dog, his expression slightly expectant, as though he were waiting for some good word he had known in the past. Paula didn’t know the word, and at the same time as she felt the bittersweetness of his condition, she was also aware that this steady watchfulness was a gift. Softened by the curly hair around his face, Jasper had a thoughtful gaze rather than a stare—a great quality.
The trip was a long one. Paula glanced in her rearview mirror across the expanse of travel crates. A couple of the dogs were restive. The other was asleep. The SUV smelled of kibble breath and wet dog fur. A few were encouraged enough to groom themselves a little: Fff-pfft-ffff, flup-flup-flup. One of the rubber hands was sticking up out of the bag against the window, looking like a kidnap victim’s desperate attempt to get out. Paula says she always winces when she imagines explaining that to a state trooper.
As Jasper acclimated to the drive and the day’s events, he watched Paula’s movements in the car, and he tilted his head with his brow furrowed a little, as though he thought he could learn to drive, sure. As though he thought he could critique her driving, certainly. No matter what was really going on in his dog head, Jasper proved that he was curious, attentive, and not easily distracted.
Paula was smitten. She found herself thinking, like she always did, that if assistance or therapy partnership didn’t work for Jasper, she’d take him. It is an old argument she has with herself every shelter-pull day. She has three dogs of her own, one very feeble, not one of them young, and Paula is on a fixed income, so it’s not like she can afford more vet bills. But sometimes a dog moves her to the point of commitment. Jasper was that dog.
She switched on the radio to stay alert: classic rock and oldies, a syndicated DJ out of somewhere else. Jasper’s ears perked. She could feel him watching her still, but there was a quivering edge-of the-dance-floor quality to his gaze now, like something in the music gave him pleasure, like Baby, are you ready to rock?
She says he had to warm up to it; he shifted position in his crate, then squeaked once or twice before he howled—a tenor croon that didn’t rise to a squeal in the way of most dogs’ howls. It was a practiced sound, pleasant and assured, an ooo-OO-ooo, OO-oo-oo. Paula laughed so hard her hands shook on the wheel, and at the precise moment she began to wonder if he would howl through the entire song (and through the entire trip, if she kept the radio on), Jasper took a breath through that curious underbite, deep and long, as though he was setting up for another righteous croon. The air whistled through the tight spaces of his teeth and made a single note.
Jasper could whistle, and Jasper could sing. Ooo-OOO-oo, oo-WAWA-oo, sweeeeeeeeeeet. The dog lover in Paula was
uplifted. The dog evaluator’s mind raced: Just what might we do with a talent like that?
Paula says she thinks about Jasper every time she gets discouraged. She tells others about him to demonstrate that great dogs can come in odd packages. She agrees to offer reality checks and be a sounding board for me on this business of finding homeless dogs with talent for psychiatric service, emotional support, or therapy. She’s about to retire from all of it, though. Her sight is getting bad, and night driving has recently become much more treacherous. Paula says she might be a little hard to catch, but she recently got a smartphone. If she can figure out how to use it, she can send e-mail. She also got bifocals, so she can read it. The bifocals may be a good thing. Until now, Paula’s poor vision led her to type in all caps, giving her message board posts and e-mails a Ten Commandments quality that set a few people on edge. This last message is no exception. Perhaps with Jasper in mind, she writes to me:
ANY DOG CAN SURPRISE YOU.
BEFORE YOU CAN FIND MANY DOGS FOR THIS WORK, FIND ONE.
The Possibility Dogs Page 6