The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  There is hope, if only an early flicker. Westminster remains an invitation-only organization, as private as the storied Augusta National Golf Club, and yes, mutts have been granted their first invitation to come inside, but with a big, bold asterisk.

  Even still, the cracking open of the gilded doors came just two years after Westminster cut ties with dog food maker Pedigree, a longtime sponsor, in a spat about the inclusion of sad-looking homeless dogs in television advertisements that were scheduled to air during the show in 2012. At that time, Westminster spokespeople had a decidedly different attitude toward the mutts than they expressed when welcoming them just two years later. Back in 2012, David Frei told the Associated Press, “Show me an ad with a dog with a smile. Don’t try to shame me.” Melissa Martellotti, a brand manager for Pedigree parent company Mars Petcare US, told the New York Times that Westminster’s position in 2012 was clear: “They’ve shared with us, when we parted ways, that they felt that our advertising was focused too much on the cause of adoption and that wasn’t really a shared vision.”

  The attitude shift into accepting the mutts—in the span of just twenty-four months—no doubt shocked some sensibilities, and it was at least a sign that a handful of powerful folks who want to keep the purebred dog party going can hear the bandleader fumbling through his sheet music, looking for a more appropriate tune to keep paying guests from heading for the exits.

  And perhaps the last laugh of all will go to Pedigree. Its competitor, Purina, took over as the sponsor of Westminster, but a recent report stated that Pedigree’s parent company ranks number one among all pet food companies and its dog food still outsells any of the top Purina brands, thanks at least in part to Pedigree’s continued advertising focus on helping homeless dogs. To be clear, Purina also invests in causes to help homeless dogs—the Nestle Purina PetCare Company has owned the adoption website Petfinder.com since 2013, and Purina makes dog food donations to shelters—but Pedigree is trying to align itself more prominently with the bigger-picture marketing shift going on among dog lovers worldwide, and people who buy dog food in leading markets like the US and UK are supporting the business move with their bucks.

  Pedigree doubled down on the Westminster-kicked-us-to-the-curb news in 2012 by starting the Pedigree Feeding Program to provide free dog food to shelters, along with the Buy One, Feed Two program, which promised up to ten million bowls of dog food to shelters in exchange for customer purchases in retail stores. Anyone who goes to the Pedigree website as of this writing is greeted with the slogan, “When you buy Pedigree, you’re helping dogs in need.” It’s spot-on in terms of trending public opinion.

  Pedigree’s support for homeless dogs is now in overdrive, but it actually began well before the 2012 Westminster kerfuffle, at least as early as 2008, just before the Pedigree Dogs Exposed documentary uproar in the UK. That’s when the company created the Pedigree Adoption Drive Foundation to help get more abandoned pooches into homes. Research into the campaign in the UK showed that Brits donated nearly ₤500,000 (more than $800,000) for homeless dogs, increased purchases of Pedigree-brand food by 6 percent, and believed—to the tune of an eight-point rating increase—that Pedigree as a brand had the well-being of dogs at its heart. Brand trust went up six points. The number of people who believed “I have something in common with this brand” spiked by nine points, the kind of improvement pollsters usually see only in their dreams.

  By spring 2010 in the US, Pedigree had started airing a television commercial called “Heroes” that showed mutts looking alone, but proud; abandoned, but worthy. It was a revolutionary advertising campaign, one of the few to capture the dog-loving public’s consciousness on the level of, say, the “Yo quiero Taco Bell” spot in the 1990s, and it tapped into that same notion of sticking up for the dogs so often left behind. The narrator’s words in the “Heroes” advertisement were anything but sad or downtrodden, spoken in earnest while dogs looked directly into the camera, eye-to-eye with viewers, as if simply wanting to be seen, for a change, with honesty:

  Shelter dogs aren’t broken. They’ve simply experienced more life.

  If they were human, we would call them wise.

  They would be the ones with tales to tell and stories to write,

  The ones dealt a bad hand who responded with courage.

  Do not pity a shelter dog.

  Adopt one.

  The creative team behind this commercial was TBWA/Chiat/Day, a big-time firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, whose work has included cultural-shift campaigns including the Orwellian “1984” spot that introduced Apple’s Macintosh computers to the world with a woman hurling a hammer into an oversize black-and-white screen featuring a demagogue whose reign, and whose tired ideas, were about to come to an end.

  TBWA/Chiat/Day is also the same company that cast Gidget the Chihuahua in the Taco Bell ads almost twenty years ago. The times are changing. Smart money, at least for now, is banking on the shelter pups.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LEMONS VERSUS STEALS

  “It takes character and control to be understanding and forgiving.”

  —Dale Carnegie

  A steaming pile of trash was blocking the lane, so the driver stepped out of his air-conditioned car and into the blistering summer sun. Some thoughtless litterer had dumped a mess of stuff and then high-tailed it away, probably without even looking back, leaving this driver to be the Good Samaritan who cleared the roadway. Maybe the Samaritan was frustrated that he’d been forced to pull over. Maybe he was concerned about other drivers’ safety. Whatever his reasons, he walked over to the heap—and then likely stopped short, a bit in shock.

  “When they got closer, they realized the garbage was breathing,” says Kathy Cain, recalling that day in 2010 on the Utah highway. “And when they rolled him over, they realized his front right leg was really bad.”

  She’s talking about Cassidy, the twenty-pound Shetland Sheepdog the Samaritan found buried in the assortment of filth. Cassidy was emaciated. His protruding ribs cast shadows across his fur, which was packed with foxtails, the pointed green fans sometimes called spear grass. He was five, maybe six years old, and wore a red collar without any identification tags. The collar had a piece of twine attached to it, indicating Cassidy had at one point been tied to something, but if he’d ever been a fan of humans, he wasn’t showing it. He was terrified as the Samaritan approached, and clearly in a great deal of pain. Had a corner been available, Cassidy would have cowered into it. Instead, all he could do was lie there in the trash on the asphalt, deeply broken inside and out.

  Somehow, the Samaritan got him up and rushed him to an animal hospital, where another unknown Good Samaritan donated the veterinary fees for the leg’s amputation. When little Hopalong Cassidy was medically well enough to leave, the veterinarian checked around the region. Nobody was trying to find him.

  Sheltie Rescue of Utah took in Cassidy on a Monday, right about the time Cain was realizing she couldn’t keep Paxton, a Pit Bull she’d welcomed into her home as a foster dog. Paxton was a good boy, a sweetheart who got along well with Cain’s two Shelties, Stitch and Jiggers. (“It’s short for gigolo,” she says. “That’s a whole other story.”) Alas, however, Paxton was too big and energetic for her small apartment. Feeding times were a serious challenge. Cain called her friend Barbara Edelberg at Sheltie Rescue, where she sometimes volunteered, and within two days, Edelberg had found Paxton a home. “I went to a Sheltie club meeting that night,” Cain recalls, “and it was a tearful goodbye to Paxton, but I heard about this three-legged dog. I had told myself that when they helped find Paxton a home, I was going to adopt another dog.”

  By Friday, less than a week after Cassidy had left the vet’s office, Edelberg handed him over to Cain, his new foster mom. “But I realized it wasn’t going to be a foster situation,” as Cain remembers it. “The first time I laid eyes on him, I told her, ‘He’s never coming back here.’”

  Cassidy’s leg healed and he figured
out how to walk on the remaining three, but he had emotional problems galore. He not only was frightened in general, but he couldn’t seem to trust anyone. He was depressed, by Cain’s estimation, and spent a lot of time trying to hide. When fireworks went off outside, he launched himself into his crate, seeking cover like a war veteran with posttraumatic stress disorder. Then he developed an abscess that required surgery near his carotid artery, and he had a near-fatal, 1-in-100,000 reaction to the subsequent medication. “I almost lost him again,” Cain says with the worry still trembling a little in her voice, even now that several years have gone by.

  There’s more than the usual reason for her deep-rooted feelings. Instead of Cassidy dying at that time, Cain lost her mother, who died within about a year of Cain’s best friend. Her father passed soon after that, too, one dear loss right after the next. Fate seemed determined to pound her down, blow by wicked blow.

  Except, there was Cassidy. He started to get better and almost radiate light as his eyes opened and looked up in a new way at the world. Soon he wasn’t just walking; he was running, romping, and playing. Within about a year, his nerves relaxed and he started to feel comfortable around people, including strangers. Cassidy proved easy to train. He listened and learned, eager for the chance to try new things. And he developed a habit that Cain, even with her own battered heart, couldn’t help but smile when she saw: Cassidy would walk up to people, put his single front leg around their necks, and nuzzle them, almost like a human giving them a hug.

  “I had suffered a lot of loss within three years,” she recalls, “and I would look at him and say, ‘You know what? I’m going to get through this.’ Mine was emotional hurt. His was physical. He has bounced back and come so far.”

  A rehabilitation center is near Cain’s home, and she got the idea that maybe Cassidy’s one-legged hugs could help more people than just her. The center has short-term as well as long-term residents, many of them older and some of them recovering from serious surgery.

  “The first time we went,” Cain says, “this lady really loved dogs, so we placed Cassidy on her bed. He kind of sniffed around. She had recently had a leg amputated. He sniffed the stub and curled himself around it.”

  Everyone in the room took a deep breath, and Cain looked over at the patient, trying to gauge her feelings.

  “She looked like the rest of us did,” Cain remembers. “Our mouths just dropped. I’m sure I had tears running down my face.”

  Today, Cassidy makes the rounds at that rehab center about twice a month, work that helped him to earn the American Humane Association Hero Dog Award in 2013. At home, he’s as happy as could be—and he sometimes outruns the four-legged Stitch and Jiggers at the park, where he makes a friend of pretty much everyone he meets. Cassidy is now working toward therapy-dog certification, which would allow him to go into more facilities and try to make more people smile. He sometimes joins Cain at the local library, too. They talk about pet care and how everybody has a purpose, even if they’re a little different.

  “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Cain says. “Sometimes you just need to have that extra patience. Give them a chance. They can teach you so much. They can be the greatest thing in your life. Look in their eyes. Just because a dog may cower or act like he’s afraid, well, maybe he’s the one that needs you. It’s always the cute little puppies that jump up and down that attract most of the people. It’s the ones who hurt, if they appear to be what some people would call ‘defective’—I hate that word—but if they’re blind, they’re deaf, if they’re missing a leg, don’t just turn your back on them, because you could be missing out on a great, great member of the family.”

  The Pit Bull was just four weeks old when his owner decided to drown him. There was no reason, really, nothing at all wrong with the puppy, which is why the owner’s roommate scooped him up and carried him, with great desperation, to Westminster Veterinary Group in Orange County, California. The roommate pleaded while handing over the pooch, who was so small and defenseless he would never have survived on his own. “Please!” the roommate begged the veterinary team. “Hide this dog!”

  Not terribly far away was OC Animal Care, the region’s public shelter, but the roommate had perhaps thought twice before bringing the Pittie there. A $2.5 million ongoing lawsuit brought against the facility in 2014 and not yet adjudicated alleged that OC Animal Care, as recently as 2010, was killing nearly half the animals entrusted to its care, including injured dogs, older dogs, and dogs nonprofit rescue groups were willing to take, with the killing sometimes happening before the legal hold period of four to seven days. The lawsuit’s allegations had been whispered about, and the reputation of the place, right or wrong, had gotten around, which may be why the roommate instead entrusted the pooch to veterinarian Tia Greenberg and her staff. They did things the public facility likely never would have done, including bottle feeding the pup and helping him put on some weight, keeping him alive with as healthy a start in life as was humanly possible.

  It was enough to save little Ri-Ri, as he’s now known at home with Greenberg and her wife, Michelle Russillo, but it wasn’t enough in general, at least not in Greenberg’s mind. She’d saved plenty of dogs’ lives since opening the veterinary office in 2000, but something about this dog’s story and his lack of options moved her to want to do more. There should be an actual shelter, she thought, a place of refuge and care and hope. If the taxpayer-funded facility wasn’t getting that job done, then she was going to do it herself.

  In 2011, Greenberg founded WAGS, a shelter that is fully integrated with her veterinary practice to provide all the treatment a dog could possibly need. “We saved Ri-Ri and [Greenberg] said, ‘My job as a veterinarian is to save pets and not dispose of them,’” says Russillo, who is now chief executive officer of WAGS Pet Adoption. “She founded it with a passion, and I took it over about six months later.”

  WAGS is a no-kill shelter on steroids thanks to the veterinary component of the organization. Animals brought into the city’s animal control facility stay there five days, and then, by contract, become the legal property of WAGS. “With the previous shelter, five days was their life,” Russillo says. “It was done.”

  Today—from the day WAGS opened its doors—almost all of the 2,200 or so pets who come through each year are getting homes. It’s the same exact population of dogs, but they are being saved instead of killed thanks to a more progressive approach to sheltering. A recent bout of upper respiratory problems and pneumonia among kittens spiked the kill rate at WAGS to 9 percent, Russillo says, but that’s an anomaly. Most months during the past three years, she says, the kill rate has been less than 3 percent, and often, it’s lower than 1 percent. Well more than 90 percent of the dogs not only are being saved but are going on to thrive.

  The terms treatables and manageables are part of the everyday lexicon at WAGS, just as they are within a growing number of forward-thinking shelters worldwide. Dogs that some public facilities would see as a waste of time, the WAGS team sees as savable. A needy puppy like Ri-Ri, as well as a three-legged dog like Hopalong Cassidy, would fall into the treatables and manageables categories at WAGS. Treatable means a medical condition that can be resolved, anything from parvovirus to a broken paw. Manageable means medical or behavioral conditions the WAGS team feels can be handled by adopters, such as a dog in need of insulin injections for diabetes or continued training for behavior.

  “Some come in that are bright and shiny and cuddly with wagging tails, and nothing shows up on their entrance exam that is concerning to the doctor,” Russillo says. “So upon that entrance exam, upon the first twenty minutes, we know how easy it’s going to be to place that pet. On the flip side, in twenty minutes you can also tell you’ve got an abused dog, a malnourished dog, a dog full of fleas, rotten teeth, smelly ears.”

  Problems like bone fractures are easy, she says. They heal, and they’re history. On treatable dogs, WAGS has a budget able to fix pretty much anything up to $3,000 in veter
inary bills. As the coffers continue to grow along with the business, that figure will rise, Russillo says.

  The tougher cases are the manageables, including the ones Russillo calls “fresh” who spend extra time learning manners with the shelter director, Cortney Dorney, who has twenty years of experience as a dog trainer. Dorney also spends extra time working with dogs who have emotional challenges so severe that some other shelters might not even give them a chance—and who, nine times out of ten, will be fine if given whatever time they need.

  “It’s truly case by case,” Dorney says. “We have dogs that come in here that look to be emotionally destroyed, like there is no turning them around. They’ve completely given up. You can see the look in their face. They’re not showing any desire for physical attention, for human contact, they won’t eat, nothing. But if you give them five minutes, they completely flip around. Sometimes, it’s a dog where we can’t clean the cage without fear of getting injured, and in two days, it’s gone. Sometimes it’s three months before we feel the dog is adoptable and safe to put out in the public.”

  She adds, “We can’t have therapy sessions with them. We can’t ask them what the mental issue is. We have to work through the steps and read the body language and put them in situations and see how they respond, and figure out what they were never exposed to, whether it’s men or people in sunglasses or people leaning over, because they’ve never been hugged.”

  Dorney says it’s a mistake to believe that even the toughest-case dogs in shelters are permanently damaged, or that whatever behaviors they happen to be showing upon intake are behaviors they’ve either shown all their lives or will continue to express. (And plenty of people do believe that: a PetSmart Charities study expected to be released in 2015 showed the percentage of people who think a dog from a shelter may have behavioral problems jumped from 8 percent in 2009 to 13 percent today.) The reality, Dorney says, is different from that stereotype. She says a dog’s challenging behaviors are often a function of rational, understandable, and even situational fear, and the behaviors usually improve to a manageable level or vanish entirely as the dog learns that new things can be safe.