DogTown

by Stefan Bechtel

  Being in my home gave Kaiser the chance to proceed at his own pace. For the first couple of years, new people made Kaiser nervous, so I didn’t push him too hard to make friends with everyone who came to visit. If I had friends over, he would prefer to stay out in the yard until they left. If we went out, it was pretty much impossible to get him inside someone else’s house. It used to be that if someone tried to pet him Kaiser would shy away and not come near, but if you ignored him and gave him some space, he would eventually come up behind you to investigate you. When he did become more comfortable (which could take a long time), he would let you touch him. It took some of my friends years to be able to walk up to Kaiser and be able to pet him.

  After a few years passed and Kaiser grew more confident, though, he started acting more like a normal dog around unfamiliar people. Instead of avoiding people outright, he is now comfortable approaching them and checking them out up front. And instead of taking between six months and a few years to be able to touch him, new people can now pet him the same day that they meet him. Kaiser has been with me for almost six years, and I can’t imagine what life would be like without him around. People who meet him now find it hard to believe he was ever an unsocialized, scared dog.

  As I finish writing, Kaiser is still sleeping on his couch, his legs twitching as he dreams. I can’t help but think about how lucky a dog he is to have made it all the way to Best Friends, where we found each other. Every day, thousands of shy, scared dogs just like Kaiser die in shelters around the world. All Kaiser needed was time, patience, and a good dog brother like Sherman to bring him out of his shell. I’ve never met a dog whom I thought was unadoptable and didn’t deserve another chance at life. I just wish there were more homes out there to give the Kaisers of the world the chance for a restful sleep on a couch of their own.

  After Knightly lost his first family, his behavior resembled human grief.

  10

  Knightly: A Dog in Mourning

  Many animals who come streaming into Dogtown are like a throng of mute refugees—tattered and torn, injured in both body and spirit, having survived grim hoarding houses, dogfighting rings, overcrowded shelters, or simple neglect and homelessness. But though their stories may be as heartrending as they are incredible, the details of what actually happened to them are usually almost entirely unknown.

  With Knightly, it was different. For one thing, he had a name, unlike all the other nameless arrivals at Dogtown. And as his name implied, he had a noble, almost princely bearing, as if his previous home were not a homeless shelter but the country estate of an archduke. A purebred Weimaraner, Knightly had a smooth body covered by a glossy mouse-gray coat and capped by a docked tail. His amber eyes, almost eerily human-like, reflected his sadness and loss.

  His age was also known—he was 13 years old, which is very elderly by dog standards. When he got to Dogtown, he was placed in a run at Old Friends, the area for senior animals, who are older and slower than the others—a sort of canine assisted-living facility.

  All of these things were known about Knightly because, unlike many of the other residents of Dogtown, he had spent his entire life with a loving and devoted couple, who treated him as part of the family. It was only quite recently that the trouble had begun. Knightly’s owners themselves grew elderly and ill, and when they became incapable of taking care of themselves, nurses and other caregivers began regularly visiting Knightly’s home. Like most Weimaraners, Knightly was a loyal and devoted guardian of his family, and when these unknown people began invading his house, doing unknown things to his ailing masters, he became extremely protective and extremely confused. He didn’t know what was going on or what to do.

  Finally, one day he lashed out and bit one of the caregivers. As a result of this incident, Knightly was taken away from his beloved family and placed with a small, independent animal rescue. Distraught, lost, and overcome with anxiety and sadness, he paced and whined, unhappy and uncomfortable. The rescue facility, in turn, sought the help of Dogtown.

  And that’s how Knightly, the old friend, arrived at Old Friends.

  MOONLIGHT ON CHOCOLATE

  “When you’ve had an amazing life, and you are a senior dog, to lose everything seems truly tragic,” said Sherry Woodard, who became Knightly’s primary trainer when he arrived at Dogtown. “When I looked at him, I understood that he wanted it all back—he wanted back exactly what he had, a life with people he knew, all his familiar toys, a place where he was comfortable. We can’t offer his old life back to him. It’s gone. But what we do want to offer him—what I really feel I’m obligated to offer him—is a life that is amazing.”

  Sherry has long, straight golden hair, which she keeps flicking out of her eyes. At Best Friends, where she has worked for 12 years, she is an Animal Behavior Consultant as well as being a nationally certified animal trainer. In fact, she now lives in a house filled with dogs and cats on the sanctuary grounds, just across the street from Old Friends, so that her work and her life are inextricable. She smiled sweetly when she mentioned this.

  “I love what I’m doing with my life,” she said. “I am living what I believe, and I’m making a difference.

  “I sometimes think people might describe me as extreme—that I put myself last, after all these animals. However, I feel very spoiled. I feel very blessed. I feel that I couldn’t be living a better life because I’m doing something that I love so much.”

  When she was a child, she pointed out, “I had incredibly intimate relationships with my pets, like a lot of kids do. But I’ve held on to my relationships with animals as an adult. I’ve kept these relationships I had as a child.”

  And that has become the basis for her life’s work.

  One of the things that drew Sherry to Knightly—besides the fact that she found him “gorgeous”—was knowing that he had emotional problems.

  “People who know me will tell you that I’m attracted to dogs that have been in trouble, dogs with behavioral challenges,” Sherry said. “All five of my guys at home are like that. Knightly doesn’t really fit that profile—he probably nipped one person in his whole life—but still, he was suffering. He was unhappy. And even though he was a senior dog, even though he did not have much time left on this planet, his life was valuable and worth incredible effort to make sure we offered him a rich life, no matter how short.”

  According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, five out of every ten dogs waiting for adoption in shelters are put to sleep just because no one chooses to adopt them.

  Her heart went out to this dignified, elderly gentleman, who seemed so anxious and distraught that he just paced in his run, making a high-pitched whining sound back inside his throat.

  But even though he seemed as frightened as a child lost in the woods, Knightly came from a long and aristocratic lineage. In the early 1800s, the Grand Duke Karl August of Weimar set out to create a noble-looking, reliable gundog for hunting big game like deer and bear. He also wanted a dog who would be a loyal household companion, at a time when most hunting dogs were rough customers who lived in packs in outdoor kennels. The result was the Weimaraner (named after the duke), a “dual-purpose” breed who was an obedient hunting dog as well as a sweet, loyal companion. Though the exact ingredients of the breed are not known, Weimaraners are thought to be related to the Great Dane and the red schweisshund, a tracking dog related to the bloodhound. They are cousins of the German shorthaired pointer. They have the extraordinarily expressive, slightly morose faces of hounds, but with light amber, gray, or blue-gray eyes that glitter with intelligence. (Weimaraners are so smart that they are sometimes called the dog with the human brain.) Pink skin often shows through around their eyes, which seems to accentuate their near humanness. Even their ears are expressive, gray and droopy as a donkey’s ears.

  Knightly’s bewilderment at the loss of his family often manifested itself as chattering, a nervous clicking of his teeth.

  But Weimaraners are also powerful
, athletic animals sometimes called gray ghosts because they move so silently when hunting. Their coloration is very unusual in dogs (the result of breeding for a recessive gene)—a color that ranges from charcoal gray to mouse gray to silvery gray and was once wonderfully described as moonlight on chocolate.

  But the most beloved trait of weimies, as they’re sometimes called—their love and loyalty to a human family—sometimes leads to their most troublesome problems. They’re “people dogs,” and if they’re relegated to an outdoor kennel without much human contact or left home alone for long periods, they can quickly become neurotic, problematic animals. And if they lose their human family entirely, they can come unraveled, suffering from severe separation anxiety that shows up as panic, anxiety, whining, drooling, or other destructive behavior, which is what had happened to Knightly.

  “A dog’s attachment to his owner is like a baby animal’s attachment to his mother, or a human child’s attachment to his mom or dad,” writes Temple Grandin, the autistic author of the book Animals in Translation, who seems to have an unparalleled insight into animal emotions. When those profound and primitive bonds are broken, animals like Knightly can come as unhinged as a human might in the same situation. People get so attached to their pets that they sometimes forget how attached their pets are to them.

  Knightly was confused by his new situation and missed his former family immensely. At Old Friends, he continued to pace and whine anxiously, peering out of his enclosure as though he expected his former owners to appear at any moment. He also “chattered,” incessantly vibrating or clacking his teeth like an old man with loose dentures. Chattering, said Sherry, “is fairly typical of old dogs when they’re anxious.” It’s not difficult to empathize with these canine emotions of grief and mourning; they are among the many things humans have in common with our animal companions.

  IN NEED OF A HOME

  Knightly’s vocalizations, Sherry said, were his attempts to express “true emotion—he wasn’t faking it. He wasn’t calling out because he wanted something, he was calling out because he needed something.” What did he need? Sherry felt that Knightly was trying to express that he desperately needed to be in a home, like the one he came from. He was trying to tell everyone that he did not want to live with a big group of other dogs, no matter how clean and spacious the quarters.

  Sherry felt that a new home might soothe Knightly’s anxiety, but until she fully understood the cause of his anxious behavior—or found a home that was suitable—she didn’t think she would truly be able to help him. Even Dogtown would probably not be enough. “A lot of people think of Dogtown as this ideal, perfect place—but it’s not that way for all dogs,” she explained. “Someone like Knightly, who had this life he loved very much, could be very unhappy in Dogtown.”

  Sherry knew very well that working with anxiety-ridden animals can be a difficult, frustrating, unrewarding job. One anxious dog who was adopted from Best Friends eight years earlier had experienced “ups and downs” ever since adoption, and Sherry had continued to work with the adoptive family. The dog had “waves of unexplained anxiety” that she and the family had struggled to understand. Sometimes it turned out to be something simple (a fostered kitten), and other times it remained an unexplained mystery.

  Ultimately, Sherry wanted to take Knightly into her own home to foster him and get to know him more intimately. But her house was “very special,” she said—meaning that it was occupied by five cats and five dogs, all of whom were rescue animals with quirky behavior issues.

  As a first step toward taking Knightly home to meet her “motley crew,” Sherry decided to try an overnight stay at one of the rental cottages used by visitors, on the grounds of the Best Friends sanctuary. This would be a “trial run” before fostering Knightly in her own home until a permanent home could be found, thereby helping him to become more accustomed to living in a home and thus more adoptable. “I want to get him as close as possible to what we hope to offer him in the future,” she said.

  When she loaded Knightly into her car for the short trip to the cottage, he bounded over from the passenger side with his big, mournful gray face and gave her a slobbery lick-kiss. “Oh, thanks—this’ll be a good date,” Sherry said.

  Actually, she had already been warned that it probably wouldn’t be a good date—a volunteer who’d had a sleepover with Knightly had reported that he had been unable to settle down, whining and following her from room to room all night. Sherry wasn’t expecting to get much sleep.

  When she got to the cottage, she put Knightly in the house and made two trips out to her truck to get her toiletries and laptop. She deliberately lingered outside for a few minutes with Knightly alone in the house, to see if he might have a full-blown panic attack. (Because he tended to stick to people like glue, never letting them out of his sight, Sherry conjectured that he might believe if he let a caregiver out of his sight, they would be gone forever.) But he seemed to manage this brief separation without trouble.

  The ASPCA estimates that owning a medium-size pet dog costs around $695 per year. This includes the dog’s food, medical bills, insurance, treats, and license.

  When Knightly arrived at the cottage, he willingly walked through the door but still seemed a little on edge and anxious. He paced and whined and chattered. He also expressed his anxiety in another way: spinning around in circles. He didn’t zip around like a young dog would, spinning like a pinwheel; instead, the old dog trudged around and around, mournfully, as though plodding along after his own tail.

  And Knightly nervously followed Sherry everywhere, shadowing her so closely that she couldn’t turn around without bumping into him. Cooking dinner, brushing her teeth, getting ready for bed—the gray ghost was right there, like a Secret Service agent tailing the President. Sherry crawled into one of the two single beds, and Knightly lumbered up after her, awkwardly trying to cuddle. But Sherry needed to keep testing Knightly to see if he would compulsively shadow her. Sherry kept popping out of bed to read, to get something to eat, to check her computer—and every step of the way Knightly followed, dutifully tracking her. Finally, after he seemed to relax enough to fall asleep on the bed, she crept over to the other bed and climbed in. He got up a couple of times in the night to check on his human, then returned to the first bed and fell asleep again.

  By the next morning, Knightly seemed to have decided that life was good, he was safe, and nothing bad would ever happen. He actually seemed to be more relaxed in the guest cottage than Sherry was.

  “He couldn’t have been happier, laying there on that couch,” she recalled. “Then he went out and happily rolled around and grunted all over the carpet, with a big dog smile. He was thrilled to be there. He had an appropriate request to go outside. He went to the door. He asked once and then just stood and waited for me to take him outside.”

  After his sleepover, Sherry said, “I felt much more comfortable with the idea that he could have an amazing future with the right people, in the right home, and that his anxiety would subside.”

  Still, when she returned Knightly to his quarters at Old Friends later that day, he quickly reverted to his old behavior, anxiously pacing and whining and chattering. “I don’t think that we spent enough time together for him to understand that I was coming to get him again and spend more time with him,” Sherry said.

  Over the following weeks and months, Knightly went to several different people’s home for sleepovers as part of a program developed by Sherry years earlier. The purpose was to get the dogs out of their runs at Dogtown, out of their comfort zones, to see how they would behave in a normal home setting full of bizarre and alien phenomena like TVs, dishwashers, beds—and sometimes other animals. The “report cards” filled out after Knightly’s sleepovers painted an endearingly mixed picture of him: “So, so sweet,” “quiet, a little whiny and clingy, seemed sad, would not relax if I was doing things, he would be standing right next to me,” “confused and anxious, will be a great pet with time, patience & traini
ng,” “wanted to be next to me wherever I was, including snuggling all night long (and even standing next to me as I dried my hair!).” One simply said, “I love him!”

  Many of these people mentioned one of Knightly’s most touching, and perhaps anxious, bedroom habits—he loved to burrow down under the covers, so that his head was buried all the way down at the foot of the bed.

  During his overnight stays with Sherry Woodard, Knightly reveled in her company and a comfortable spot on the couch.

  “I think Knightly’s messages are pretty clear,” Sherry said. “He truly does tell people that he knows what he wants in life. He wants a home, he wants comfortable furniture, he wants people to be near, but overall, I don’t think he’s needy in an unhealthy way. He seems like he might be a healthy guy, underneath an anxious exterior.”

  Even so, despite all the sleepovers and kind intentions, Sherry could see that Knightly was not making the sort of progress she felt he could. The “healthy guy” she was convinced lay inside him was still imprisoned by his own bewilderment, grief, and anxiety. And his surroundings at Old Friends didn’t seem to be helping him move forward with his life.

  THE SEARCH FOR HOME

  Finally, Sherry decided to see if it would be possible to temporarily foster Knightly in her own home, as he seemed the most comfortable in domestic surroundings. Knightly’s task is as difficult for a dog as it is for a human: Distinguished, elderly, and accustomed to a life of privilege, he would need to give up the past and adapt to a whole new living situation that was more crowded than the one he left behind. At Sherry’s house he’d have to share his castle with a gang of other animals who might not consider him top dog, as he’d been in his original home.