I wanted to hear more about how he got started with animal fighting, and whether his experience might translate well for kids who faced the same pressures he did to get involved. Vick seemed to be in a candid mood.
“I started dogfighting when I was eight years old. So many kids in the neighborhood were involved. We lived in public housing and we couldn’t have dogs in our houses. But we got a hold of dogs and we kept them in abandoned buildings. We fought them during the day, and then at night, we used them to chase down cats.”
“Eight years old? You were just a child.”
“You grow up quick in Newport News.”
“And then you were hooked at that point?”
“Yes, I was. It was exciting and I was really into it. I kept doing it as I got older, and nobody really ever told me to stop. I knew it was wrong, but I figured it was just a misdemeanor and I could get away with it. When I was at Virginia Tech, and we were fighting dogs in a field, I remember seeing a police car, and I was getting ready to run, and they just drove on by.”
“And then you kept on with it when you were playing football with the Falcons?”
“Man, I went back to Virginia on our one day off a week just to fight dogs. I mean, it’s crazy now that I think about it. I spent so much time on something so pointless.”
He continued, “We met a guy and he really showed us the ropes, taught us about the industry. We just got deeper and deeper into it. It was a really big part of my life.” That guy was “Virginia O”—Oscar Allen—indicted in October of 2007 and the last of the Bad Newz Kennels crew to be arrested.
By now I had made up my mind, but I wanted to lay down a marker. “Well, Mike,” I told him, “I really want to give you a chance to turn this around. I believe in change—on a societal level and on a personal level. But if you backtrack, or don’t show a continuing commitment, I’ll be the first to call you out. Mike, I think you know you are out of chits. You’ve got to make this work.”
“Wayne, I won’t disappoint you.”
We continued the conversation, and then I walked out to allow him and Judy to speak privately about other matters. I stepped into his backyard and made a phone call. But for the most part, I sat quietly and looked out into a field, waited, and thought about the mission of HSUS and whether Michael Vick could ever really fit in.
I still didn’t know whether he had changed at his core. Perhaps I’d never know with certainty. But I did know that his words and behavior had changed from his days at Bad Newz Kennels. His public statements, and his pledges to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell about working with us, encouraged me. That was an insurance policy, by my way of thinking, and if he reneged, everyone would know it.
I knew a lot of HSUS members would be upset about any association with Vick. They hated what he did, and so did I. But I didn’t see how shunning him would save the life of a single dog. I was there to think about what’s best for the animals—even if that made for some uneasy alliances.
Just as Vick had paid $1 million for the care of the dogs seized at Bad Newz Kennels, I thought he should now have to invest his time in community outreach programs to reach kids. Animal fighting was gaining new recruits in the African American and Latino communities, and we had to do a better job of reaching all those young men in time. We were trying to jump-start our outreach, and Vick’s commitment could help.
We who advocate for animals are a movement of converts—former meat eaters turned vegetarians, trophy hunters turned wildlife watchers, onetime fur wearers now decked in cotton. We’re each on our journey, trying to live with integrity, and just as in meeting life’s other moral tests, no one is perfect or pure. Yes, Vick committed a terrible crime and did awful things to animals. But even for the guy who ran Bad Newz Kennels, there can be the good news of a second chance and a shot at redemption. Sometimes the change we seek comes down strange pathways. And sometimes it comes through the unlikeliest of people. Every great moral cause needs penitent converts and witnesses to a better way. If Michael Vick wanted to walk through that door, I would not be the one to close it on him.
A month later, after Vick’s home confinement was served, we did our first event with him, at the Baptist community center in Atlanta. The audience was a group of about fifty-five kids considered at risk of falling into the dogfighting world. I spoke, and so did Tio Hardiman, an African American who leads our community-based programs. Then, Mike came up and spoke. The kids listened to his every word. A crew from 60 Minutes was taping, and the stakes were high, for HSUS and for Vick.
“I want all of you to know that this haunts me, getting rid of dogs, it haunts me,” he told them. “There were many times when I said to myself that I gotta stop this. Stop doing this. My intuition was telling me this ain’t right but I couldn’t stop doing it—peer pressure. Five days after I really had those thoughts, my cousin was busted and then the whole thing came down and before I knew it I was facing jail time.
“I spent 544 nights in prison and I cried on so many of those nights. It hurt and I knew I had to come out and make an impact. So during my time in jail, I put together a strategy with one main message, which is that the feelings we have for one another, for human beings, we should have for pit bulls.
“What’s happening now with dogfighting is sick and it upsets me because I was a follower in all this, not a leader, and now I want to be a leader against dogfighting. I never gave them a chance and if I could go back I’d change it.”
In Chicago, at a similar forum several weeks later, Mike carried the same message. “We need to be good to animals. Not just dogs, but all animals—horses, birds, cats, and all animals. Don’t do what I did. I hurt animals for such pointless purposes. Now, I want to help more animals in the future than I harmed in the past.”
As I sat and listened to Vick, on both occasions, I was thinking, We have to embrace this kind of change. This is what we want. We should not look for reasons to reject it. We can’t afford to.
Our programs are designed to lead these kids away from dog-fighting and to show them how a man is supposed to treat a dog—with respect, gentleness, and love for a creature who can love you back. After all, if an adult in Michael Vick’s life had stepped up to teach him that, he’d have been spared a lot of grief, and many dogs would have been spared from the horrors he inflicted.
I don’t know if Mike, now a star again in the NFL, will stay with the program forever, but he is with it now and I am happy about it. By the end of 2010, he had spoken to ten thousand kids in at-risk communities, and to a person, they’d listened to him with rapt attention. I can sense he is feeling some pride in being part of something good. I hope he’ll stay with it for the distance. And as long as his heart leads him into our ranks, he’ll always be welcome.
CHAPTER FIVE
For the Love of Pets
IN A LIFETIME OF being around animals, I’d seen some strange and interesting things, but here was something completely different: I was standing in the front galley of a Continental Airlines 727 that was soon to depart Baton Rouge Airport, surveying a plane packed with passengers—all of them dogs. It was like something from a Far Side cartoon, complete with chipper flight attendants serving dog biscuits and water. Given the desperate circumstances, everyone was quiet and well behaved, and the sound of the captain’s voice had ears up and heads tilted. Not one of the 140 dogs on board was barking or whining—not even the ones stuck in the middle seats.
There was something comical in the scene, but also deeply touching, seeing all these frightened faces wondering what was happening to them. Yet however afraid they might have felt at the moment, every one of them was lucky to be leaving New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina. These guys had already been through a lot. They’d been abandoned when the city was evacuated, left to fend for themselves as the waters rose, their food ran out, and they found themselves all alone in an empty house. When finally they heard a friendly voice, it wasn’t their owners but one of the hundreds of rescuers who had come to h
elp. Now they were bound for California, where others would take them in until one day soon, if everything worked out, their owners would find them and take them back home. What mattered most right now was to get them to safety and worry about the reunions later.
Their first stop after the rescue had been the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center, an equestrian facility which almost overnight had been transformed into America’s largest emergency animal shelter. That facility in Gonzales, Louisiana, had a capacity of two thousand dogs and other animals and could surely have fit more had the management company renting the place to us given its permission. But two thousand was the rule, and they held us to it, no matter how great the need. So for every new arrival past that number we had to make space, and that meant moving animals somewhere else. With hundreds more arriving by the day, we were in a tough spot, and as usual it was the kindness of strangers that showed us the way. This is how I came to know Madeleine Pickens. She called out of nowhere to say she’d been reading about the abandoned animals of New Orleans, knew that they needed transport from the disaster area, and if I could get them to an airport, the planes would be waiting.
Not the kind to just cover the costs and leave it at that, Madeleine was there on the tarmac to help with the off-loading when the trucks rolled up. After the dogs had been placed in their seats, Madeleine walked up and down the aisle, giving each one a little dose of love. And just before that plane took off, headed first for San Diego and then Marin County, she assured me that there would be more planes as needed. I took her up on that offer too and returned to Lamar-Dixon relieved to know that in the unfolding crisis of Katrina we had a new and very formidable ally in Madeleine Pickens.
The amazing thing was how many people from all across our country stepped up to rescue Katrina’s animal victims, and in time to reunite them with their worried, often despondent owners. With so many human lives in the balance, it took a while before the media turned their cameras on the plight of animals in the flood. But when they did, what America saw was deeply troubling and tragic in its own way—a dog swimming in the waters, seemingly with no place to go; a cat trapped on a rooftop, and exposed to the withering summer sun; a forlorn dog peering out of an attic window, abandoned and alone. As millions saw these images, they wanted action—and this outpouring of concern was like nothing we had ever experienced at HSUS.
Then an interesting thing happened—something I always hope for, but that you can never quite anticipate: the world saw that helping animals is a task that also helps people. The separate stories of the human rescue and the animal rescue melded together, and it became clear that if government authorities did not attend in a serious way to both problems, then both efforts would fail. We saw it play out time and again. Those who were forced to leave their pets behind went to heroic lengths to come back and find them. Others defied orders and simply refused to evacuate without their pets. They stayed behind in flooded homes or waded through the streets carrying their animals. Friends don’t walk away from each other in a time of need, as they saw it, and whatever the dangers they’d face them together. It was a kind of revelation for the American public, and a defining hour for the humane movement. We saw the forceful pull of the human-animal bond, and how it reaches almost everyone. We saw the courage and love it inspires, even at the most dire moments.
Amid all of the tumult and stress of those weeks, I noticed something else—something that didn’t happen. As a spokesman on the scene for HSUS, I had expected to hear a charge about all that was going on around me—the thousands of rescued animals, the hundreds of people who deployed, the millions of dollars sent to support the operation. Why help all these animals when people were suffering so terribly? No matter what the situation, or how desperate the need of animals, there are always those who say that caring for animals is a case of misplaced priorities.
But this time, the question never came—not once, in hundreds of interviews. And I think I know why: because people seeing these rescues on television instantly understood the need at hand and the goodness of our effort to save lives. Nobody demanded an explanation or sought to belittle our concern for these innocent creatures even amid so much human loss and sorrow. The animal-rescue efforts after Katrina were all a part of the same picture of how a kind and caring society responds to suffering—not helping one instead of the other, but helping human and animal alike. And if any cynics had been tempted to make light of our efforts, the best answer would have come from the many human victims of Katrina whose love for their own animals was so apparent, and in some cases so strong that they even put themselves at risk to save their pets.
Katrina and the Human-Animal Bond
RESIDENTS OF NEW ORLEANS and surrounding areas were left to take those risks because there was so little in the way of a plan to help people and their pets, and this brought confusion from the very beginning. One of the few acts of foresight, as far as animals were concerned, was to convert Tiger Stadium at Louisiana State University into a holding center for the pets of early evacuees. People fleeing inland before the storm were able to drop off their pets there, and staff and students of the veterinary college stood ready to care for them. This one precaution saved hundreds of lives, but it was a happy exception in the crisis to come.
In New Orleans and beyond, many people had fled their homes but left the animals behind. Most of them topped off large bowls or even filled their bathtubs with water. They left mounds of pet food and assumed the animals could cope on their own for a couple of days until the storm had passed. And, of course, some people did not leave at all, either unwilling or unable to evacuate. They hunkered down with their animals and braced for the worst.
That moment drew closer on August 29, 2005, when Katrina flattened some of the outlying islands south of the mainland before plowing into the beachfront communities of southwestern Mississippi and eastern Louisiana. The hurricane’s eye had landed fifty miles east of New Orleans, not a direct blow but close enough to leave the city battered and damaged. The second blow didn’t come from above, but when the rising waters overwhelmed the levees and released the floodwaters.
It didn’t take long to realize outside help would be needed. It was a challenge far beyond the means of local humane organizations to deal with, though they gave it all they had. The Louisiana SPCA, for example, had already evacuated all 263 animals from its shelter and sent them to Texas. Just in time, too, since its main facility in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans was soon under water. Other animals in the high-impact zone had a different fate. I was sickened to learn that twenty-three dogs and cats held by the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi had drowned in their cages after vainly swimming for hours as floodwaters rose inch by inch until the air was gone.
So it fell entirely upon the HSUS and dozens of other nonprofit organizations to save and shelter animals and to reunite them with their families. At such moments, there is no safety net for the animals, but after Katrina, we and allied rescue groups offered the closest thing to it. Police, firefighters, and other first responders had received no guidance at all for animal rescue, and even if they had known what to do, they had no equipment, training, or other resources to do the job. All of that would become our responsibility, and soon we found ourselves conducting the largest animal-rescue mission in American history.
Volunteers came from everywhere. There were professional rescuers from all over the country—from Rhode Island and New Jersey to California and Hawaii. There were veterinary teams—VMATs—to provide emergency care for the weakened and famished animals brought to Lamar-Dixon, in tents that looked like MASH units. And then there were the many hundreds of nonprofessionals who just showed up, took on any job they were given, and never stopped working except for a few hours’ sleep on a good night. As tens of thousands of people were rushing out of New Orleans and surrounding areas—for good reason, and often under government order—these volunteers were rushing in to help. And just getting to the disaster area took a lot of doing. They were a selfless and coura
geous force, and there was no hardship they wouldn’t endure to save a life.
Along with the volunteers on the scene, hundreds of thousands of Americans donated products and money to enable the rescue and relief. When it was all added up, close to $100 million was donated to local and national humane organizations in the weeks after Katrina hit. It was not anything like the billions given for the response to the human crisis, or the additional billions spent by the federal government, but it was a wonderful show of generosity, and it spared a lot of heartbreak.
The worries and fears of pet owners grew by the day, and for many our rescuers were their last hope. In the days after the levees broke, HSUS received some seven thousand phone calls and e-mails just from people in New Orleans and surrounding communities who pleaded for help in saving their animals. Other groups responding to the disaster logged thousands of calls too. Residents weren’t allowed back into the city because National Guard troops had walled it off, barring anyone but emergency responders.
No one knew how long authorities would maintain the barricade preventing reentry, but seeing the chaos and destruction around us, we began to realize that it might be weeks or even months. That meant it was a race against time in rescuing thousands of animals trapped in homes, or struggling to survive on rooftops or car tops in parts of the city with no dry ground. Starvation and dehydration, to say nothing of distress and fear, would set in if help didn’t arrive soon.
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