Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

by Rosenfelt, David

  She said that Wanda had gotten up on her hind legs and hugged Debbie with her front paws through the cage bars. That, she explained, had clinched the sale, though I’ve got a hunch the sale was clinched the moment Debbie set eyes on her.

  We took Wanda to our vet, as we did with all newcomers. He checked her out and the staff gave her a bath, and then began picking the ticks off of her. They counted over four hundred of them, which disgustingly revealed how mistreated she had been. Even worse, Wanda truly was terribly undernourished. I could see every one of her ribs; I will never understand how someone could fail to provide food for a dog. But that wasn’t going to be a problem at our house.

  Once we got her home, Wanda gained weight so fast that I think Debbie must have been slipping her bowling-ball-sized biscuits. I assume her ribs are still there, but they soon retreated from sight, and Wanda currently weighs 165 pounds.

  There are only four dogs currently capable of getting up onto our bed without assistance. Three of them—Jenny, Benji, and Otis—are relatively young and can jump high enough to get there. The fourth, Wanda, would never dream of jumping. She simply steps onto the bed, as if it were a curb.

  Amazingly, she doesn’t seem to take up that much room on the bed. She finds her spot in the crowd and sort of curls up. She’s comforting to sleep next to; we call her the Great Wall of Wanda. She snores loudly, and for a few months Debbie thought it was me. Then one day I was out of town and the snoring continued, which got me off the hook.

  Our bed is truly something to see at night. There are always four or five dogs up there, including Wanda and Bernie, the Bernese mountain dog. Everybody prefers Debbie to me, so they all get as close to her as they can, leaving me relatively unimpeded.

  In Santa Monica, Debbie’s side of the bed was about two feet from the window, and I walked in one night to find her asleep, but so crowded that her feet were on the windowsill.

  And the noises in our bedroom are unbelievable. Between the snoring and the scratching, the collars jiggling, and all the other weird noises, it sounds like a jungle in Zaire.

  But back to Wanda. When it came to feeding time, she was hilarious. She got the same amount of food as the others, the only difference being that she viewed the serving as the appetizer. Once she was finished, usually about fifteen seconds after she started, she went on patrol.

  She knew which dogs were unlikely to finish their meals, and she was on the scene when they walked away from their dish. She then inhaled what they’d left behind and moved on to the next one.

  Wanda is a serious eater.

  She is also a gentle giant, obedient and wanting only to be petted. She craves human contact. It is scary to think how many Wandas are out there, being used as guard dogs or stuck outside in deference to their size.

  Wanda belongs in the house, on the bed, on the couch, wherever the hell she wants to go. And that is how she is going to spend the rest of her life.

  Otis

  Lorie Armbruster, a friend and terrific rescue person in Orange County, called with a problem. Their rescue group had a three-year-old shepherd mix named Otis that they had unsuccessfully placed three times. Each time, he had been returned with a complaint; he was too aloof or too aggressive or too skittish or too whatever.

  They felt that he might be unadoptable, and euthanasia was under consideration. That was why she turned to us, even though Otis was a much younger dog than we usually took in.

  When I went to get Otis, Lorie gave me a speech about his emotional issues, one of which was that he was completely unfriendly, bordering on aggressive, with women. Perhaps a woman had mistreated him earlier in his life, but there was no way to know that now.

  I brought Otis home, and it was clear that he loved having the other dogs around. Debbie was at work, so I called her and told her that she should be very careful around Otis until we learned whether or not he presented a danger.

  When she came home, she sat on the couch quietly with a glass of wine. It was hard for her to drink it, though, because Otis jumped up on the couch, draped himself across her lap, and went to sleep. I told Debbie that she must not be a real woman.

  Otis has a bunch of friends that he wrestles and runs in the Maine woods with. His best friend is Benji; they are completely inseparable.

  Simon the Psycho

  A couple of years ago we got a call from a rescue group alerting us to a very difficult situation. A family in the San Fernando Valley had a ten-year-old golden mix named Simon. He had been theirs since he was a puppy, and they loved him and provided a good home for him.

  Then one day, for no apparent reason, he bit the woman, inflicting a small but significant amount of damage. They had two young children, and they instantly and correctly decided that they couldn’t keep Simon and risk injury to those children.

  But they overreacted. Rather than moving cautiously, they brought Simon to the East Valley shelter and turned him in. Not wanting to entirely abandon him to the system, they notified rescue groups and asked them to intervene if Simon didn’t get adopted through the shelter.

  Unfortunately, the system isn’t set up to work that way. Since they reported the bite and the woman got medical care for it, the shelter was not allowed legally to adopt Simon out to anyone other than a registered rescue group.

  The normal procedure in situations like this is for them to hold on to a dog for ten days to make sure it doesn’t have rabies. Then, after that period and if a rescue group hadn’t put in a claim for it, it would be put down.

  So Simon’s only chance was a rescue group, but that was a slim one. Simon was a mix and therefore didn’t qualify for breed rescues. The few groups that take mixes are generally overcrowded, and with all the great dogs in the system, why would they use a space on a senior who bites? For obvious reasons, he would be extraordinarily hard for them to place.

  So we took Simon. He was adorable and friendly, and exhibited no aggressive tendencies whatsoever. That’s not to say he didn’t have his idiosyncrasies. For instance, he went crazy whenever he was on the other side of a closed door from Bernie, the Bernese mountain dog. We would put Bernie into a room by himself to eat, to prevent him from taking everybody else’s food. Simon would bark like a lunatic outside the door until Bernie came out, and then he was fine again.

  Simon seemed to like me more than he did Debbie, and he followed me around all day. This made him quite unusual; almost every dog we ever had preferred Debbie, and we’ve had a lot of them. His favorite spot was on the chair in my office, where he stayed while I was working on my computer.

  He was in that position one day when Debbie came into the office. She went over to Simon to pet him. He was looking right at her, so he wasn’t taken by surprise … but she was. He bit her on the arm and hand. The wounds required twelve stitches.

  I reluctantly came to the conclusion that we needed to put him down; we simply couldn’t keep such an obvious danger to life and limb. I contacted his previous family, who had occasionally been coming to visit him. They didn’t resist; as much as they loved Simon, they agreed that we needed to do what we needed to do.

  The only one who didn’t agree was Debbie. Simon has this sweet, friendly way about him (when he isn’t ripping humans apart), and she couldn’t bear to kill him. We’d just have to be more careful.

  And we have been. As of this writing, it’s been two years since Simon bit Debbie, and there hasn’t been another incident. This is a surprise, since by other standards he’s even nuttier than he used to be.

  For instance, in the Maine house there’s a staircase to the second floor that has a railing alongside it. Whenever there’s any kind of barking, Simon runs up the stairs, and Bernie runs to the side of the railing on the first floor. They then bark furiously and angrily at each other, venting their outrage while secure in the knowledge that the railing is protecting them both.

  But it is amazing how few times we’ve been bitten by any of our dogs. The worst bite I suffered was from a collie mix named Sadie,
a crotchety old lady who was one of the first dogs we ever took into our home. Sadie considered herself royalty, and she did not suffer fools easily.

  She didn’t like anything about me, and she made that quite clear one day when she bit me on the elbow. And she didn’t just bite me; she dug her teeth in to the point that when I lifted my arm in pain, she hung on, and I raised her off the ground.

  Even with all that, the damage wasn’t particularly severe, and I didn’t even go to the doctor. That presented something of a problem, since it left me with no credible way of garnering sympathy from Debbie.

  She was coming in from a business trip that night, and I went to pick her up at the airport. I wasn’t in that much pain, but I decided that a sling would be the best way to demonstrate the trauma and suffering I had experienced. So I created a makeshift one and wore it.

  It was, of course, the first thing that Debbie noticed, and she asked what had happened, her voice reflecting real concern.

  “Sadie bit me,” I said. “And she dug her teeth in so hard that I lifted her off the ground.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing yet,” I said, hoping to be praised for my restraint.

  “No, I meant what did you do to make her bite you?”

  So there it was … out in the open. Debbie was taking Sadie’s side against me. She was siding with the predator over the victim.

  I would like to say it was an isolated incident, but alas, this book is nonfiction. In Debbie’s view, dogs can do no wrong.

  If a dog takes something off my desk and chews it, her view is I left it too close to the edge.

  One of them pissed on the floor? Must be a bladder infection.

  Barking too loudly and too often? They must have seen an animal outside.

  Simon bites her and gives her twelve stitches? She startled him and he was reacting in understandable self-defense.

  Suffice it to say that when I screw up, I don’t get that much consideration and understanding.

  Not even when I’m wearing a sling.

  Kaboom

  I think the first thing I sensed was that Otis was pacing. Otis is a ninety-pound shepherd mix, and I didn’t notice him because he was making noise; I noticed him because the pacing he was doing was on my chest.

  Even if he had been making a racket, I wouldn’t have heard it, because within moments the thunder was so loud that no other sound could possibly intrude upon it. And then there were also the flashes of lightning, which turned the area into daylight every four or five seconds. Looking out the window was like watching the “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad on CNN, minus Bernie Shaw’s reporting.

  Keep in mind that our dogs are from Southern California, so they basically had no idea what thunder and lightning were. I myself hadn’t been in a thunderstorm for almost twenty years, and probably had never been in one that severe in my life. I certainly had never been in one in Vegas, because it almost never rains in the casinos.

  The ironic thing is that lack of weather, and especially thunderstorms, had been one of my expressed reasons for wanting to leave California and head east. I love thunderstorms and always have; I have fond memories from growing up of sitting on our front porch in Paterson, New Jersey, and watching the pounding rain bouncing off the road. But this one was not particularly well-timed.

  The noise coming from the outside was deafening, and trying to sleep was impossible; I finally knew what it must be like to be our neighbor. During the brief pauses when the thunder stopped, I could tell that our dogs were barking, though in comparison to the crashing thunder, they sounded like Simon and Garfunkel singing “Sounds of Silence.”

  Actually, they were not going as nuts as I would have expected. Otis continued to pace, and I’d moved him to the floor. Simon also seemed agitated, though he hadn’t bitten anyone, and Benji was at the window, trying to figure out what the hell could possibly be going on.

  I hadn’t moved from the bench I was lying on, and it was going to take a lot more than a storm to budge me. I was actually fairly comfortable, and my sense was that I was not going to have very many moments like that on the trip.

  Emmit had obviously been wakened by the storm, and he yelled out to me that Erik and Nick hadn’t come back. He had last seen them lying out on the grass, apparently preferring to sleep under the sky, unencumbered by dogs. But that was obviously prior to the storm.

  I was worried about them, and I assessed my options. I could stay where I was, comfortable and under a blanket, and do nothing. Or I could go outside in that ridiculous storm and try to find them.

  It was the definition of a no-brainer.

  I’ve had much tougher rationalizations, since there were only two realistic possibilities. Erik and Nick were not banging on the door to be let in, so they’d either found cover or been hit by lightning. If they’d found cover, they were fine. If they’d been hit by lightning, they were dead. Either way, there was really nothing for me to do.

  The odds against the third possibility, that they had been hit by lightning and survived, were minuscule. As they say, there’s more chance of getting hit by lightning than that happening. And it’s not like I’d been trained in anti-lightning CPR; what the hell would I do if I found them? I think I read somewhere that the best thing to do with a lightning victim is let them sleep it off in the rain.

  Besides, selfless as I am, I had to consider the repercussions should something happen to me. The dogs needed me on the vehicle. What if I were to go outside and get hit by lightning myself? Who would be the trip leader? What would happen to the dogs that love me so? I needed to survive for the greater good.

  Obviously, I had no role to play in this crisis.

  Debbie called to ask if we were OK, and I told her that we were fine, and that the dogs were doing well. She said that her gang was surprisingly calm, and she was going to call the other RV and check in on them.

  When I made the mistake of telling her that Erik and Nick were outside, she said, “Shouldn’t you make sure they’re OK?”

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” I said.

  “In this storm?”

  “It’s not really that bad; it sounds a lot worse than it is.”

  And then, as if on cue, the RV door opened and Erik and Nick came in, soaking wet but otherwise intact. Of course, Debbie wasn’t aware of that, so I said, “I’ve got to go look for them. I don’t care about the personal danger; I’m responsible for the members of this team.”

  When I hung up I said, “Welcome back,” to Erik and Nick. “You guys OK?”

  “It’s raining like crazy out there,” Erik said.

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  The storm went on for at least another half hour. I thought we were parked on a dirt lot, and my fear was that we were going to wake up and find ourselves bumper-deep in mud. It wasn’t a strong enough fear to get me to go outside and check; no fear could be that strong.

  Of course, whatever the terrain was like, we were going to have to walk the dogs on it, so if it was muddy, that could be very unpleasant. There were no hoses to wash them off, and not enough water if there had been hoses.

  Eventually my alarm went off, and after five minutes of gearing myself up, I set out to wake everybody. The dogs were slow to rise, but the humans seemed eager and alert and raring to go.

  The ground wasn’t bad at all; I guess the area must have needed the rain. We set up our mini dog park and let the gang out. We were getting better at it; everybody seemed to know their assignments, and it all just kicked into gear.

  Most people reported getting some sleep, which was fairly amazing under the circumstances. Everybody had a story to tell, mostly about the experience of waking up with dogs in their faces. Cyndi Flores was crowded to the point that she’d slept on a bench with her feet up on the cooler containing the meatballs.

  It was our first feeding time, so I took a large bag out of the storage area and put food into twenty-five dishes. At home we always put some wet f
ood on top of the dry to make it more tasty and palatable, but I’d decided not to do it on this trip. It would take time and involve too many hassles: washing the dishes, opening the cans, et cetera. I am a master at hassle avoidance.

  The dogs barely ate, except of course for Wanda, which was no great surprise. They’d been under considerable stress, with their new surroundings and new human companions, and stress will often make them less likely to eat. We see it when we bring a new dog into our house; in some cases it can take twenty-four hours before they’re chomping down.

  I was sure we were well behind schedule, but I really had no way to accurately judge that. We were going to have to figure it out soon, since we had the hotel reserved in Maine and, more significant, people had flights home. We were supposed to get there on that coming Thursday, and the flights were on Friday. I didn’t think we were going to make it.

  We got some bad news when we learned that the Love’s rest stop had lost its electric power in the storm, so the showers wouldn’t be available. It wasn’t such a disaster that day, since we had all showered the day before. But if things like that kept happening, it could get quite unpleasant.

  The same drivers—Emmit, Randy, and Joe—were behind the wheel when we left. They’d been the only drivers so far, and they seemed fine with it. I assumed they had taken a look at the rest of us and decided that they would rather drive in a state of exhaustion than risk dying with us.

  Joe reported that Wanda the mastiff insisted on climbing onto the driver’s seat with him. He resisted my offer to move her onto my RV. Joe and Terri were totally pleasant, go-with-the-flow-type people; in fact, the entire group seemed to fit into that category.

  The first stop was for gas; by then our gas bill was approximately the GDP of Uruguay. We’d been using Debbie’s credit card, and twice the company cut off credit, thinking that somebody must have stolen the card and was using it fraudulently. Each time she had to call them and explain the situation, and then deal with the laughter and surprise of the person at the credit card company.