Animals’ Best Friends

By JOHN MARK EBERHART

‘Dogtown’ showcases success stories at the nation’s largest no-kill shelter

“Dogtown: A Sanctuary for Rescued Dogs” by Best Friends Animal Society and Bob Somerville (Sellers Publishing Inc., 80 pp., $16.95)

LOS ANGELES — This crowded, sprawling city isn’t exactly Michael Mountain’s turf. He’s used to “3,700 acres, all canyon country, surrounded by federal and state land.”

On that acreage among the Utah canyons lies Dogtown. Run by the Best Friends Animal Society, it’s the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the nation. Many of the Michael Vick pit bulls ended up there. So did pooches from Hurricane Katrina, but Dogtown isn’t just dogs — it’s home to many species of abandoned or abused animals, including cats, goats, sheep, rabbits and horses.

“Dogtown” is also a TV show on the National Geographic Channel (the two-hour season premiere, “Saving the Michael Vick Dogs” is scheduled to air Sept. 5). And “Dogtown” is an 80-page book now, too, with text by Bob Somerville. Mountain wrote the introduction and is playing a key role in promoting the book, which explains his presence at the recent BookExpo America in LA.

Asked what he hopes the book will accomplish, Mountain, president and one of the founders of Best Friends, gives a simple answer:

“We would like people to think about adopting a dog or cat or whatever — to think about adopting from shelters rather than buying from a store. They’re great animals, and they become really loving pets. When you adopt from a shelter or rescue group, they know you have saved them, and there is that bond, and it is something very special.”

That’s it; I can’t stop myself from telling Mountain about Heath, the German short-haired pointer I rescued three years ago this summer. When I entered the shelter, other people were walking by him, and he followed them with his eyes but never budged from the floor of his cage. When he saw me, he immediately jumped up, put his paws on the chain-link barrier and started whining.

Mountain nods.

“Somehow,” he says, “they know.”

Mountain’s job might get some people down. He sees thousands of animals come into Dogtown, animals that have been left alone, starved, abused. But doing something about the problem “is very rewarding.”

And there always seems to be a problem. Best Friends, Mountain says, is facing a new predicament these days: the foreclosure crisis.

“You have more dogs and cats than ever just being abandoned by people who did apparently care about them,” he says. “They don’t know what to do — they have to move into Grandma’s apartment or something like that, so they drop Fido off at the shelter. Others, though, have just left dogs in a house when they’ve moved out — have left piles of food around and hoped for the best.”

Many readers find such stories disturbing, but “Dogtown” the book is anything but disquieting. In these pages readers will find vignettes of dogs regaining their happiness, dogs being healed by caring people and by the security of the dog pack itself. As Mountain writes in his introduction:

“‘Dogtown’ isn’t just a fun name. From the beginning it’s always been a town. Dogs are social animals. They naturally form their own societies and their own hierarchies with their own codes of behavior. Dogs who have been treated badly need to rediscover their own true nature, to become real dogs again. So they need to be with each other in order to do that.”

Reading that, one can’t help thinking of the dogs involved in the Michael Vick incident. The breakup of the ex-NFL quarterback’s dog-fighting operation didn’t bring as many dogs to Dogtown as the foreclosure crisis has, but it was ugly nonetheless.

“There were 40-something dogs taken in by the authorities,” Mountain says. “The 22 most difficult of them came to Best Friends. They’re in special care now.”

Mountain says those dogs face “a long rehabilitation, but they’ll be fine.”

He says one of Best Friends’ veterinarians, who focuses on animal mental health, “describes this as being very similar to dealing with someone with post-traumatic stress disorder. They’ve been through this series of horrors, so just like with people, there will be all sorts of things that set them off — somebody coming in with a such-and-such hat or something, which triggers some memory.”

Mountain adds it’s a matter of “time and trust — first getting the dogs to trust the people who are working directly with them, and then introducing them, slowly, to more and more people, so you can get them desensitized.”

Hurricane Katrina presented a completely different challenge. Just days after the storm, Somerville recounts in “Dogtown,” a “team of rescuers from Best Friends arrived ... having driven from Utah with all the supplies they could think of — generators, food, collars and leashes and catchpoles, crates, medical supplies, fencing material, tarpaulins for sun protection, twist ties, duct tape and so on.”

Rescuers roamed New Orleans with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne. Early on, many owners had been forced at gunpoint to abandon their animals. Once Best Friends personnel were on the scene, people were more likely to heed orders to leave. Best Friends took animals temporarily, then reunited owners and pets.

“Dogtown” the book can be a gut-wrenching read, but it focuses on such success stories. Along with the textual passages from Mountain and Somerville, the book features dozens of photos of dogs that are finding their way again. It’s their eyes — those guileless canine eyes — that will pull very firmly on readers’ hearts.

“I think people do have good intentions,” he says, but don’t always follow through on them. Yet Mountain’s outlook is optimistic when it comes to the issue of animal welfare in the United States.

“Generally speaking, things have gotten a lot better.”

The issue of animal welfare has become a hot-button topic. The 1960s brought the civil rights revolution, the 1970s the feminist movement. How humans treat animals is a major issue in the early 2000s.

Best Friends is a part of that evolution. In the wake of the Michael Vick story, Best Friends was a factor in getting Georgia to draft new protective anti-dog-fighting legislation.

“Georgia used to have one of the weakest dog-fighting laws in the country. Now it has one of the strongest.”

Across the country, the issue of “companion animals” and damage to them is changing legally, too. In the past, if someone hurt, abused or killed your dog, for example, you might be compensated, but your compensation would be based on the concept of the animal as a piece of property.

Increasingly, Mountain says, the courts have seen fit to compensate owners for the emotional damage from the loss of the animal.

Other developments he cites: the decline in the wearing of real fur, and decreases in animal abuses at factory farms and in experimental settings.

The work is never done, he cautions.

“But we certainly take care of animals now in a way that would have been inconceivable to people a hundred years ago.”

XJohn Mark Eberhart writes for the Kansas City Star.