DogTown (26 page)

“H
ere, Johnny! C’mon, boy!”

Johnny just stands there.

“Hey, Johnny! C’mon, big fella!”

Johnny looks up slowly, like a crestfallen cow. He doesn’t move to the left or the right. He doesn’t act as if he’s even heard the command. Then—one, two, three, four beats later—he stirs, shuffling toward his trainer, Pat Whitacre, tongue lolling out, with a sweet, dopey grin on his face.

Johnny is a beautiful dog—a purebred golden retriever with such an extravagance of lush blond fur that the groomers at Dogtown line up to brush him. But you don’t have to spend much time with Johnny to suspect that he might be a little slow on the uptake. When he first arrived at the sanctuary, the Dog Admissions Report that’s filed for each arrival told a tragicomic story:

Johnny had been bought at a pet store, which meant, unfortunately, that he undoubtedly had been born and raised in a puppy mill (essentially a factory for mass-producing puppies, where breeding adults are often kept in tiny, filthy cages and forced to bear an endless stream of salable offspring).

But after a couple of months, Johnny’s frustrated new owners were overwhelmed by Johnny’s problems. They complained that Johnny was so dumb he couldn’t learn anything. He couldn’t be housebroken. Johnny was so slow to respond that they thought he might be not only deaf, but also even partially blind. As a result, he was kept in a kennel, where he would roll in his own feces, making himself both odoriferous and unapproachable. Despite his owners’ best intentions, Johnny was not much better off in their home than he’d been at the puppy mill.

The family gave up on Johnny and surrendered him to a golden retriever rescue organization. The breed rescue group, after trying to work with Johnny, also concluded that teaching a slower dog required more time than they could give him. “We’ve worked with him on ‘sit’ and it’s really hard—he just looks at you,” one of the rescue staffers said. The rescue group turned to the first place they thought could help a boy like Johnny: Dogtown. They appealed to Dogtown in the hope that there would be someone there willing to work with Johnny, who had struck a chord in their hearts: “He is in his own world and it’s a happy one! He has a way of looking at you that is so innocent and so loving. We hope that you will consider taking him in.”

A SWEET, SLOW BOY

Johnny’s file at Dogtown shows that he arrived on November 28, 2007, that he was an 11-month-old neutered male, and that all his shots—parvo, rabies, distemper—were in order. Johnny also showed up with something very few Dogtown arrivals possess: a complete certificate of pedigree, going back four generations. Unfortunately, his file also came with a Dog Admissions Report that basically described him as having flunked out of the elementary school of life. Despite the detailed history, the Dogtown staff would conduct their own assessments to form their own opinions of Johnny’s case and what kind of plan was needed to help him learn.

But dog trainer Pat Whitacre warmed up to Johnny right away. He liked him as soon as the big retriever came bounding out of a breed rescue van parked in front of the clinic—a big golden bundle of doggie energy. Pat led Johnny into the lobby and was given the dog’s short, unhappy history by one of the rescue staff. “He was this beautiful, happy puppy, who unfortunately had no place to go and a pretty bleak future,” Pat said. “His future wasn’t too bright unless he could change his behavior enough to be placed in a home somewhere.”

But despite the history of failure, Pat did not see a hopeless dog in front of him at all. “When people say a dog can’t learn, well, it’s a challenge to a dog trainer, and I’m a little oppositional by nature, but the statement makes no sense to me,” he said. “It’s not possible for an animal not to learn unless there is severe cross-circuiting in the brain—unless something’s really put together wrong up there.”

And Pat Whitacre just didn’t believe that was the case.

It’s not as though much beloved goldens are dim-witted as a breed. In a book called
The Intelligence of Dogs,
neuropsychologist Stanley Coren ranks the intelligence of dog breeds, based on the speed with which they learn new commands and several other criteria. Out of 79 breeds, according to Coren’s ranking, golden retrievers come in fourth. They’re in the top ten group of “brightest breeds” (smartest: border collies, followed by poodles, German shepherds, goldens, and Dobermans; dimmest: bulldogs, basenjis, and Afghan hounds).

But arguments over intelligence aside, one of the things that Johnny really had going for him was that “he’s the sweetest dog you’d ever hope to find,” Pat said. “It’s impossible to get him angry with you, and he has no real handling sensibilities, he has no kind of contact reactions from things touching him or brushing him or whatever. He doesn’t care who’s touching him, he doesn’t care if you touch him on his face, or touch him in his ears, or stick your fingers in his mouth, he’s not going to snap and bite somebody. He just loves everybody.”

Pat Whitacre was eager to work with a happy-go-lucky dog like Johnny and believed the dog could be taught new tricks.

WHY CAN’T JOHNNY LEARN?

The fact that Johnny had spent weeks or months in a puppy mill might have had something to do with his house-training problems, Pat felt. Like so many puppies raised in these factory farms for dogs, Johnny wasn’t housebroken simply because he didn’t need to be. Kept confined in a small cage, he simply defecated wherever he happened to be and learned to live in his own filth. Also, if he was confined in a small area where he got little if any exercise as a pup, that could have caused a bit of developmental delay in his motor skills, Pat reasoned. “We see that in him even today—he’s a little bit goofier and floppier than most year-old dogs would be,” Pat said.

Johnny had this harebrained way of stumbling into things so frequently that when he walked through the clinic kitchen, you could sometimes
hear
him walking by the procession of clanks and clatters. He’d do silly, inappropriate things for fun, the sorts of things kids do—like digging to the bottom of the trash can and scattering crumpled paper all over the floor, like someone searching for something.

Johnny, in effect, may well have been in recovery from the crimes that had been committed against him as a helpless puppy.

Pat took Johnny in for an overall physical with Dr. Mike Dix, the head vet and medical director at Dogtown, not long after he arrived.

When Dr. Mike began looking the shaggy dog over, he quickly noted that “he does seem a little bit slow to respond.” Johnny would look in one direction, and then Dr. Mike would make a noise, and a couple of seconds later Johnny would turn around and look. “There seems to be a disconnect between what happens and how he responds to it,” Dr. Mike said. Physically, though, Johnny was a fine specimen—a handsome, healthy dog with a good heart and lungs, able to move freely and without pain. His hearing and eyesight appeared to be normal. Medically, there seemed to be nothing wrong with Johnny at all. He was also, Dr. Mike noticed, “a very nice dog. He’s very sweet. He just seems like he’s kind of in his own little world.”

Dr. Mike described Johnny’s attitude as “happy-go-lucky but not aware…he’s like a rich billionaire who has no clue about life. He’s fun. He loves life. He just bounces around being goofy. I saw him playing with another dog one day and he’s sitting on top of him wrestling him. He’s a goofy dog. He could be a great family dog…as long as they don’t want too much out of him.”

The good news was that Johnny had a clean bill of health. As far as the vets could tell, there wasn’t anything physically preventing him from learning. The next step would be on the behavioral side: seeing what could motivate Johnny to learn.

PARTNERS WITH PAT

“Within the first 24 hours of meeting Johnny, I was real impressed with him,” Pat said. “This dog gets me very excited. I love this dog.”

Pat Whitacre looked at the same animal everyone else had looked at, but he did not see a dumb, hopeless bumbler. He saw a shining star. “He’s got so much going for him—so much potential. I can’t wait to start working with him. He has so many good features—everything I would look for in a dog to train. He is motivated, he is mobile, he is active, he gives you lots of behavior to play with. And he is absolutely harmless. He is the gentlest dog.”

Only a day or two after Pat started working with Johnny, such an obvious rapport had built up between the two of them that other trainers on staff at Dogtown started asking Pat if he was going to take Johnny home and foster him. Pat had already started to think that training Johnny would require being around him a great deal—more than simply visiting him at Dogtown. In fact, Pat felt that full-time fostering would be critical if Johnny was ever to overcome all his bad habits and lack of good ones. On a pragmatic level, Pat realized that fostering Johnny would probably mean not getting much sleep for a number of nights, and if he did get started fostering him on a weekday, he’d be dragging himself to work every day, exhausted. So he decided to wait until the weekend to get started, even though “had I waited one more day, somebody else would’ve yanked him out and fostered him first, and I wasn’t about to let that happen!”

Pat knew that having Johnny in a home environment would be enormously revealing. If Johnny was kept at the sanctuary, Pat would never really know if he’d solved his problems, because Johnny wouldn’t exhibit any problems there. In his comfortable, simple quarters at Dogtown, there would be no shoes for Johnny to chew up, no cats to bother, no food on the counter to gobble up—problems that hadn’t shown up yet but might in a home. Pat wouldn’t even really be able tell if Johnny was housebroken, either, because if he failed to go out through the doggie door and instead defecated indoors on the concrete, it just got cleaned up by volunteers.

In the sanctuary, “There’s really no reason for him to change his behavior, especially the behavior that keeps him from getting him into a home,” Pat said. “He would basically still be able to continue being Johnny, with very little opportunity for us to help him change those behaviors.”

So Pat took the happy, ditzy dog home. Pat led him, still on leash, around his house, where all Johnny’s problem behaviors popped up immediately. He tried to chew on anything within reach. He strained at the leash. He tried to eat food on the counter.

At the same time, he seemed oddly oblivious of things dogs usually notice—like one of Pat’s cats. Pat had put the cat safely in a cage so he could gauge Johnny’s attitude toward cats, but Johnny didn’t even register that there was a cat in the room. Holding out a treat, Pat tried to lead Johnny’s nose toward a cat on the windowsill above the sink. But Johnny just playfully grabbed a pot by the handle and started dopily playing with it, oblivious of the cat in the room. “Everything’s a toy, isn’t it?” Pat said to Johnny, unable to stop laughing at the dog’s endearing absentmindedness.

The qualities that had put other people off only made Pat love Johnny more. But although he could see what a great dog this was going to be, he had no illusions about the difficulty of the undertaking. Though Johnny was 11 months old, he had learned almost nothing he needed to know to coexist in a human household, and he had acquired quite a few habits he needed to unlearn. For one thing, Pat discovered, Johnny had no boundaries. He just climbed all over everything, “which is probably more of a problem in a potential home than mine,” Pat observed with a laugh, gesturing around his spare bachelor quarters, with the weight-lifting bench, dirty dishes in the sink, piles of paper, and general air of cozy, comfortable disorder.

Pat decided that, to expunge Johnny’s old, bad behavior and instill new, good behavior, he was going to need to keep a close eye on Johnny around the clock. He decided that the two of them would need to be physically leashed together, at least for the first few days or weeks. He’d even sleep with Johnny’s leash around his wrist so he knew when Johnny was coming or going, or when he needed to get out his doggie door to relieve himself. They were literally together all the time.

The first few days weren’t easy. Pat discovered that, contrary to Johnny’s first low-key reaction to cats, he actually started to think cats were “kind of cool.” If the cats dashed around the house, Johnny would follow, his golden fur a blur behind them, and drag Pat along for the ride. Unfortunately, one of Pat’s other dogs tended to get swept up in the excitement and join in the chase, so that cats, dogs, and Pat were all racing after each other through the house. The end of the chase was never as exciting. If Johnny ever actually caught up to a cat, he would just stop on stiff legs and look at it goofily, sniffing, apparently without a clue about what to do next.