The Lost Dogs

About the Michael Vick case: football player who was an influential part of a dogfighting operation, owning and training pit bull type dogs. When he got busted, unlike in previous similar cases, the dogs were not immediately euthanized. Usually they’re deemed too dangerous and vicious to ever live in a home setting again. This case proved it all wrong. Rescue facilities, animal sanctuaries, dog trainers and foster groups stepped to evaluate and work with these dogs, giving them a chance at a better life. Some needed serious medical treatment. Most were terrified of loud noises, the proximity of people, anything unknown. They had lived such limited lives as fighting dogs, many did not know how to walk on a leash, navigate stairs, or even play with toys.

The book begins by telling how the dogfighting operation was discovered, the state the dogs lived in, the methods that were probably used on them (brutal and uncaring to say the least), how all the pieces of the case were put together, where the dogs stayed while it was all getting figured out (some in better places than others), where they all went afterwards (varied depending on their condition and needs) and how their rehabilitation worked out. Some dogs’ stories are covered in a lot of detail, others just get a blip at the end, where there’s a section that tells what happened to each and every one of them. Fifty-one dogs were seized from the property, forty-seven of those deemed worth attempting to save. Only three ended up not making it. One had serious medical problems and was euthanized. Another died in an unfortunate accident. And only one was considered so violent and aggressive it couldn’t be handled at all. All the rest lived through their ordeal and improved with a lot of effort and patience on the part of many people. Their responses varied- ranging from timid and skittish to suspicious and guarded to outright threatening. Many were fostered out and eventually adopted into family homes. Others had to live their whole lives in a sanctuary, due to behavior issues or an inability to be safe around other dogs. But they all did far better than anyone really expected, and it set a precedent for saving other dogs from similar situations, instead of just automatically euthanizing them.

Some parts of this, of course, are hard to read due to the mistreatment and suffering of the animals. The first hundred pages in particular are rather dry and I almost didn’t continue- it starts out just all about the case, more the people involved than the dogs. I didn’t really care about what kind of coffee or beer the investigators had while conniving with each other, or who did what to further his career- but I get it, this author is more used to sports writing and the book is based on a sensational case. I suppose for readers who like reading true crime it’s compelling, but for me it was just something to get through in order to read the part I was more interested about: the dogs. Even then there were some awkward parts, some missing words in a sentence here and there (is it just me, or is this getting more common nowadays? don’t people use human proofreaders anymore?)

There is, as I expected, some overlap in here with content from Dogtown, as a good number of the dogs from this case went to that sanctuary. I recognized two of them from the descriptions of their behavior and how they were rehabilitated. But there’s enough different information that it was still interesting to read about those individuals all over again. I’m pleased to see the author wrote another book after this one, The Found Dogs, detailing where many of these same dogs are ten years later. I’ll be interested to read that one if I can find a copy.