THE DOGS OF WINN-DIXIE

Written by Marti
Photos & captions by Marti

Now here are the hardest parts to remember - the dogs, most of whom learned to like & trust us, and most of whom we left behind and will never see again.

Judging by the evidence we saw last week, it must be against the law to spay/neuter in some parts of Louisiana. I think we saw two altered dogs all week out of hundreds that we handled. One of the things that gave us a slightly different outlook than some of our colleagues who were newer to the arena of animal welfare/rescue was our jaded dismay at the unending parade of distended teats & testicles and the exponential generations of misery they represent for the animal world. I was reprimanded, nicely, for discussing spay/neuter and putting an end to dog fighting with some of the young men of the neighborhood who came by to admire a certain type of dog. It was considered "not respecting their culture".

Fair enough. But I'm not sure bad treatment of animals can't be exorcised, with education & time, from a culture.

On the purebred scene we saw primarily German Shepherds, Chows, Rotties, Akitas & Labs. There was one Basset, an owner surrender. One Boxer, a couple of Beagles. A Golden lived with a rescuer in the parking lot. There were some small dogs like Chihuahuas & Lhasas, although they were frequently shaved down and it was hard to tell if one was looking at a Maltese or a mix. There were some hunting-type hounds, an array of very cute All Americans and, of course, infinite variations of genetics stemming from the American Staffordshire Terrier, Bulldog & Mastiff.

I've never spent much time with pit bulls, and I have one acquaintance who has had a good bit of plastic surgery courtesy of one, so it was with some trepidation that I crawled into crates to get the noose of the kennel lead around the necks of the ones too scared to come forth on their own. But in the end, I didn't meet a pit bull I didn't eventually like. They came in all shapes & sizes and I mentally divided them into "leaners & launchers." The leaners were like the scarred old veteran with ears home-snipped down to his skull who just wanted to lean into you for a scratch & some affection. Maybe he had been a bait dog. Maybe he was a fighter who took a lot of punishment and kept on fighting. But a lifetime of pain was written in the scars all over him.

The launchers were the young Turks whose idea of a fun walk was to run as fast as they could to the end of the lead and launch themselves into space. To keep my sanity, I worked on teaching them leash manners, and many of them "got it" on the first or second walk. Maybe the knowledge will stand one of them in good stead if a potential adopter ever takes him for a tryout walk . . .

Every last one of the pits that we met would probably be a wonderful, adoring pet. And almost none of them would I be 100% confident having in a multi-dog household (that can be said about a lot of dogs, of course). But in the milieu of NOLA, the pits were primarily bred to fight and there is no telling how many generations of selecting for that trait have gone into cementing a characteristic that might be too entrenched to untrain. One of the enduring agonies of the week is the conviction we felt that there are not enough single dog households in the country to absorb a fraction of the pits coming out of New Orleans.

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