No More LawDogs

We were sorry to read this week that Diane Jessup, director of the Lawdogs USA program that trained American pit bull terriers for bomb and narcotics detection work in Washington State, has announced that she hast to terminate the program.

In a statement on the homepage of Lawdogs , Jessup says that, "at this time I have had to shut down the LawDogsUSA program. I hope that in the future funding and support can be obtained making possible for an all American pit bull detection program to be set up again, and I hope that LawDogsUSA's pioneering efforts will help open the way for others using these best of dogs in this most important of jobs." She says that the time, resources, and commitment needed for the program were more than she could provide alone, and that she has decided to focus her attention on caring for her elderly parents.

What a shame that this program will cease to exist. It had a lot of potential to do so much good for this breed. Hopefully someone with the right training experience, somewhere in America, can pick up where Lawdogs left off.

Terrierman Blog

Sometimes, I forget that Terrierman's blog exists. Then someone or something reminds me, and I read up on all the stuff that's been posted since my last visit.

One of the things I like best about pit bulls is the terrier qualities the dogs possess--the tenacity, the prey drive, the springy build (well, in a well-bred and built dog, at least)--and sadly, I see more and more people trying to emphasize the "bully" in their breedings while completely neglecting the fact that these dogs were created with a good amount of terrier blood. As a result, we see more and more blockheaded, stocky dogs with short muzzles and an overall slow, thick appearance.

Though American Pit Bull Terriers did (and do) carry a significant amount of bulldog in them, and many of the old-school gamedogs did carry a lot of bulldog influence (heavier heads, lower centers of gravity, jaws built for gripping and holding, etc.), I wish people would stop denying our modern dogs the terrier traits that (in my opinion) made them so balanced and versatile.

Anyway, that's just a rant. All I'm really trying to say is that the Terrierman blog is a great resource if you admire the terrier breeds. It's a good read and I wanted to share a link to it for any working-terrier geeks who might stumble across this. So, here it is.

Chances are, I'll be adding it to the links here as well. So I don't forget to read it regularly!

The boys are getting to know one another a little better . . .

I always said that when Reba was gone, we would start allowing Doc to have more house privileges than he had before. For a while there, we did let Doc mingle freely with the other dogs under close supervision, but not once, but twice, my elderly old bitchy dog made a huge point of getting in his face for some perceived slight or other. And the second time, it resulted in a rather unsettling fight. Doc still bears the scars on the side of his face, from where Reba snap-snap-snapped him with her teeth; I still bear the mental scars of the image of Doc then picking Reba up by the head and carrying her across the room.

Rob and I broke it up rather quickly, and Reba had no real injuries, just a scrape near her ear. Poor Doc had punctures all over his face and legs.

After that, we decided that those two dogs would just never be safe together, so we kept them separated. Reba and Tucker had run of the house together most of the time, while Doc shuffled around from the basement and kitchen to the upstairs bedrooms, depending on what we were doing.

Now Reba's gone, and I'm starting to slowly give Doc free time here and there in the house. When Tucker goes out in the yard, I let Doc have free run of the house. And when Tucker's settled in on the couch in the mornings or evenings, after his walk and a meal and he's satisfied and sleepy, I let Doc wander around and/or sit on the couch with us. For the most part, he's good with Tucker, just a little pushy. I will never let the boys have "play" time together, and I think I will always keep them separated save for quiet time when everyone is in calm, quiet states of mind. It's easier on the dogs, since they both get a little stressed out by one another, and it's easier on me, since it stresses me out to have to worry about Doc and Tucker getting in a fight over anything. Doc's big, brash, and has a bit of an impetuous streak; Tucker is little, soft, and is a little bit afraid of Doc. In some ways, it's a great combination because Tucker will never challenge Doc, and therefore, we run little risk of Tucker starting a fight. But in other ways, it's really not the best combo, because Doc completely takes advantage of Tucker's hesitance and will bully him if given the opportunity.

But on a limited level, we are integrating them. Doc is most certainly enjoying the time out--and is already starting to get very spoiled. When it's time for me to put him up, he now carries on a bit and gets frustrated with me. If that keeps up, he's going right back to restricted mobility--I don't need to hear his fool mouth whining and barking at me all the time!

Ah, the joy of owning pit bulls!

B-More Dog on WMAR Channel 2

More good press for B-More Dog this week! Yesterday Pauline Houliaras (B-More Dog VP) and I were invited by WMAR Channel 2 to do their Good Morning Maryland show to talk about pit bulls and Pit Bull Awareness Day.

It was a great opportunity to let people know we exist and get some positive media exposure for the breed. Pauline's pit bull Raven was with us and did a nice job showing the world that not all pit bulls are killing machines.

You can watch the clip here.

An Oldie But Goodie

Baltimore Examiner Editor Frank Keegan commented on my blog post from yesterday, pointing out the positive story that appeared in his paper about B-More Dog and Pit Bull Awareness Day. He posted a link and an excerpt to an editorial he wrote in 2007, back when Baltimore County was considering passage of breed specific legislation that would have required pit bull owners to muzzle their dogs on public property and keep them in locked kennels when at home.

Somehow, I didn't see this story when it first appeared, but I wanted to put a link to it up here for whoever reads this blog to see--it's definitely encouraging to know that one of our local papers here in Baltimore has a record of running stories that only paint our dogs as vicious, baby-eating monsters.

Here's a link to the piece, if you're interested in reading it.

Tiny Bit of Positive Press in Baltimore

Yesterday the Baltimore Examiner newspaper called me because they received a press release B-More Dog put out to announce Pit Bull Awareness Day. I did a little phoner with the reporter, and today a short but sweet story turned up in the paper.

It's not a story of monumental proportions, but it's positive and it's about pit bulls--and that's a rare thing!

You can read the story here.

Still here . . .

Kind of lost the energy to post after Reba got sick and then left us. But we're all still here.

Tucker is doing fine, after a day or so of moping around. Now he just soaks up all the attention that he used to have to share with Reba. That little dog really is a survivor. He goes with the flow and bounces back from things so quickly. I guess I ought to be very happy about that, but I'm still trying to get over my surprise that he hardly missed a beat, even though he lived with Reba from the moment he came home at 8 weeks old.

Doc is Doc--he gets more freedom in the house than he used to, now that there is no pissed-off old lady dog waiting in the living room to get in his face. He's become very accustomed to having that newfound freedom, and he's resisting being restricted to one area of the house when I don't have time to watch him. That's going to be a bit of a work in progress, I think.

But in general, I guess we are all as well as can be expected. Still reeling.

On Saturday, Doc will go be back at training after taking the week off. He's learned to stand now ("schtay" is the command), and he's getting pretty good about standing still when I ask him to do it. But he's not really reliable with it yet. All in good time!

A Death in the Family

I know this is long, but it made me feel better to write it out. And I'm so scared I will somehow forget if I don't recall everything, get it all down, make sure it's somewhere I can go over it again and again if I need to.

We have had a death in the family. We had to let Baby Reba go. She was my old girl who was 16. She was with me my entire adult life, pretty much. I got her when I was 20. I'll be 36 in February.


I remember the day I got her at the dog pound—the Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society in Menands, N.Y. She was a puppy being housed in the older dog runs. I don’t know why she was there—maybe because she was a bit too big for the puppy cages in the front. Or maybe because she was just a plain old dirty black mongrel—not a flashy mark of white anywhere on her. Clearly not a purebred anything. Mostly lab, partly something else that didn’t reveal itself very well—they listed her as lab/pit bull, but I often suspected maybe it was Rottweiler that gave her those shorter ears that rosed a bit and the coarse, thick coat that developed a wave when it got wet. But really, who knows—she was a big black dog. Sadly, I don't think I had the foresight to take photos of her as a baby--I don't think I realized how incredibly important she would ever be to me. I was just a college kid, 20 years old, and I knew I'd love her. I had no way of knowing how much.



If you knew Reba, you knew that she did things her way. Only. All the time. She was not very cooperative but she somehow seemed to understand compromise and though a couple of dog trainers I took her to when she was young thought I was a fool for putting up with some of her quirks, and instructed me to yank her off her feet for things, we learned to live together with a kind of mutual respect that I wonder if I will ever have with another dog in my life.



She was obsessed with squirrels, right up until her last week on earth. Somehow, I made her understand that chasing squirrels on leash and yanking my arm out of socket was not permissable--but to teach her that, I had to be willing to agree to let her stalk them once in a while to get her fix, then when the squirrel was safely stowed up in the tree, I could tell her "OK" and she could rush the tree trunk with a ferocious "I dare you to come down from there" woof.



She did not like most other dogs, but she would agree to not raise a ruckus about them, even if I brought them into her own home, as long as I didn't force her to associate with them. If I would keep that infernal dog on the other side of the room, no problem. If I tried to coax her or cajole her into being social, she could be a bit of a loose cannon. So we just made sure other dogs stayed a respectful distance from her--until Tucker. Something about him, from his puppyhood, appealed to her. After a lifetime of refusing to have anything to do with 99.9 percent of dogs on this earth, she suddenly found a brother--a dog she wanted to play with, lay on the couch with, act like a dog with. It was amazing.



Reba always made me feel very safe. She had no protection training, but she had a very natural protective instinct I learned early on. She was not aggressive, but she did respond to threats. I can’t tell you how many times one particular homeless man in Albany, who was rather overbearing and a little unpredictable, would try to harass me for money or whatever. Reba would not have him coming close enough to touch me. She would get in between us and if he reached for her or for me, she would growl and warn him off. When Reba and I were living alone in an apartment in a borderline neighborhood, she saved me from god only knows what fate when, one morning when I was on the shower, she kept a would-be intruder from climbing in my front window. I could hear her barking and snarling, and I knew something was wrong--I threw on my robe, ran to the living room, and found her snapping and lunging at a pair of hands hanging onto my windowsill. She bit, the hands disappeared, I called the police. They caught a homeless guy who admitted to trying to come into my apartment. He says he thought it was vacant, was just looking for a place to sleep. Thank God for Reba. My mother used to always say she worried about me, living alone in all sorts of different places, and she was petrified when I decided to move to "dangerous" Baltimore. She said she always felt better knowing I had Reba with me though--somehow, she figured between the two of us, we would figure out how to take care of each other and keep one another safe. And we did.

Reba liked to hike. A lot. The dog was born to be in the north, in the woods. She hiked a bunch of Adirondack mountains with me. We went up Blue Mountain, Crane Mountain, Buck Mountain, Hadley Mountain, Prospect Mountain, Sugar Loaf Mountain, various state forests in Massachusetts and some places in Vermont, in addition to some I’m probably forgetting. We hiked in the Catskills, in the Shawangunks, in southern Vermont, in Western Massachusetts. She also liked to swim and if there was a body of water in sight, it was all I could do to keep her out of it. She swam in the Grafton lakes, Blue Mountain Lake, Lake George, Lake Champlain, Indian Lake, the Hudson River, North and South Ponds, Long Pond, Lake Minnewaska, the Chesapeake Bay (yuck!), the Patapsco River, the Atlantic Ocean, and a whole bunch of mucky ponds and tributaries that probably don’t even have names.



I remember that she was ridiculously agile for a bulky, larger-breed dog. We took her to Crane Mountain, which had areas that were like 90 degree stone faces that had to be practically scaled to get to the top. I would let Reba off her leash, and she’d be up that rockface like a mountain goat and looking down at us from above, waiting for us to catch up. It was something to see.

I remember when I realized one day that Reba had gotten fat—really fat! We had taken her hiking in the Shawangunks in the fall, and my boyfriend took a photo of me with my arm around her. When we got the photos developed, I was stunned to see that she looked like a fat black bear with a little head instead of a dog. When I took her to the vet that year, she weight a big fat 77 pounds. It turned out she had a thyroid deficiency that was causing her to gain weight. We put her on meds, and she was a nice, svelte 68 for pretty much the rest of her life.



I remember that she really, really, really liked Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. She developed a taste for it because I worked at a Ben and Jerry’s store all through college, and I stopped in with her pretty frequently to pick up my paycheck or get a pint of something sweet. Sometimes I’d get a cup of plain vanilla and we would share it sitting on the front step of the store or Washington Park nearby.

She used to sing, a lot. Whenever the mood struck her, usually first thing in the morning. I wish I could find video of it now--it was ungodly but clearly it made her so happy. She'd bark and howl and screech and sneeze. It was a unique sound that I always called Reba's Morning Song.




I remember that she loved the snow.



For the first 9 and a half years of her life, we lived in upstate New York, where we got massive amounts of snow all winter. When my car needed to be dug out of a snowdrift, I would take a shovel, Reba, and a tennis ball. I would shovel one tire out myself, and I would throw a tennis ball into the snow drift next to another tire. Reba would go to work digging out the snow to find her tennis ball at the bottom. Before long, she would not only find her ball, but she’d also have cleared one of my tires from being buried in snow. She was a good worker.

I remember when we got the huge 2003 snowstorm in Maryland, I told my boyfriend that she would help dig out the car. I’m not sure whether he really believed me until he saw her doing it. That was the last time she helped dig me out of a spot, since Baltimore doesn’t really get much snow.

I remember when we rented a house on Chincoteague Island one summer with some friends. We got a house right on the channel, and Reba was so excited to see the water that she waded into the shallows then got too deep and started to get swept away in the current. She was paddling against it and crying a little at the same time, so I jumped in to save her. But then I started to get swept away too, so I grabbed onto the dock and yelled for help till we got pulled out by our friends who were nearby unloading the car. I was clinging to Reba, and she was clinging to me. I thought we were going to get swept out to sea, but finally we were rescued by my patient friends who were probably shocked at our the idiocy of me and the dog for jumping into such dangerous waters!



Tucker gave her back a lot of the youth that I thought had long gone. She played and romped with Tucker in the living room (we called it “fighting” because they were so loud), bowing and barking, and trying to instigate him—it was amazing. She stopped howling when we left the house. She started gaining interest in working for her treats again, and would come hobbling over to me to show off that *she* knew how to sit or lay down or give pay, every time I tried to teach Tucker a new command. It was too funny.



I remember the last day of her life.

I remember that the night before, she had fallen asleep on the couch and because she could no longer walk up and down the stairs, when she woke up at 6:45 AM, she stood at the foot of the stairwell barking to wake me up and get me moving for the day. I got up, and I was a little grumpy because I wanted to sleep for 15 more minutes, but who can sleep when a super-demanding old dog is insistently barking her fool head off till you finally obey her wishes? I got dressed. I took her for a walk. I remember that she was decidereally slow and limping a lot more than usual that morning. I made a mental note to give her extra pain medication with breakfast that day.

We went inside and she got on her bed. I went into the kitchen to do stuff with Doc. I remember hearing her kind of scrabbling around on the hardwood floor. I remember looking at her laying next to the coffee table and trying to get up. Lately, she had been having some hard times getting her back end underneath her, so I would help her up. I went to help her and immediately knew something was wrong. Her feet looked limp. She’d get her front end up, and she wouldn’t put weight on her back legs. I thought maybe some pain medication and breakfast would fix it. I made her breakfast, put her pills in a hunk of chicken breast. She refused to eat laying down (she hated doing that) so I held up her rear end while she gobbled up her meal. I laid her on her dog bed, called Rob, waited to see if maybe she’d get better.

She didn’t.

By 10, I knew she was probably not going to improve. I had a message into the vet to ask what to do, but I kind of knew. So I stayed home from work.

Around lunch time, I took her out in the sun and laid her in the grass. She looked over her shoulder at me, smiling like nothing was wrong. She loved laying in the grass out front. She rolled around a bit, she rubbed her face in the grass like she liked to. After a while, I flipped her over on her other side so she could bake evenly. Tucker came out for a while and laid next to her. Then, when it seemed like it was getting warm, I carried her back inside and put her on the couch with Tucker.



The vet called. We talked about options. There really weren’t very many. Wait and see if she gets better, which she might. Or she might not. Or let her go now rather than make her last day or two painful and scary and immobile, not knowing if she would get better or worse or just stay the same. No peeing or pooping without help, no walks, being carried around (which she hated more than anything), watching us cry over her, becoming stressed because everything was so confusing and uncooperative.

Rob came home. We gave her a raw meaty bone, the kind I give all the dogs but take away once they’ve stripped most of the meat off so they didn’t break teeth or end up swallowing bone fragments that could later cause constipation or worse. I let her eat it to her heart’s content, I heard her gnawing and chipping away at the hard bone, satisfied to get at the center where there was still some blood. Eventually, she was done, panting and satisfied with herself. We pet her, talked to her, cried a bit over her. She seemed really happy.

At 4 PM, I got a couple of hot dogs and put them in pouch. Rob loaded her up in the car. Our appointment was at 4:20 PM. We stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts because when we lived in Catonsville, I used to take her there on Sunday mornings so we could share a plain donut while I had my coffee. She liked those trips, which eventually we stopped making because getting in and out of the car had become such an ordeal for her. But this one last time, she got to stop for a donut. A whole one, she didn’t have to share with me.

We got to the vet and in the room, they had laid out a nice soft comforter for us to put her on. They examined her and talked to us about our options, told us that she might get better but that if we tried to wait it out, it might become more stressful and difficult for her and for us. That even if she did improve over 24 hours, it probably would not be long before she had another occurrence, since at her age the tissues were not likely to repair. That right now she was not mobile but she was not in pain, so in the grand scheme of things, letting her go now would not be unreasonable. In fact, it would probably be kinder.

They left so we could talk. We cried. We hugged her and kissed her and petted her. We told them we were going to let her go.

We kissed her more, cried more. In a few minutes, the vet came in and gave us a jar of beef flavored baby food and a big bucket of biscuits. She told us that what would happen is, one minute Reba would be licking up baby food and we’d be petting her and she’d hear us, then she would suddenly start feeling woozy and then become unconscious. As soon as she was out, she would administer the euthanasia drug. That’s exactly how it went. Rob was laying out behind her head, I was right in front of her, petting her and feeding her, she was licking, licking, licking that food like she’d just hit the jackpot, then I could tell the telazol kicked in, she had her tongue out and covered in a lick of food, she looked around, then she laid her head next to rob’s leg, The vet then injected the shot into the catheter, and we just waited and cried. She listened to her heart and told us she was gone. It happened so fast.

She was laying out on that blanket, she didn’t look any different than usual, she could have been sleeping. She was on her side, I petted her ears, I kissed her face, I told her I was so sorry to have to let her go, that I’d miss her. I looked at her nose and her tongue, still sticking out of her mouth, still with a lick of Gerber beef mush on it. Honestly, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.









Every day since you've been gone I feel like everything is wrong. I don't know who will help me find my way. I know the other dogs mean well, and I love them, but they can't do it--they don't know me like you knew me and I don't know that they ever will.

God, Reba, I hope we do get to meet again someday.