The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

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THE VIDEO WAS GRAINY and unprofessional, shot on a handheld camera that shook and skipped and soaked up all the ambient noises-a few voices, birds, distant barking. Still, she studied it, watched it over and over. It felt like 500,000 times, although the real number was probably more like 100. What she saw was both heart-melting and slightly alarming. The sight was also somewhat familiar.

On the day of the original raid at Michael Vick’s house, Marthina McClay had been sitting in the green velvet rocker that anchors her living room, watching a CNN report about the situation. Helicopters hovered over the stately white house on Moonlight Road and their cameras picked up the activities below. One of them zoomed in on a police officer leading a dog out of the woods and into a waiting crate.

He was a large male, maybe fifty-five or sixty pounds, with a tawny brown coat. Before the animal stepped inside he looked back over his shoulder and stared into the camera. McClay gasped. He was beautiful, with a black snout and black highlights around his eyes that made it look like he was wearing eyeliner. He wagged his tail and posed for the camera, which panned away. McClay turned to her roommate, who sat on the couch nearby, and said, “Shame is, they’re probably going to kill them all.”

Now, eight months later, McClay stared at the video on her computer screen. There had been a few big brown dogs with black snouts in the group, so she couldn’t be sure this was the same guy, but he sure looked like the dog from that CNN footage. His name was Bouncer and as she watched the video she knew why. Again and again he jumped straight up and down as if his legs were made of pogo sticks.

Amusing as it was to watch, the jumpiness was something of a warning sign for McClay. It was typical of high-energy dogs that had been locked up too long-jumping was the only outlet for their energy in confinement. How it would translate into a home setting was anyone’s guess. Would the big lug spend his days leaping all over her house? Would he transfer the impulse into some other energetic pursuit that would do even more damage?

But the video showed something else, too. In the scenes where Bouncer interacted with the men and women around him, he was calm and attentive. He was very people-focused. He was interested in what the handlers wanted, and he had a desire to please. These, McClay knew, were great traits. They indicated a solid temperament that she could work with.

She could also see that he was good with other dogs. That was important to McClay, since she had three pit bulls sleeping at her feet, and Bouncer would have to get along with them. When she first learned that the government was considering signing the dogs over to rescue groups, she submitted an application on behalf of her organization, Our Pack, but figured she’d never hear anything. A few weeks later she got a phone call. It was Rebecca Huss.

“What do you think about these dogs?” Huss asked.

“I believe at least a few of them could make the best household pets in America,” McClay responded.

“Oh, so you’ve worked with pit bulls before,” Huss said.

The conversation had gone on from there. Huss asked all the expected questions. The two women talked for a long time about the dogs. McClay also spoke numerous times to Tim Racer and Donna Reynolds, who were attempting to broker the arrangement. Eventually, Our Pack’s application was approved and the intensity of those negotiations picked up. Huss, Reynolds, and Racer hoped she could take more than one dog, but McClay didn’t have any foster homes available other than her own.

She could take only one dog, but she couldn’t decide which. She received videos of six or seven dogs. She asked endless questions. Somehow, though, she kept coming back to that big jumping bean. What she didn’t know was that Bouncer had been the luckiest of the Vick dogs. He had been the only one sent to the shelter in Hopewell, Virginia. It was a smaller, quieter facility at which each kennel had an indoor and outdoor section, which meant that he had more space, more stimuli, and fresh air. He was treated as an individual, not dealt with in a group. The staff bonded with him. He received lots of attention and was regularly allowed to run and play in a small exercise area. That didn’t erase the effects of eight and a half months of shelter life and the years in Vick’s operation, but it helped.

McClay had made up her mind, but she watched the tape one more time anyway. She looked at the way he wagged his tail and shook his whole body with excitement; she looked at his big goofy body. “I like goofy,” she thought. She looked into his big brown eyes again and picked up the phone. “I’ll do it.”

Nicole Rattay was going home. Finally. Her four-week dog-sitting assignment had turned into six weeks, but the time spent had been worth it. She had helped the dogs fight off some of their kennel stress and many had even shown distinct improvement. Now she was on the road again.

There was no RV with thirteen dogs crated up in the cabin this time. Instead, she drove a rented four-door sedan with only one dog along for the ride. The drive, though, was the same: Virginia to Oakland. She could move a lot faster in the car, but she was on her own, with just the radio and Bouncer panting in the backseat to keep her company.

She and Steve would have brought him out on the first trip, but Huss hadn’t yet secured a home for him, so he’d stayed behind. But now that McClay had agreed to take Bouncer, and since Rattay was heading west, she had agreed to drive him out. Getting out of town proved a little harder than Rattay had imagined. Before she could leave with Bouncer, she had to call a few of the shelter attendants at home. They had grown so attached to him that they had begged for a chance to come down and say good-bye. So Rattay waited patiently while everyone sobbed through their send-offs before hitting the highway.

Once they were on the road, Rattay kept Bouncer crated up in the backseat and tried to cover as much distance as possible. When she finally pulled into a motel for the night, her watch showed almost 11:00 P.M. Rain fell. She was road-weary and didn’t feel like hauling the crate into the room. She decided to let Bouncer sleep on the floor. They got into the room and she passed out almost immediately, but he was a ball of energy.

As she drifted in and out of sleep she could hear him barreling around the room and bouncing off the furniture. Finally he settled down. Some sound, a sort of crunching, filtered into her subconscious, but she couldn’t make herself care where it was coming from.

When Rattay woke in the morning the room looked as if a tornado has passed through it. Things were knocked over, the sheets on the other bed were tossed and there was paper everywhere, torn up little bits of yellow and white paper. During the night Bouncer had shredded a phone book. As Rattay cleaned she came up with a new plan: She would let him roam free in the car during the day so he could burn up a little energy and then she’d crate him up at night.

Back on the trail, this seemed to work better. Bouncer quickly made his way into the front seat. He spent time looking out the window, watching the sky and the trees and the other cars. He took great interest in what Rattay was doing and checked out all the controls, sniffing everything from the radio dials to the steering wheel. When he was done he looked at Rattay with those big brown eyes and goofy expression, as if to say, “Anything I can do to help?”

There was. Over the next two days he helped Rattay stay awake and entertained on the long cross-country haul. Finally they arrived at Donna and Tim’s.

I’m crazy. What made me think this was going to work? What made me think I could take a dog from Michael Vick’s fighting operation and make it better?

Mathina McClay was standing in the street watching the big brown dog jump up and down, up and down. The ridiculousness of it all was crashing down on her. Besides questioning her own sanity, she wondered how she had missed the signs. She’d seen the jumping and the high energy on the video; did she really think that would magically cure itself once the dog got here? Hell, Huss and Racer had named him Bouncer.

Now she was stuck. Donna and Tim had driven the beast down to her home in Los Gatos, about an hour south of Oakland, and as soon as he stepped out of the car the big dope started with the kangaroo impression. She wished she could call the whole thing off, but she knew she was committed. She took the leash and waved as the pair drove away.

She turned toward the house, a tidy one-story structure appointed with Renaissance reproductions and a hand-painted sign that read COLD NOSE, WARM HEART. The place contained three other dogs, and McClay wondered if it would survive the fourth.

McClay locked the other dogs in her bedroom before she brought Bouncer inside-that would have been way too much for him. But nothing seemed to make Bouncer any less bouncy. He continued to jump and jump and jump. He jumped on McClay, even nipping at her to get her attention. He jumped on the furniture. He found a pair of socks and chewed on them. When the socks were rescued, he grabbed a pillow and began gnawing on that. He tried to pee on everything: the kitchen floor, the couch, the TV.

Finally, McClay coaxed him into his crate and he seemed to settle a little bit, as if he knew the drill. She offered food and toys, neither of which held his attention. He was uneasy and scattered, and McClay felt bad for him. She dropped a pillow on the floor, sat down next to the crate, and settled in for a long night.