DONNA REY NOLDS AND TIM Racer had never been so happy to end a vacation early. It was September 2, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend and just days after Michael Vick’s plea hearing, when Reynolds and Racer packed up their stuff and walked out of the house they’d rented in Stinson Beach, California. They would have loved to stay, but they were off to bigger things.
The next day they caught a flight to Richmond, where they would gather with seven other canine experts brought together to evaluate the Vick dogs. Six of the nine people on the panel worked for the ASPCA, and those who weren’t Ph.D.s were at the very least certified animal behaviorists. Reynolds and Racer came from a different place altogether.
They were artists by trade, and they dressed the part. Racer, thin and athletic, tended toward cargo shorts with work boots and loose T-shirts. With brown hair and a broad face centered by a flat nose, Racer spoke directly with plenty of eye contact and so fast that “pit bull” became not two distinct words but one hybrid: “pitble.” Reynolds, by contrast, faced the world with a high wall of curly hair, full cheeks, and a big smile, but always seemed to be saying less than she was thinking, a sensation heightened by her arching eyebrows and deep, wary eyes. She accented her outfits with funky add-ons: a necklace made of red dice, laceless Chuck Taylors, or black military-looking boots.
Michigan natives, the pair met in 1980, during their first week of classes at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Upon graduation they moved to Chicago where they rented a small studio. Racer, a wood carver, began working on carousel-style animals, posed figures done in the seamless, high-gloss style of merry-go-round horses. Reynolds made her career as a found-art illustrator, creating collages and pictures out of existing materials, which she sold to magazines.
They began rescuing dogs off the streets-bringing home strays, training them and then finding them homes. Over four years they established themselves as working artists, took in and found homes for dozens of dogs, and enjoyed the benefits of big-city life. But they grew weary of the cold weather, so in 1991 they packed up and headed for Berkeley, figuring the funky college town with a large arts community would be perfect for them. It was not. Somehow, they never felt comfortable there and migrated toward Oakland, which fit better. It was grittier and simpler, more diverse. It was like Detroit, but nicer.
Their self-employed status allowed them to set their own schedule-i. e., go in late and stay late-and they began using part of their days to work with a raptor rescue program at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, California. There they helped injured or lost owls, hawks, eagles, and falcons relearn how to fly or walk or hunt.
They continued to take in dogs, too, and in 1995 they got a call from a woman who knew they helped strays. She had been driving her car along the highway one night when she saw an injured dog on the side of the road. She pulled over and realized it was in even worse shape than she suspected. The animal clearly needed more help than she could give it and she wasn’t sure what to do. After a moment of thought she swung open the back door and said, “If it gets in the car, I’ll help it. If not…” The dog crawled into the backseat and collapsed.
She took it to a shelter and implored Reynolds and Racer to go get it. When they went to see it, they cringed as the shelter workers brought out a small male pit bull, maybe thirty-five pounds, black and covered with cuts and scars. Tubes and wires ran from the dog’s body and wherever it went someone had to walk behind it, rolling the IV stand that it was hooked up to. “It looks like someone wrapped him in barbed wire and rolled him down a hill,” Reynolds said.
On one side, the dog’s lip was just sort of hanging off. “His face is like hamburger,” added Racer. And yet, upon walking in, the dog seemed to smile at them. It went up to Racer and began rubbing against his legs.
“Race, we’re in trouble here,” Reynolds said. The couple took the dog in. They called him Mr. B, and they worked hard to nurse him back to health. Reynolds hit the Internet. On one pit bull message board she encountered a character called Old Dog. On the board he had always come off as a bit of an asshole the way Reynolds saw it. But he knew his stuff and when Reynolds described her situation, he offered to help.
Reynolds was willing to take assistance from whoever would give it because there was more at stake than simply the survival of the dog. The woman who had picked him up off the road was in the midst of a battle against cancer, and she was coming to see the dog’s survival as a metaphor for her own struggle. It became very important to her that the dog make it, and she took a keen interest in his progress.
Eventually, Reynolds took Mr. B to see Old Dog, who turned out to be a legitimate dog breeder and a bit of a cowboy from central California. Old Dog agreed to take Mr. B in and give him a foster home until the dog could be adopted. Before long he’d adopted Mr. B himself, but even more important, he became a trusted resource.
Reynolds and Racer needed all the friends they could get, because the following year, 1996, they bought their first house. It became much easier for them to take in foster dogs until they could find a permanent keeper. Their experience with Mr. B had given them a taste of how desperate things were for pit bulls, which made up the majority of the shelter population nationally as well as in the Bay Area.
Through the years they had rescued whatever dogs they had stumbled upon, but now Racer proposed that they actually begin going to shelters to seek out adoption-worthy pit bulls. Reynolds had misgivings, but she agreed to take a look. At the first shelter they went to they found a beautiful brown and white pit bull. They were sure they could help her, so they brought her home and called her Sallie. She was an incredible dog-even-tempered, loving, and totally friendly with the other two dogs the couple already had.
Most people have been led to believe that pit bulls are mindless attack machines, and while they can have an inclination to be aggressive toward other dogs, the reality is that free of negative influences, they’re not much different from any other breed. Reynolds and Racer had come to see that, but that knowledge didn’t help them solve the problem they now faced: They could not find a home for Sallie. It was then that Reynolds and Racer realized how off-base and yet deeply ingrained the public perception of pit bulls remained. Racer and Reynolds suddenly understood why there were so many pit bulls languishing in shelters.
Before long they were part of a small community in the Bay Area dedicated to rescuing pit bulls. One night while a bunch of them were out together, they decided to start a Web site that would display available dogs and try to help change the pit bull’s image. So on April Fool’s Day 1999-“under the influence of many margaritas,” as Reynolds says-they formed a rescue group called Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pitbulls or BAD RAP.
The site went up a few weeks later and within days Reynolds realized they had tapped into something much bigger than they’d ever imagined. They had hundreds of inquiries from all over the country; people were looking for information on pit bulls. How to train them, what to feed them, how much exercise they needed. There were people looking to place dogs and people looking to adopt dogs.
Reynolds and Racer gave up their work with birds of prey and focused on pit bulls. They were uniquely prepared for the task of taking shelter dogs, teaching them some manners, and then finding them homes. Over the years they had taken in, nursed, and trained dozens of dogs, culminating with Mr. B, who made all the others look easy. The raptor rescue had helped, too-anyone who can get a wild eagle to literally eat out of his hand can probably get a pit bull to walk nicely on a leash.
Their connection to Old Dog became more valuable than ever. He gave them key insights into the breed’s behavior, tendencies, history, and traits, and he answered their questions. Reynolds and Racer threw themselves into the work. “We never made a conscious decision not to have kids,” Reynolds says. “We always sort of thought we would one day get the urge, but we never did, and I think we channeled a lot of that parenting energy into the dogs.”
As part of the plan, BAD RAP took only the best dogs-ambassador dogs-which they chose after a rigorous evaluation. They set up obedience classes for pit bull owners and insisted that new adopters attend at least one class with the dog they were hoping to take home beforehand and four more classes afterward. Those adopters also had to submit to a home inspection and everyone was encouraged to come back for advanced classes. Instead of being set up to fail, as they felt so many pit bulls were, these dogs would be hardwired to succeed. They would go into the world and prove how safe and reliable pit bulls could be.
But the BAD RAP crowd knew from experience that more than placing individual dogs, the best way to save the breed was to fight back against the negative perceptions. Education and advocacy became as important as rescue. They began consulting with shelters and other pit bull rescue groups about how to evaluate dogs, screen adopters, set up training programs, and best maintain kenneled dogs. Their Web site became a database, including articles on pit bulls, news about fight busts around the country, and a message board that hosted lively discussions about pit bull-related issues.
In time the group grew to forty volunteers and had a permanent presence in the Oakland animal shelter. The arrangement included a separate room in the corner of the facility where they could house the dogs they’d accepted into their program. It let them better control the atmosphere, providing a saner, quieter place that allowed the dogs to keep it together longer in the shelter. They also set up a wood chip- filled exercise and play area out back and an office in an old trailer they picked up off Craigslist from a parachuting company that had gone bust. Every day BAD RAP volunteers came to the shelter to work with the dogs, getting them out for exercise, training, and playtime. Donna and Tim did evaluations, home inspections, ran the training classes, and set up adoptions and foster care.
The couple had remortgaged their house three times to keep the operation running when donations ran low, but by 2006 BAD RAP’s finances were solid. Donna was spending eighty hours a week doing BAD RAP work, which had caused her art career to all but disappear, so she finally began taking a salary. Tim maintained a successful business carving wooden replicas of people’s family pets, but he was slowed by the forty hours a week he spent on BAD RAP, so the following year he too accepted a small salary for his efforts.
From the beginning they had followed the Vick case closely, trying to figure out a way to help. In early June, about six weeks after the initial raid at Moonlight Road, Reynolds heard that the Humane Society was stepping in to handle the animals. She was ecstatic. She had a relationship with HSUS and had recently worked with them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. BAD RAP had come in to help rescue some of the hundreds of dogs that were abandoned or lost during the storm. Tim and Donna had brought their typical approach, saving the best and putting down those that were suffering or unable to present the breed in a positive light. Reynolds felt this practical approach had won them some favor with HSUS and the federal government; it proved they weren’t weak-kneed apologists incapable of making hard decisions.
As soon as she heard the HSUS news, Reynolds raced to her computer and started typing a proposal. Nine pages later she had outlined her group’s history, its success adopting out household pets, and its track record providing candidates for law enforcement work. Finally, the proposal laid out a plan to individually evaluate each of the Vick dogs. She was certain at least a few of them would be worthy of saving if only they were given a chance-and if they didn’t linger too long in the shelters. She finished writing at 5:00 A.M., walked the envelope to the mailbox, and dropped it in.
Nothing. She got no response. But she stuck with it. When the federal government took over the case she poked around the legal filings until she came across Mike Gill’s name. She printed out another copy of her proposal and mailed it to him. It landed on Gill’s desk about the same time he was consulting Dr. Z about what would become of the dogs. Gill was struck by the similarity of the approach advocated by BAD RAP, so he passed the proposal on to Zawistowski. Dr. Z had never met Donna and Tim but he was familiar with their work, so when he sat down to put together his team of expert evaluators, he included them on the list.
Now, eight years and more than four hundred rescued pit bulls after they began, Donna Reynolds and Tim Racer were on their way to a secure government meeting where they would take their places on a secret committee of experts assembled to assess the victims of what was already the most notable and important dogfighting case in history.