DOGS HAVE BEEN COMING and going all morning. The brown dog- Sussex 2602-lies flat in her pen watches them go by. Some prance by on leashes, some walk with uncertainty, some have to be carried. Now, it is her turn. A man squats outside her pen. He look at her through the gate and makes soft noises. He sticks a finger through the chain link and wiggles it slowly.
The brown dog shifts back and forth, lifts her head, and sniffs the air; her tail lifts to the side and then flops back down. She settles, shrinking even farther into the corner of her pen so that her hind leg and one side press against the fencing.
She freezes and hopes that the man will leave. She’s done this many times, and she knows that when she simply ignores them they will often go away. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, they will pull her out. This man is not going away. He is still there, still speaking softly.
He opens the gate. The brown dog’s heart begins to race. The man sits on one side and leans his head and shoulders into the pen, but he does not reach forward to grab her collar. He rests on an elbow and continues cooing. The sounds are gentle and flowing and for a moment the brown dog can block out the barking that fills the background like daylight and concentrate just on the sounds the man is making. There is peace in that.
She can catch whiffs of his breath, too, and the sweet moist scent provides further distraction. He slides a little farther forward, still talking. The brown dog shifts again. She raises and lowers her head. Her tail thumps the ground once. The man is very close now. Close enough to reach out and grab her if he wanted to. Her body begins to tremble.
He blows in her face. She sniffs then licks her snout and turns away. The man reaches toward her head, still talking. She ducks, pulls her neck in and presses her chin against the ground. His hand keeps coming. It touches her head. He strokes a few times. She lets out a little whine. He keeps at it for a minute or two, then reaches out with his other hand. He places one hand under each of her shoulders, then lifts and slides her out.
He is carrying her across the room, past the cages where the other dogs sit or stand and bark. He is heading-they are heading-for the rectangle of light cut into the far wall. The barking seemes to intensify as they near the door. The dogs at the end of line of kennels jump up and stand on their hind legs, pressing their front paws against the chain, barking and barking.
Finally, they duck through the door and the world changes. Smells rush up from the ground. The sky stretches above them. The barking recedes into the background. The brown dog sniffs enthusiastically, then blows a little air out through her nose.
The man puts her on the ground. She lies down flat. It is hard concrete like the floors inside and she can smell some of the other dogs that have been here, too. Other people stand around looking at her. Behind and around them are other fences like the ones that make up her cage. It is incredibly hot and the people gather in the sliver of shade near the building.
The brown dog feels the heat press down on her. She likes it, she feels like it hugs her and pushes her even farther down into the concrete. She looks at the trees in the distance.
The same man who came to her pen appears before her. He begins petting her. At first just a little, then more. She continues to look at the trees. She can smell them and she remembers the trees from the clearing. She remembers the squirrels and the rabbits and the heavy chain around her neck.
The man is in front of her now, bouncing a little, excitement in his voice. She lifts her head for the briefest instant. He claps and encourages but she puts her head back down. She moves it only a few times. When he puts a bowl of food in front of her, she sniffs but does not eat. When other dogs are brought out, she looks at them with both wariness and curiosity. Her tail swishes a few times and she shuffles forward on the pavement, craning her neck to get a sniff, but that is it.
She does not open up. She does not relax, even when they bring her back to her pen. It doesn’t smell funny this time. It smells the same as when she left. She burrows back into the corner and tries to ignore the tide of barking around her.
The evaluations had started out better than anyone could have hoped, but that didn’t mean there weren’t low points. In all, eighteen of the dogs had reacted the same way as Sussex 2602, flattening out on the ground and trying to ignore what was happening around them. One was so stressed that he puked when Racer tried to pull him out of his cage.
Many of the dogs had no names, but two that had been singled out were Lucas and Jane. Vick’s only known champions-a dog that has won three straight times-showed troubling reactions to some of the tests.
Lucas was confident and great with people but when the test dog was brought out he showed another side. The test dog had been used numerous times, and he knew the drill. He trotted out toward Lucas, who stood on the concrete. As the test dog approached, Lucas simply turned and looked at him. Something about his stare or the way he held his body told the test dog everything he needed to know about Lucas. The test dog stopped in his tracks, turned, and went back into the shelter.
Jane was the dog who had made a habit of shredding metal bowls. She had a condition that had caused many of her teeth to fall out, but she ground the bowls across the floor with her paws, air-hockeyed them around her pen, and gnawed at them so relentlessly that they eventually succumbed. Jane, whose face was a highway map of scars and whose mouth permanently hung open from where her jaw had been broken but never set, had a bad reaction to the food test, latching onto the fake hand and shaking it ferociously.
There was something about Jane that Racer admired, though. She made the best of what she had. Lock me up in a kennel for four months with nothing but a metal bowl? Fine, but I’m going to have as much fun with that bowl as I can. Put me next to another dog with nothing but a chain-link fence between us? Okay, but like an older sibling trying to entertain himself on a long car ride, I’m going to rattle that fence, shake it with my mouth and push on it with my paws, pester that little sister next to me until I get a reaction. Will I break down and cower in the corner? No chance.
Charming as that spunk could be, it was also evidence that Jane had an attitude problem. Part of that had come from her treatment: She had been aggressively and forcibly overbred. That was enough to turn any dog sour on the world, and it no doubt played a role in Jane’s response to stimuli.
An even more heartbreaking example of how such mistreatment could harm a dog lived in the kennel next to Jane. The black female that inhabited that space had been overbred to the point that she had simply lost her mind. Her body sagged and swayed and she growled through gritted teeth at everything around her. She wanted to attack anything and anyone that came near. She was the only dog that Racer didn’t actually handle. No testing was necessary.
Two other small dogs seemed friendly enough with people, but as soon as they were put into the testing area they displayed an aggressiveness common to fighting dogs. They had a heightened sense of awareness, a certain tension in their bodies, and they searched the area for another dog. Racer realized that the team had unintentionally re-created a fight scene: They had placed these dogs in an enclosed area with people standing around gawking. The evaluators were pushing the dogs’ buttons. These two little guys had been down that road before, and they knew what to do. Both of them attacked the stuffed dog. But pushing buttons, intentional or not, was part of the deal. The testers weren’t after false promise; they wanted reliable results.
When the day was done, the team had tested all but five of the dogs. The members gathered for dinner at a diner across from the hotel. The evening was filled with much excited talk about what they had experienced during the day. What they had found so far were anything but the most viciously trained dogs in the country.
Instead, they’d encountered American pit bull terriers and Staffordshire bull terriers with a broad spectrum of temperaments. A few of them had that fighter’s instinct, a visible willingness-almost desire-to go after other dogs that dog men refer to as gameness, but not many. No more than twelve.
Beyond that there were the pancake dogs, creatures so stressed out from life first at Vick’s and then in the shelters that they had largely shut down. Even those dogs, though, could be very sweet. One of them stayed flattened to the ground through all the tests, until the examiners brought out the child-size doll. The dog grew visibly interested and slowly but surely it crawled across the concrete floor to reach the doll. When it got there, it sniffed and wagged with glee.
Then there was a group of what were simply dogs. They were not socialized, they had no manners and no idea how to behave, and many of them had likely experienced at least fight-testing sessions if not outright fights, but they remained largely sound of mind and body. They needed only direction, affection, and companionship.
The court documents showed that Bad Newz had not been terribly successful at breeding fighters. With the exception of a few dogs like Jane and Lucas, most of the Vick dogs had underperformed. That was why so many were being killed: The crew could not get them to fight. Most of the dogs that remained almost certainly would have fallen into that same category, and if not for the raid on 1915 Moonlight Road, almost all would have suffered some sort of hideous demise.
This was to some degree a matter of pedigree. Breeding no doubt plays a role in dog behavior. There are border collies that are better at herding and retrievers that are better at retrieving because they’ve been carefully selected to perform that task over time. By the same logic there are pit bulls-so-called game-bred dogs-that are more inclined to fight and are potentially better at it than others.
The Bad Newz crew, it seemed, had not been willing or wise enough to spend the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars more it cost to buy dogs from such elite lineages. Instead they rolled the dice on adult dogs that showed promise and when they found a few good ones, like Jane and Lucas, they attempted to start their own line of champions. That’s why Jane was so criminally overbred, and why so many of the dogs rescued from 1915 Moonlight Road had the same sandy brown coat as both she and Lucas did. Many, if not all of them, could probably claim one or both as a parent or grandparent.
However, breeding a good fighting dog isn’t as simple as taking the offspring of two champions, throwing them in the ring, and counting the money. The process is a subtle blend of nature and nurture. How the dog is trained and treated, how it’s kept, how it’s socialized, at what stage in its life it is introduced to certain stimuli all contribute to how it develops. Some pit bulls could be raised by the most caring, loving family in the world, who do everything by the book and those dogs might still have an inclination to go after other dogs. Some dogs can be raised in the harshest way possible and still have nothing but happiness and companionship to share with the world.
And breeding a dog to fight is different than breeding it for other traits. There’s nothing about herding or retrieving or pulling a sled that goes against the dog’s internal drives. But creating a dog that wants to attack other dogs is at odds with twelve thousand years of evolution, a period of time in which dogs were instilled with the instinct to work together in a pack to survive. Centuries of breeding based on mutual dependence goes far deeper than fifty or even one hundred years of manipulation to encourage a desire to do harm.
Even Louis Colby, a renowned breeder and reformed dogfighter, has said that if you mated two champion dogs and harvested a litter of twelve pups, there might be one champion in the group. Certainly, if you raised pit bulls in an atmosphere of hostility, frustrated and angered them, honed their aggressiveness, and then put them into a situation where they felt challenged, some of them would fight, but so would most other dogs. The Vick dogs showed that even under those circumstances many of them still did not prefer to fight, and even when they did, the simple fact that they were pit bulls did not guarantee that they would be good at it. The truth, in the end, is that each dog, like each person, is an individual. If the Vick dogs proved nothing else to the world, this would be a significant advance.