DogTown (4 page)

T
o visit the Best Friends Animal Society, first you’d have to make your way to the tiny town of Kanab, a dot on the map about a three-hour drive from the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Kanab, just a few miles north of the Arizona border, lies in an area of such scenic splendor that huge chunks of it have been made into national parks—Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and of course the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is 90 miles away.

Once you get to Kanab it’s quite possible you may recognize where you are. The first hint is the statue of a lone cowboy on a white horse, which stands along Main Street. Ancient red-rock buttes surround the town, like the backdrop for a Western, which, as it happens, may be how you know this place. What is now known as Angel Canyon, just north of town, has been used as a backdrop for dozens of TV and movie Westerns dating to the 1940s, including the
Lone Ranger
television show. Even more remarkable, the 140-million-year-old canyon walls are marked by dinosaur footprints from the Jurassic Period and mysterious thousand-year-old petroglyphs left by the Anasazi, the “ancient ones.” It’s a setting that inspires and humbles at the same time.

Best Friends calls this remarkable place home. The largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the United States lies in 3,700 acres of raw western landscape, surrounded by 30,000 more acres that the sanctuary leases from the federal government. At any given moment it is home to about 1,700 animals—mostly dogs and cats but also birds, horses, burros, goats, rabbits, pot-bellied pigs, and even some wild animals like raccoons and owls. The Best Friends sanctuary, with over 40 buildings, provides care and housing for all these companion species, in various “gated communities” for each sort of beast. Dogtown, which generally houses several hundred dogs at any one time, is one of the liveliest of the animal communities at Best Friends.

Visitors to Best Friends make their first stop at the Welcome Center, where they are given a warm welcome by the sanctuary’s official greeters—the animal residents themselves. The greeters say a good deal about what goes on here, as many of them are animals who have been injured gravely, sometimes permanently, and who are in recovery from wounds both psychic and physical. They are also lovable, adoptable, and unique, special kinds of creatures, albeit with special problems, who will provide special pleasures to those who open their hearts and homes.

Dogs are among the visitors’ favorites, and to be a greeter is to serve as an ambassador of Dogtown, providing that valuable first impression. A recent favorite was Ava, a splendid golden retriever. Ava is a beautiful dog with a sparkling personality, but when she worked as a greeter, most people noticed her attire before anything else. She sported a plastic Elizabethan collar around her head that kept her from bothering the bandages on her left front paw. Ava could be seen making her rounds in the lobby, alternating between trying to get the plastic collar cone off her head and happily approaching people for a good scratch behind her floppy ears.

Ava’s personality is high-spirited and gregarious, goofy and giddy. Despite her injuries and cumbersome apparel, she always seems ready for a romp. But a look beneath her playful exterior reveals the dauntless spirit of a fighter. She survived a grave injury, thanks to the medical experts at Dogtown.

Ava came to Dogtown after being found in the desert with her paw caught in a coyote trap. It was unclear how long Ava had been out there with no access to food or water, but it was obvious that her injuries were serious. When she was brought to Dogtown, her injuries were “very, very severe,” said Dogtown vet Dr. Patti Iampietro. At many crowded shelters, a badly injured animal like Ava would have three to five days to live, or even less. In most shelters, she would almost certainly have been “put out of her misery” or, at best, had her leg amputated. Even at Dogtown amputation seemed a genuine possibility, because once Dr. Patti took a close look at the injury she found that severe infection had set in. If the infection had been allowed to spread, it could have killed Ava. “I really wanted to make an effort to see if we could save the limb, so she’d have four legs and she could run around and be happy,” Dr. Patti said. It would take multiple surgeries, a lot of time, and a lot of attention to heal Ava’s injuries, but Dr. Patti and the rest of the Dogtown staff were going to do everything they could to save her life.

Ava’s front left paw was severely injured when it got stuck in a coyote trap. The Dogtown team fought to save her leg from amputation.

And it was clear that Ava appreciated it. When she was on the job as a greeter, Ava was still not out of the woods and needed more surgery—and yet here she was, bouncing around the waiting room like a frolicsome pup, seemingly unaffected by her desert dance with death.

Ava’s message is that no creature is too damaged, too difficult, or too insignificant to be cared for here. If the world “out there” tends to be cruel and neglectful of dogs, this is dog heaven, or at least something close. It’s Dogtown, where every animal gets a second chance. The goal is to treat the medical and behavioral problems of the dogs—many deemed unadoptable—who are brought here, and then to find them a permanent adoptive home—a “forever home”—if at all possible. If no home can be found, these dogs are not euthanized. They are free to stay for the rest of their lives. The pact that’s made with animals when they come to Dogtown is something akin to unconditional love.

“A SPIRITUAL AND CONSCIOUS LIFE”

Even a casual visitor to the Best Friends sanctuary will notice that the soul-stirring surroundings seem entirely in keeping with the humanitarian mission of this place. When the small group of friends who created Best Friends first bought this property back in the early 1980s, they loved the land because it created the perfect environment for the work they wanted to do. Here they could build a retreat center that would “take people out of themselves in this monumental landscape, that would eliminate ‘poor me’ in the majesty of the whole thing,” according to Francis Battista, one of the founders of Best Friends.

Taking care of animals had always been one of their core concerns, Francis said, “part of the collective aspirations of the founders. It was kind of baked into the cake.” There were quite a few different things “baked into the cake” when a couple dozen friends, British and American, first came together during the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. In a nutshell, Francis said, “We were trying to pursue a spiritual and conscious life—activity that would take one out of the confines of the self.”

Kindness, as an expression of the spiritual, was regarded not simply as a virtue but as a path in its own right. Kindness to animals, the weakest members of society and often its victims, was regarded as an avocation of particular value. Other activities included work in prisons as well as programs to brighten the lives of terminally ill and seriously injured children. The group was also very active in the animal rights arena. They wrote and distributed tracts opposing animal vivisection while calling for an end to animal testing and experimentation.

Angel Canyon in Kanab, Utah, home of the Best Friends Animal Society, is decorated by petroglyphs that are a thousand years old.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

In the late 1970s, the group’s focus had begun to shift toward animal rescue and rehabilitation. It had become clear that, although they had always been drawn together by spiritual and humanitarian work of various kinds, one thing they all had in common was a love of animals. They understood spiritual leader Mohandas Ghandi’s observation that “a society can be judged by the way it treats its old people, its young people, and its animals,” and knew they could help change the plight of animals in the United States. It would be an uphill battle, though, because millions of animals were being put to death in shelters every year.

First, several members had settled on a ranch in Arizona where they began to take in strays and abandoned animals. Francis, fellow founder Faith Maloney, and a half dozen others began taking in strays and unwanted pets at the ranch, but the pet population soon outgrew the property. So the group began shopping for a larger place to house their swelling population, looking at rural properties from coastal California to an island off the coast of Honduras.

One day in 1982, Francis had to drive from the Arizona ranch to Salt Lake City, Utah. Whenever he drove anywhere in the West, he would stop and pick up U.S. Bureau of Land Management maps, which showed what parcels were privately held, and take little side trips to visit them. On this particular day he drove up Highway 89 through Kanab, Utah, past an enormous parcel of privately owned land in the inspiring canyon lands of southern Utah, a region known as the Golden Circle. He took a hard-packed dirt road back into the property and stared around him in awe.

“I thought, wow, this is fantastic!” he remembered. “But it’s probably not for sale, and we couldn’t afford it anyway.”

But when he returned to Kanab and asked around about the property (then called Kanab Canyon), he was surprised to discover that it was, in fact, for sale. The property had been purchased by a group of enterprising businessmen in Kanab, who wanted to use it as a tourist destination and also rent the Kanab Canyon “movie ranch” to film-production companies. Westerns having since fallen out of fashion, the owners tried to sell the land to ranchers. But the property, too steep and dry for ranching, had turned into a white elephant. No doubt it was beautiful, but as people like to say in the West, “You can’t eat the scenery.” Francis and his friends didn’t need to eat the scenery; they just needed a place to change the world. Francis got on the phone to tell the rest that he had found it.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE FOR ANIMALS

What Francis had found, as it turned out, was something akin to the Louisiana Purchase for animals. The town fathers were only too happy to part with the property—$5,000 down, easy terms, for 3,700 acres, plus an additional 33,000 acres leased from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. The total price: $1.2 million, all for a chunk of land the size of Manhattan.

At 5,000 feet, the place could be cold and snowy in the winter, but it also had more than 320 days of sunshine every year. And its remote location had at least one other advantage: Hundreds of barking dogs would not bother the neighbors, unless by “neighbors” one meant the eagles, coyotes, and cactus wrens.

As Francis Battista tells it, not long after he, Faith Maloney, and some others began settling in to their majestic new home—now renamed Angel Canyon—the animals began to take over. One day one of the group’s dogs ran off and wound up in the local dog pound—which, as it turned out, was a four-foot-high, tin-roofed shed behind the airport, where the vet had to drive over from 80 miles away and it was not uncommon for animals to die of neglect and dehydration.

“Seeing this situation horrified us,” Francis said. “We thought, Anything we do has to be better than this. So let’s do something!”

It was decided that Francis should visit the mayor at his home in Kanab. He found him standing out in front of his house, watering the lawn. Francis explained that they had considerable experience with animal rescue work (Faith had run an animal shelter back East) and would be willing to take charge of animal control for the jurisdiction. The mayor was only too eager to hand over the job to these enthusiastic and unpaid volunteers. For one thing, he was between dogcatchers and needed some help. The “jurisdiction,” as it turned out, in practice went well beyond the confines of tiny Kanab and spanned three immense western counties—more like the size of a small eastern state.

“After that, for the next several years, every police call that came in involving animals—child abuse and neglect cases, hoarding, or whatever else it might be—Faith was called in, sometimes in the middle of the night,” Francis recalled. “We started providing our own vet care, catteries, doggeries—it was all hands on deck. Within a few years we were taking care of 1,200 animals. And anybody in the group who was not totally into animals was gone.”