CHAPTER

The Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

the first time I met Oogy, a veterinarian told me that police had found him in a raid and were directed to take him to Ardmore Animal Hospital (AAH) in Montgomery County, PA, by the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Dr. James Bianco, the surgeon who saved Oogy, told me that he recalled the raid had been on a home because of suspected drug activity. For years, I took the story of Oogy’s arrival at Ardmore at face value. It didn’t matter to me how Oogy had gotten to the hospital that saved him; it was enough for me that he had been saved. I had no reason to question the explanation with which I had been provided. But eventually, prompted by the curiosity of a reporter friend, I started asking questions to see what I could find out about the chain of events that had culminated in Oogy coming to live with us. I found myself driven to see what I could discover about the actual events themselves. I had to know as much about the truth as I could find out. And even though I learned that it was unlikely the story I’d been told was what had actually happened, I also learned that discovering the actual events surrounding Oogy’s arrival might well prove to be impossible.

It would not have been unusual for the police and the SPCA to work in concert during the raid in which Oogy was discovered. Experience had taught the police and the SPCA that wherever dogfighting occurs, there is a substantial chance that other illegal activities are going on, often involving drugs, weapons, and undeclared cash. As a result, the police routinely accompany the SPCA on dogfighting interventions, and the SPCA routinely joins police in, or is available for, drug raids.

Drug dealers fight dogs for money and sometimes simply for bragging rights. They also keep fighting dogs around to protect the drugs and, on occasion, to scare away the competition. This type of operation represents the lowest level of what is now an industry generating over five hundred million dollars a year, commonly referred to as the “street-fighting” aspect of the business. The dogs involved in this lead the most horrific lives imaginable: They are brutalized to toughen them and to make them angry; their injuries are often either not treated or are treated in a rudimentary way (street-fighting dogs have been found with gashes, tears, and cuts stapled together); and they are bred, housed, and trained under the most barbaric conditions. There are also amateur and professional levels of dogfighting, in which an increasing amount of time and money is spent to breed and train the dogs and even to provide some basic medical care for them. Recently, a fourth level of dogfighting has emerged, combining significant financial resources with street-fighting sensibilities.

Fighting dogs who will not fight or who lose fights are occasionally released, but more often than not, they are destroyed in a variety of inhumane ways: They are shot, drowned, bludgeoned, electrocuted, garroted, hung, stabbed, or, as probably happened to Oogy, given to other dogs to be torn apart. The fact that when we first met Oogy we were told that he was a pit bull suggests to me that the dealer who most likely used him for bait thought that he was a fighting dog who would not fight.

When police find fighting dogs in a raid in which they are not accompanied by the SPCA, standard procedure requires them to have the dogs transported there. The SPCA in Philadelphia told me that the Philadelphia police would not have been in Montgomery County, nor would they have taken an animal seized in a raid in Philadelphia to a shelter in Ardmore. According to the director of operations for the Montgomery County SPCA, when police find an injured animal and call while the facility’s operations are open, the animal will be brought there, where two surgeons are on call to provide emergency treatment. Given the extent of Oogy’s injuries, had he been taken to that facility following the raid in which he was found, it is a virtual certainty that he would have been destroyed. The surgeons would have been faced with hours of costly procedures that, given the severity of the wounds and the myriad other medical problems they would have had to deal with, might well have proved futile. On top of that, the SPCA did not have unlimited resources to rehabilitate fighting dogs, particularly at the expense of the other animals in its care. There was no way of determining in advance whether rehabilitation efforts would be successful; after these efforts had been made, a fighting dog might still pose a threat to other animals, or even humans, in which case it could never be made available for adoption. Since time, effort, and money spent on rehabilitation attempts meant that resources would be denied to other dogs with a real likelihood of being adopted, fighting dogs almost invariably would be destroyed. The chances of a mutilated fighting dog being rehabilitated, even if it could have been saved through hours of surgery and postsurgical treatment, and then adopted were beyond remote.

At the time of Oogy’s rescue, Ardmore was the only animal hospital in the immediate area to offer after-hours emergency room treatment. Had the police called the Montgomery County SPCA after hours, when the facility’s operations were closed, a dispatcher would have had the authority to direct the police to take a wounded dog to Ardmore’s ER. The Montgomery County SPCA has no record of that happening, and no follow-up report, which would have been generated had they directed the police there. In fact, the SPCA did not pick up or receive any fighting dogs at all on the weekend that Oogy was found. When I asked the SPCA’s director of operations whether the presence of a bait dog would have necessarily meant that there had to have been fighting dogs at the site, and wondered why none had been taken to the SPCA as a result of the raid in which Oogy was found, the director told me that very often the owners “drop the dogs”—let them loose so that they will not be charged with animal cruelty. “The dogs usually turn up in a couple of days,” he told me, “either as strays or when they corner somebody on the roof of their car.”

I later learned that another possible reason no other fighting dogs were found in the raid is that dogs being used for street fighting are often kept at a different location from where they are fought. Since those who fight dogs are usually not concerned with providing proper care for them, the dogs are often stashed in abandoned properties so that if they are discovered, there will be no way to find the owners. And to make detection more difficult, dogfighters also regularly change the locations where they train the dogs and hold the fights.

The fact that no other dogs were found in the raid in which Oogy was discovered also suggests that Oogy may have been abandoned after he was attacked. Since there were no other animals in the house, there would have been no reason for anyone to stay there with a dying dog, especially a dog that had been abused when it was alive.

In the absence of any evidence that the Montgomery County SPCA directed that Oogy be taken to the Ardmore ER, I’m left with only one explanation as to how Oogy got to the hospital—and although it is speculative, it makes the most sense to me. I believe that Oogy was found in a local police operation, which is consistent with Dr. Bianco’s recollection, and because the raid was local, the police knew about the emergency services that were available after hours through Ardmore. My best guess is that some animal-loving cop found a mutilated, dying puppy and, on his or her own initiative, brought the dog to the emergency services at Ardmore to try to save its life.

In the end, the only important thing is the fact that Oogy was discovered and brought in for treatment. I can never know why the fighting dog that attacked Oogy, and that would have been or was being trained to kill, did not in fact kill him. The emergency room services were eliminated several years after Oogy was found, and all of the ER records are gone, so I have no way of knowing if its staff ever wrote down which police department brought him in. I was told that the ER staff would probably not have bothered to note the department because it wouldn’t have been relevant to treatment. I tried to locate the two doctors who had operated the ER to see what, if anything, they remembered, but I couldn’t track them down. As a result, I cannot determine how the police came to learn about and raid the drug-dealing operation, or where exactly the raid occurred, or what actually happened during the raid and what was found. I can’t learn the fate of any people who may have been there when the police burst in. I can never know how long Oogy lay in his cage and suffered or what that suffering consisted of. I will never know why his keepers did not kill him and put him out of his misery when they saw that the dog being trained to kill had not finished the job.

My investigation into the events that culminated in Oogy coming to live with us also revealed that after the police rescued him, Oogy survived largely because of one woman’s refusal to let him die and the efforts of a surgeon and veterinary staff who operated out of the purest of motives: to save the life of a helpless creature before them.

Diane Klein, the hospital administrator of AAH, began working with Dr. Bianco when she was just out of college, a year before he acquired the facility in 1989. The first year that the hospital was open for business, Dr. Bianco and Diane each worked one-hundred-hour weeks, yet Dr. Bianco did not generate enough income to feed his family by himself. Luckily, his wife was working at the time. For the first two years the hospital was open, Diane slept in a room on the second floor and constituted the entire staff. She worked as Dr. Bianco’s assistant, managed the schedule, paid the bills, ordered supplies, kept inventory, and clipped toenails. Diane had graduated from college with a degree in biology and aspired to become a veterinarian herself. When she started with Dr. Bianco, she was taking night courses with that goal in mind. As the volume of business increased and the staff grew, in appreciation of her dedication and skills, Dr. Bianco offered to pay for Diane to get a degree in veterinary medicine. By that time, though, Diane had married and had her first child, and she felt her time and energy were better spent focused on her family. Dr. Bianco then asked Diane to manage the office. Along the way, he also made her a partner in the business.

Both Dr. Bianco and Diane are completely committed to helping animals and will do whatever is required to achieve that end. They enjoy a professional relationship that is based on an implicit trust in each other’s judgment. Ardmore Animal Hospital’s national recognition reflects the professionalism and compassion that starts at the top.

“Diane loves gladiator dogs,” Dr. Bianco explained to me. “But, ultimately, her generosity goes beyond this. There is no purer animal lover. She has a special affinity for dogs not given a fair shake.” He paused, thought a moment, and then continued, “This business attracts a lot of people who relate better to animals than they do to humans. I’ve had more than one technician who rode with outlaw motorcycle gangs. I’ve had technicians who were literally incapable of speaking to my clients. Diane is a special blend of animal lover and people person. She is so dedicated to helping animals that she is very demanding of the staff.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t say the staff is afraid of her, but they certainly have a very healthy respect for her. The thing is, she is no more demanding of the staff than she is of herself.”

By her own admission, Diane would make a lousy animal rights advocate. “It must be the Italian in me. I have no tolerance for people who abuse animals. I’m not capable of reasoning with them. I couldn’t deal with these people rationally. But then, there’s nothing rational about them.” She laughed. “I’d go after them with a hammer.”

Monday, December 16, 2002, was the second anniversary of the death of Diane’s all-time favorite dog, Maddie, a Staffordshire terrier–bulldog mix that had been with Diane for thirteen years, ultimately succumbing to cancer. The night before, she and her husband had looked at some videos of the dog. At first, they had laughed at Maddie’s antics, but eventually their sense of loss overcame them, and they had cried and comforted each other. On the drive to work that Monday morning, Diane was unable to stop thinking of Maddie, remembering favorite moments. She felt down, a bit distracted.

Diane turned onto the quiet, tree-lined street where the hospital is located in an old Victorian-style home. At the time, AAH carried a staff of six doctors and eight to ten technicians. The hospital also offered the services of two animal specialists one night a week. In addition, AAH leased its facilities and equipment to an after-hours and weekend emergency service owned and operated by two doctors who utilized the hospital’s facilities but were not on staff.

Diane parked behind the hospital. As she did every morning, she came in through the back door, and as she did every morning, the first place she went was the treatment room, where hospitalized and surgical cases were housed, to see if any animals had come in through the ER.

The room was painted in hues of beige and brick and smelled like isopropyl alcohol and adhesive tape. Against the far wall from the entrance were two tiers of three small cages sitting on top of two larger cages. Additional cages lined the two walls on either side; an oxygen cage also sat to the right of the entrance to the room. The bottom of each cage was carpeted with shredded newspaper and had built-in dishes for water and food. Medical instruments were stocked in the drawers of a stainless-steel examination table that stood in the center of the room.

The first thing Diane saw as she entered the room was a white pup lying in one of the small cages against the opposite wall. His head was on the floor between his paws. The left half of his skull was swathed in white gauze stained with blood, held in place by adhesive tape. The pup’s body was spotted with dark, dried blood. Bloody, pus-filled holes and gashes covered the side of his face and the part of his skull not obscured by the bandage. Diane began to seethe as it became apparent to her that the ER had basically done nothing for the poor animal. They had not even bothered to clean off his blood. As soon as Diane walked into the room, the pup lifted his head and his right ear stood at attention; his large, dark eyes looked at her, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. As she stood there transfixed, the dog struggled to his feet, sneezed, and shook his head. Blood droplets sprayed from under the bandage. Then, incredibly, he started to wag his tail.

Diane walked over to the cage past one of the ER physicians, who was standing in the room focusing on some sort of paperwork. She bent and stared at the pup, her nose only inches from his. The pup appeared to be a pit bull or a pit bull mix, but it was difficult to tell exactly because of his swollen and distorted head. Diane’s thoughts slipped to Maddie, then returned to the pup in front of her. She straightened, her eyes never leaving the dog. She pointed to the animal and, without averting her gaze, asked the doctor, “What the hell is that?”

Somewhat startled, the doctor looked up to see what Diane was talking about and then told her that the dog had been found following a raid and likely had been used as bait. He explained that the police had brought the dog over to the ER for treatment.

The dog sat back down and looked at Diane. The nostrils of his large black nose twitched at Diane’s proximity. The three-by-five-inch cage card read “Male Pit Bull or PB Mix” and showed December 15 as the date of admission. The dog’s age was estimated at three to four months on the cage card, but Diane thought that estimate was high. Looking through the chart, she saw that, in addition to the visible wounds on his head, the left ear and much of the left side of the dog’s face was gone, torn off by the violence that had been inflicted upon him. Diane was astonished by the fact that the pup did not exhibit any signs of the constant, staggering pain she knew he must have been experiencing. She was also amazed by the fact that after what had happened to him, he didn’t seem to be afraid of her. He simply continued to sit in the cage and watch her calmly.

There was untouched food in the cage. The ER staff had cleaned the largest wound on the left side of the pup’s face, given the dog an injection of steroids to counteract shock, and injected him with antibiotics. They had not given him any blood or tried substantively to treat his injuries. The ER staff were not doing what Diane refers to as “above and beyond.” They had expended only the minimal effort needed to keep him alive. No one owned the dog, so there was no one to hold the ER accountable for his treatment or to pay for the effort that it would take to try to repair the damage he had suffered. As a result, Diane learned, the doctor planned on transferring the dog to the SPCA.

From experience, she knew that if the pup was transferred to the SPCA, he would be euthanized.

Aware that the doctor’s likely plans for the pup would lead to his destruction, moved by what he had already endured and his sweet, calm demeanor, and well aware of the magnitude of the fight that lay ahead, Diane asked if the doctor would sign over the animal to her. She wanted to at least make an effort to save the dog’s life. The doctor agreed, because once the transfer had occurred, the dog’s welfare was no longer his responsibility.

Dr. Bianco was upstairs in his office doing paperwork. When he came down to the first floor to begin his day’s rounds, Diane immediately went over to him, the words spilling out of her.

“I need your help,” she said to him. “Will you take a look at this dog who came in over the weekend? He was used as a bait dog. Half his face is missing. The police brought him in and the ER doctor was going to send him to the SPCA, so I had him signed over to me. The SPCA will just destroy him. I want to try to save him. He’s really cute and seems very sweet, and I really feel badly for him.”

Dr. Bianco looked at her and shook his head in mock disbelief. “Oh God, Diane…” He sighed. “Not another one.” Then he smiled and said, “Okay. Let’s go have a look.”

Dr. Bianco followed Diane back into the treatment room, where he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened the door to the dog’s cage. He lifted him out and placed him on the examination table. Cradling the dog’s head in his left arm to immobilize him, Dr. Bianco took a scissors from one of the drawers and cut open the bandage. With his right foot, he pressed the pedal that opened the top of the medical waste bin on the floor at the end of the examination table and dumped the bloody wad of gauze and tape into it. Saturated with and stiffened by discharge from the dog’s wounds, the bandage landed with a loud thump, as though it were made out of plaster of Paris. With his right hand, Dr. Bianco stroked the dog’s flank to calm him down and erase his fear. The pup offered absolutely no resistance. Dr. Bianco, too, was astonished that despite everything that had happened to him, and despite the way humans had so obviously mistreated him, the dog exhibited no signs of anxiety. He seemed to understand somehow that the people around him now were different from those who had controlled his life before; that they were kind, even though he had probably never before experienced human kindness.

The pup’s ribs were prominent, which told Dr. Bianco that he was malnourished. His breathing was shallow, but he did not open his mouth for additional air, which was a sign of distress. His head and neck were caked with iodine brown dried blood. His features were horrifically damaged. There were multiple infected puncture wounds on the right side of his face and skull. The left side of his face and forehead were gone. What had been that side of his face, from just back of his muzzle to behind where his ear used to be, was now yellow green pus, oozing blood, and fully infected. All that remained of his left ear was a jagged stump. The tissue surrounding the yawning cavity where the left side of the pup’s face had been was dead and blackened; the rotted flesh smelled like meat that had been left out in the sun for days. The blood vessels on that side of his forehead had been torn apart. And yet, incredibly, although he had to have been in tremendous pain, he gave no indication of it.

Based on the conditions he observed and the extent of ruin and infection he found, Dr. Bianco estimated that the dog had been lying untreated and unattended for five to seven days. He did not want to contemplate what the pup had endured during that period. Despite the fact that the pup had been losing blood the entire time, the ER doctors had not done a blood count or given him any transfusions. In his weakened state, the dog would surely have a difficult time surviving both the extensive infection and the shock of surgical trauma if Dr. Bianco were to operate, and operating offered the only chance of saving the dog’s life.

Dr. Bianco gently removed his elbow and laid the pup’s head down on the table. The dog lay on his side, exhausted; his tail swatted feebly several times. Dr. Bianco rubbed the dog’s neck. Even with the pup’s face so swollen and mutilated, Diane thought that he was undeniably cute. She gently touched the top of the dog’s head and bent over him, her eyes on Dr. Bianco’s face.

Dr. Bianco looked back at Diane. He shook his head in the negative and shrugged. He pursed his lips grimly, then said, “Diane, I’m sorry. I don’t think I can save this dog.”

Diane straightened from where she had been crouched over the pup. She looked into Dr. Bianco’s eyes. “Dr. Bianco,” she said. “You’ve got to save this dog.”

Dr. Bianco’s father and his uncles had all been craftsmen who worked with their hands. They were stonemasons, welders, and carpenters who had always taken great pride in what they created for the use of others. Dr. Bianco credits them with having given him the manual dexterity to be an exceptionally effective surgeon. With no other reason than the fact that helpless before him lay a victim of horrific abuse that might possibly be saved, and moved by Diane’s determination that every effort be made to preserve this life, Dr. Bianco started surgery.

The operation lasted several hours. First, Dr. Bianco’s assistant gave the dog general anesthesia. Dr. Bianco then started him on an antibiotic treatment and flushed the hole where his face had been to clean the gaping wound. He cut away the dead tissue and inserted a Penrose drain into the exposed portion of the animal’s face, a plastic tube that came out through an opening Dr. Bianco made in the underside of the jaw. This would allow blood and other fluids to escape, to prevent infection and promote proper healing. After this, he sutured the gaping meat that the dog’s face had become. They transfused blood and liquid nourishment into the dog intravenously.

The dog survived the surgery.

He wasn’t Oogy then. In fact, he didn’t have a name. For superstitious reasons, the staff didn’t name animals whom they didn’t know and didn’t expect to survive. By all rights, this dog should have been nothing more than one of the uncountable number whose lives are lost or destroyed as the result of dogfighting each year. Yet even though the pup had no real prospects for survival, the hospital staff worked together to do everything they could to save him. No one would be there to thank them if they were successful, and there was no one to pay for all the time and effort they were putting in. There was no guarantee that they would accomplish their goal or, if they did, whether the dog would be able to establish a successful, loving relationship with a human or another animal. But they persevered. Their efforts were, in the truest sense, simply a collective exercise in the right thing to do.

The surgery was over, but the dog wasn’t out of the woods: The hospital team soon discovered that their patient would not eat. He would occasionally take a little soft food, but not the quantity that he needed in order to regain his strength; neither did he offer any visual or behavioral clues as to what was interfering with his ability to eat. Dr. Bianco did not know if it was an internal complication or something else. Bloodwork gave no indication of infection. There was a fistula just below where the pup’s left ear had been. Dr. Bianco simply had a gut feeling as to what he needed to do next. He reached into the jaw with a forceps and felt loose bone. He extracted a piece of the dog’s jawbone about the shape and size of a fifty-cent piece. A section of the dog’s lower mandible had been broken off and had been digging into the roof of his mouth whenever he bit down, sending a lightning bolt of pain through his being. He had been in such extensive discomfort that he could not functionally operate his mouth, but he had never showed this. His threshold for pain was extraordinary.

The forty-five-minute procedure to remove the shattered bone enabled the dog to eat again. He began to take solid food on a regular basis and started to gain strength and to put on weight.

Dr. Bianco was in awe of the power of the beast that had inflicted the wounds with which he had had to contend. The dog that had grabbed this pup had a bite forceful enough not just to fracture, but to break off a piece of his jaw. Dr. Bianco had attended seminars given by humane societies and rescue centers to teach veterinarians how to recognize injuries associated with dogfighting. As part of this training, he had seen films of actual fights, and he could easily imagine the scene that culminated in the devastating injuries the pup had suffered. The fighting dog would have grabbed the pup, which would have been howling and bawling and squealing in pain and terror the entire time, and shaken him like a rag, slamming him into the floor, slamming him into the side of the cage had they been in a box. It was nothing short of a miracle, given the pup’s malnourished state, that he had survived the attack at all. To have also survived the subsequent prolonged period of suffering and inattention, the loss of blood and extensive infection, the absence of food and water, and then the surgical trauma was, in Dr. Bianco’s estimation and experience, truly miraculous.

Diane had been aware of all of this, too. Dr. Bianco knew that Diane had had an almost visceral response to what this dog had endured and that her determination to save the dog was in direct proportion to the extent that she sensed he had suffered. She did not want him to die, and she would not let him. She had saved the dog from certain euthanasia and then set in motion the process to provide some semblance of normality in the dog’s life.

For Oogy to have survived all of this certainly suggests that he had to have been fighting to stay alive. But based on what his life had been up to that point, what would have driven that determination? I want to believe that he sensed there was something better waiting for him.

Trauma is easier to overcome than long-term maltreatment, because abuse becomes a way of life and affects the dog’s spirits. Although the pup had suffered both trauma and abuse, because he was so young and neither had been prolonged, neither seemed to have had a permanent effect on him. He continued to heal and then began to flourish. His condition and the cruelty he had endured produced a heartfelt, deeply caring reaction among the hospital staff. His happy, affectionate nature was seemingly more pronounced because of the horror he had undergone. They warmed to him. As Diane described it, “He became everybody’s dog.” The entire staff participated in caring for the dog and nurturing him. Buoyant with optimism, after another ten days Diane took him home to begin fostering him for adoption. She named him Eli because he was white, which made her think of a cotton ball, which led her to Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. She wanted to keep him, but her own dog was jealous.

“He was just another white pit bull as far as I was concerned,” Dr. Bianco later told me. “But he had a charming personality. You have to understand that we get pit bulls in here on a somewhat regular basis. We repair them when we can and try to adopt them out. There’s dogfighting going on in this area. One time a kid brought in a pit bull he said had been attacked. He was crying, and he said he could not afford the surgery. One of my clients, who was in the waiting room when the kid came in, volunteered to pay for it. The surgery cost her eight hundred dollars. Several months later, the kid came back with the dog torn up again. He was clearly fighting the dog. I confronted him. I said to him, ‘You’re fighting this dog.’ He denied it, of course. I told him, ‘Listen, I know you are. I’ll fix him up this time, but don’t bring him back here again.’ ”

The Pennsylvania SPCA, which is located in Philadelphia, receives anywhere from fifty to seventy-five reports of dogfighting a month. Through the years, I have met fighting dogs that have survived and other rescued dogs that have been abused and mistreated in horrific fashion. But for obvious reasons, survival is exceedingly rare in a dog who has been used as bait and mutilated to the extent that Oogy had been. And it’s even rarer that, after the unspeakable depravity and abuse that had been inflicted upon him, the dog maintained a trusting, loving spirit.

I am routinely overwhelmed by the circumstances that brought Oogy to us. There are so many “ifs” involved: if the fighting dog had killed Oogy as he was supposed to do; if Oogy had not somehow survived his torment; if the police had not raided the facility at the moment they did; if the raid had not been local, so that the police would not have had access to ER services; if Diane and Dr. Bianco and the staff had not been so determined to save Oogy…

Long after Oogy had come to live with us, when I had pieced together as best I could how events had unfolded, I related the story to Noah and Dan, told them how Diane had refused to allow Oogy to be sent to the SPCA, insisted that Dr. Bianco save him, and had essentially dedicated herself to not letting him die.

Noah blurted out, amazed, “Really? That really happened? Diane really did that?” He broke into a wide grin. “Jeez,” he said. “Diane’s a freakin’ saint!”

“Saint Diane!” Dan exclaimed. “I like that.” He rolled it around in his thoughts for a few seconds. “Saint Diane,” he said. He, too, had a broad smile on his face. “The patron saint of hopeless causes.”