Dr. Frank writes about caring for the emotional and mental needs of the Vicktory dogs.
Rehabilitation of fighting dogs has received very little attention and no systematic study. How does the experience of being used for fighting – which includes not just the fighting itself, but the methods of housing and the ways they are handled by the humans "caring" for them – affect the dogs psychologically and emotionally? If, in addition to the disfiguring physical scars, they develop emotional scars, how extensive is the damage? How long does it last? Being fighters, could the emotional scarring be a canine form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as is seen in humans who have engage in combat? Can any of the damage be reversed? If so, what are the best methods to do this?
These are the questions we have set out to study here at Best Friends. We have recently begun a series of studies looking at psychological and emotional trauma in animals that have survived great adversity, including animals that have endured the nightmare of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath (the animals that have reunited with their human families as well as those that did not), cats that have lived a horrendous life in a massive hoarding situation with physical conditions every bit as harsh as the worst of the German concentration camps, dogs that were kept their whole lives in small cages to be used as puppy-producing machines in a puppy mill operation, and other forms of neglect, abuse, and cruelty. Having the Michael Vick dogs join our family here at the sanctuary has provided us with a great opportunity to study what kind of mental health and emotional well-being issues occur in fighting dogs. And the findings are not to be some esoteric minutiae that has some vague promise for dogs in the future – the findings are intended to help these dogs right here, right now.
I, along with John Garcia, Jeff Popowich, and videographer Michael Delgado Hand ("MDH") traveled to the East coast to look at the Vick dogs that everyone else was writing off as hopeless – too mean, uncontrollably aggressive, or otherwise psychologically deranged. With John doing the actual handling of the dogs, we assessed each animal's response to a number of very simple things, such as the approach of a person, walking them on a leash, touching them on areas all over their body, and gently holding their mouths closed for a few seconds.
Leaving the science of my study aside for a minute, here's the essence of what we found: These were all wonderful, loving dogs. But for many of them the wonderful-loving aspect was buried very deep – hidden behind the outwardly visible signs of emotional distress they were clearly experiencing. Some of the dogs were very frightened by people they didn't know, some were simply terrified of anything and everything and stayed huddled up in the back of their enclosures, frozen, trembling, and just wanting all the scariness to go away. Some showed signs of depression – they simply showed little or no response to anything that happened around them. And on the positive side we found many of the dogs were the very opposite of what we had been told ahead of time – bouncy, playful, outgoing, loving, and seemingly quite happy dogs that simply craved the human attention we were thrilled to able to provide.
Overall, the team of the four of us – all very experienced with and knowledgeable about dogs – agreed that inside every one of these terribly mistreated dogs was a loving soul that simply wanted the chance to be healed of their physical and emotional scars and then become the loyal, loving, and lifelong companion of a kind-hearted human family.
In my next entry I'll write more about the individual dogs and how they are doing. I'll also share with you some of the challenges of rehabilitating fighting dogs and some of the difficulties of the kind of studies we are doing.