Travels with Casey Read online

  The public perception of Pit Bulls has changed markedly since the 1980s, when the breed had a reputation for being charming and athletic, appearing in family films and as a mascot in various advertisements. But after a series of well-publicized maulings in 1987 among which a Pit Bull killed a toddler, the dogs’ image was transformed into one of violence and aggression. It probably doesn’t help that studies have linked Pit Bull ownership with criminality.

  The first Pit Bull–specific ban was passed in 1987, and the breed has since been singled out disproportionately in BSL bans. But as critics point out, the public’s perception of dangerous dogs tends to change over time. “Dobermans, Rottweilers, and German Shepherds have all gone through periods when they were seen as the ultimate ‘tough’ dog,” James Hettinger wrote in Animal Sheltering magazine. (Other breeds have also been stigmatized. In 1738, a Blue Paul Terrier—a breed that no longer exists—attacked a number of other dogs and humans in an Edinburgh meat market. In response, enraged citizens converged on the dog, slaughtered it, and placed a one-pound bounty on all Blue Pauls. Within days, dog carcasses hung from shop windows, floated in the harbor, and lay on the side of the road, clubbed to death.)

  Some sixteen states have banned breed-specific legislation in recent years, arguing that such laws are unfair and ineffective. That’s good news to John Garcia and Best Friends, who have made it part of their mission to show that dogs aren’t born bad, and that most dogs made bad by humans can be rehabilitated.

  After visiting the outdoor dog kennels, John took us for a tour of Angel Canyon in his Jeep. He drove us down a winding road, past a horse sanctuary to a cavernous lake under a canyon. “It’s like a scene from The Abyss,” Garrett said, adding that he half-expected some underwater ET to float up in a bioluminescent ship, or for a monstrous tentacle to pull us all under.

  From there John took us to Angels Rest, a pet memorial park and the final resting place for many sanctuary animals. Low wooden poles, each adorned with a chandelier of metal wind chimes, had been erected around the flat, brush-lined yard. The chimes jangled in the breeze over rows of terra-cotta-colored gravestones, each of which lay flat against the gravel. Without headstones protruding from the ground, Angels Rest felt less like a somber graveyard and more like a well-tended Zen garden. I stood beneath one of the wind chime curtains in the center of several graves, which had been arranged in concentric half-circles, like the top half of the sun as it peeked out from a rocky red cliff behind the park.

  When Garrett and I returned to the clinic, a young vet told us that the black dog was doing fine. The spay surgery had gone well. “But it’s good you found her when you did,” she said, adding that the dog would have died without medical attention.

  She spoke matter-of-factly, explaining that the dog had a pyometra, a uterine infection that causes the uterus to fill up “like a water balloon full of pus,” she said, cupping her hands around an imaginary expanding water balloon as she spoke. “It’s a raging infection, and it happens very quickly.”

  “And it would have been fatal?” Garrett asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was an early-stage pyometra, so she probably had another week to ten days.”

  THE NEXT morning, we returned to the clinic to pick up the dog. Though they’d hinted that they could make space for her at the sanctuary, everyone I talked to at Best Friends seemed to be rooting for me to keep her. Still, I wanted to spend one more night in Kanab to see how she handled life in the Chalet. To Garrett’s dismay, this extra time in Utah meant we’d have to skip the Grand Canyon and drive directly to Phoenix, where he had to catch a flight back to New Hampshire.

  Another vet met us in the clinic waiting room and proceeded to deliver more unexpected news. “I’m concerned she might have Brucella canis,” she told us. Brucella canis. The words practically rolled off the tongue and sounded to me like some sort of harmless, perhaps even aristocratic, canine ailment.

  “It’s a sexually transmitted disease,” she said. “It’s a pretty common disease on the reservation.”

  The news got worse: Brucella canis can be transmitted to humans through body fluids, including saliva and milk. “Your dog’s already potentially been exposed,” she said, “and so have you.”

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. My dog might have given me an STD. I thought about the awkwardness of breaking the news to Marc. “Let me preface this conversation by saying that I’m not sexually attracted to animals,” is how I imagined that might go. But there was good news, the vet said. “It’s a low likelihood that she has it,” she told us. “She’s not showing all the signs, but we were concerned by some of the ways the tissue looked when we did the spay.”

  The vet handed me a bottle of doxycycline for the dog and suggested that I keep her away from other animals and people for two weeks. “Just to be safe,” she assured me.

  I worried about keeping the black dog away from people and dogs. What kind of start to her new life was that? Was I just going to isolate her in the motorhome, like some sort of leper? I wondered what I would tell my dad and stepmom when I visited them in Scottsdale. I’d been looking forward to a stress-free few days in their desert home. Brucella canis might just ruin everything.

  John Garcia tried his best to cheer me up later that afternoon at an outdoor shooting range facing a cliff. A man of remarkable enthusiasm, he handed me a shotgun and a beer and ordered me to “have some fun.” I wasn’t so sure I should be drinking during my introduction to firearms, but I turned out to be a surprisingly good shot with a shotgun. Garrett was terrific with a handgun. John was probably just being nice, but he said we were two of the best first-timers he’d ever seen.

  Back at the RV park that night, the dog mostly slept in a crate John gave us for the road. He’d warned us that she might be tired for a few days—the surgery, combined with the stress of a new environment, could make her seem lethargic and distant.

  While she slept, I searched the Internet for information about my potential STD. On the website VeterinaryPartner.com, I found a report detailing the illness in dogs. It wasn’t pleasant reading. Though antibiotics are used to treat Brucella canis, the article made clear that the “bacterium is so good at hiding inside the host’s cells, you can never assume it is ever truly gone.” Other articles suggested euthanasia as a common “treatment.” I looked up the symptoms in dogs; they included inflammation of the spine, kidneys, and inner eye. But often the only sign of the illness is a miscarried pregnancy.

  That would have seemed to rule out the black dog, who had apparently delivered living puppies. But the vet at Best Friends had cautioned me that the woman I spoke to on the reservation could have been mistaken; maybe those puppies had actually belonged to a different dog.

  Next, I found a 2012 report by the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians titled “Public Health Implications of Brucella canis Infections in Humans.” The report found that there were between one hundred and two hundred cases of the illness in people reported each year, but that “it seems likely that B. canis infections in humans are significantly underdiagnosed and under-reported, primarily due to the nonspecific presentation of the disease and the lack of readily available laboratory testing.” Fortunately, the treatment is easier in humans than dogs; normally a course of antibiotics does the trick.

  Garrett, for his part, took the STD news in stride. “At least it’s not worms or parasites,” he said. “I’ll take dog syphilis over worms any day.” He could sense that I was making myself crazy online, so he temporarily broke the spell by announcing that it was time to name the new dog.

  “We can’t just keep calling her ‘Black Dog,’ ” he said.

  He was right. Now that I was pretty sure I was going to keep her, it was time to name the animal. But I wasn’t feeling especially creative. The first idea that came to mind was “Bear,” to honor the passing resemblance. “Too common,” I said. We sat there for the next thirty minutes, drinking wine and coming up blank.

/>   Just when I was about to give up for the night, I blurted out “Rez.”

  “Why not name her Rez? Or Rezzy?” I proposed. I’d never met a dog named Rez before, and it fit with the common practice of naming a stray dog for where you found her. I suppose I could have also called her Spirit, after the gas station that was her former home, or Navajo. But Rez, or Rezzy, seemed to fit. I knelt down in front of the dog’s open crate, where she was curled up in a ball.

  “Nice to meet you, Rezzy,” I said.

  ON OUR way south the next morning to Sedona, Arizona, I pulled the RV over at Lone Rock Beach on Lake Powell, a stunning reservoir on the border of Utah and Arizona. The second-largest man-made reservoir in the country (by capacity), Lake Powell has two thousand miles of shoreline, more than the west coast of the continental United States. Lone Rock Beach is named after a solitary rock that sits in Lake Powell’s Wahweap Bay, some 750 yards from the beach.

  Visitors can dry camp at the water’s edge, and on the day of our arrival (Easter Sunday), there were a dozen or so all-terrain vehicles and campers parked on the muddy sand. I didn’t want to chance getting stuck, so we left the RV in a lot and walked down to the beach with the dogs. Though Rezzy still seemed dazed from her uprooting and operation, I was curious how she’d respond to a body of water. I doubted she’d ever seen one.

  As he is wont to do, Casey made himself at home on the beach. He swam far out into the water after a tennis ball and then returned to land to destroy a young boy’s inflatable beach ball. The poor boy sobbed on his beach towel. I apologized profusely to his parents, who turned out to be good sports about it. “There are many more where that ball came from,” the dad assured me.

  With that crisis averted, I let Rezzy off the leash. Garrett and I watched as she walked gingerly along the water’s edge. Though she didn’t go far, her tail never stopped wagging. I was hoping she’d go to the bathroom, because she hadn’t pooped since we’d picked her up the previous morning from the clinic. But no such luck.

  After an hour on the beach, we climbed back in the motorhome and drove south to Sedona, a small city known for its scenic red sandstone formations and its spiritual, New Agey vibe. We spent that night at a dog-friendly hotel—El Portal—and had dinner and margaritas with the dogs on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. Though we didn’t have much time the next day to explore the area, we took a short morning hike through the red rocks. I let Casey walk ahead of us but didn’t let Rezzy off the leash this time. There were too many places where she could potentially run and hide.

  Rezzy didn’t poop on that walk, either. I called the Best Friends vet later that morning to ask for advice, but she said not to worry. “Sometimes the stress of a new environment can cause that,” she assured me. “Give me a call if she still hasn’t gone in forty-eight hours.”

  While I had her on the phone, I asked if the Brucella canis test results had come back yet. They hadn’t. I pressed her on the likelihood that Rezzy had the illness. “It’s unlikely,” she said, repeating what she’d already told me. “But we should know for sure soon.”

  As Garrett and I drove toward North Scottsdale, where my dad lives in a beautiful red adobe desert house, I confessed that I felt like a terrible son. I hadn’t told my dad and stepmom about Rezzy’s possible condition, and I wasn’t sure I was going to. “If I tell my dad,” I said to Garrett, “he’s going to freak out about getting it and will probably want me to keep Rezzy and Casey in the motorhome for four days.”

  “But it’s too hot to keep them in there during the day,” Garrett said. “Maybe he’ll just have you confine the dogs to one room in the house?”

  That was a possibility. But it still sounded stressful. My dad doesn’t react well to changes in his routine, and a newly rescued street dog with a potential STD that could be transferred to himself, his wife, and his dog would constitute a serious disruption to his peaceful quasi-retirement.

  Besides, I was mostly convinced that Rezzy didn’t have the illness. I’d believed the woman on the reservation when she told me that Rezzy had birthed healthy puppies, and from everything I’d read online, a dog with Brucella canis would have had a miscarriage. Still, I couldn’t help being on edge my first day at my dad and stepmom’s house. My body tensed when my stepmom, an animal lover who emails me several funny dog or cat videos each month, knelt down to kiss Rezzy. Later that day, during an evening walk with the dogs through the desert, I hip-checked Rezzy out of the way when I sensed that my stepmom was about to go in for another smooch.

  “I’m going straight to hell,” I told Marc when I spoke to him by phone that night.

  Thankfully, Rezzy turned out to be fine. The vet called me the next day with the good news—my new dog didn’t have “doggie syphilis.” During a long walk in the desert to celebrate, Rezzy even decided to defecate; she did so behind a cactus, which offered her some semblance of privacy.

  MY DAD and stepmom share their home with a beautiful, sensitive, tennis-ball-obsessed Golden named Cassie. The dog is a celebrity of sorts, at least in the world of Arizona Golden Retriever rescues; she was the 2011 Arizona Golden Retriever Connection calendar cover girl.

  Like many cover girls that have come before her, Cassie can be high-maintenance. She’s suspicious of some dogs, particularly those that compete for attention from her favorite humans. She seemed especially threatened by Rezzy, perhaps because they’re both females. When my stepmom tried to play with the dogs on Cassie’s favorite carpet, Cassie bit Rezzy on the top of her nose. Rezzy slinked away with a small cut.

  Though Cassie has never bitten me, she wasn’t my biggest fan when I’d first met her the previous year. In fact, she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me back then. If I got too close, she’d shuffle backward or pee on the floor. She’d quickly warmed up to my dad, but she would cower in fear at the sight of most men.

  “I’m not going to give up without a fight,” I’d assured her, lying on my back on the ground (the most unthreatening position I could think of) and making sweet kissing noises. Other times, I would throw tennis balls for her or toss chunks of salami in her dog bowl when I was sure she was looking.

  In the midst of Cassie’s obvious anxiety around me, I’d suggested to my dad and stepmom that we reach out for help to a pet psychic—or an “animal communicator,” as most prefer to be called. I’d been reading about animal communicators as initial research for this book, and I’d even spoken to several about my relationship with Casey (more on that in a bit).

  I searched online and found a local communicator by the name of Debbie Johnstone, who had been profiled two years earlier in The Arizona Republic. Though most animal communication sessions are done over the phone, since Debbie was local I called and made an appointment for her to come by the house and meet Cassie.

  In person, Debbie managed to look both whimsically childlike and intensely serious. Her gaze was direct but not piercing; it was softened by oval glasses and bright blond bangs that curled slightly inward over her much darker eyebrows. Her hair was the almost-white color one might find on a storybook princess, but her face also had a slightly masculine edge. She looked a bit like actor James Lipton with a wig.

  “I believe I was born this way,” she told us, seated next to Cassie on the floor of my dad and stepmom’s home. “When I was two, I remember talking to the animals and hearing them. My mother thought it was my imagination, but I knew I could communicate with them.”

  Debbie’s childhood connection to animals is typical of the hundreds of animal communicators—the vast majority of whom are women—working today in the United States. Penelope Smith, who has been called the “grandmother of animal communication,” credits her childhood cat, Fritzi, with comforting her while her parents fought.

  “We took refuge in our bedroom to avoid the frequent parental conflicts accentuated by alcohol,” she writes in her book Animal Talk. “Fritzi and I understood each other deeply.”

  Though the practice of animal communication existed be
fore Penelope made it her job, the profession didn’t gain traction until the late 1970s. The field’s growth coincided with the burgeoning New Age movement; many communicators share an interest in alternative medicine and mystical philosophies.

  Animal communicators insist that anyone can learn to commune with their pets, but “it takes practice,” Debbie told me. For Debbie, that began soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks. She’d been working for nearly twenty-five years in the technology industry, but 9/11 shook her out of the complacency of living a life she wasn’t passionate about.

  “My job didn’t feel right, and neither did I,” she told us. “I decided to go do what I loved most—working with animals.” She started volunteering at a rescue organization for horses and took a four-hour animal communication workshop. “Eventually my ability just turned back on,” she said.

  Many hopefuls attend workshops, where they say they use focused meditation to receive images and feelings from other species telepathically. Other communicators rely on alternative techniques: some claim to go into a shamanic trance and speak to an animal’s “spirit guides,” while Houston-based celebrity pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick says that animals project their thoughts and feelings through the earth’s magnetic fields.

  Animal communicators insist they act as translators, conceptualizing the messages they receive—which they say can come through words, pictures, or feelings—into affirmations of our animal companions’ happiness or explanations of their misbehavior. Joan Ranquet, who teaches at Communication with All Life University, a school she founded, finds that dogs are a lot like hyperactive five-year-olds. She takes notes as she listens, which may read something like, “I’m a good dog. I love the smells in the yard. The woman was wrecked over her breakup. I’m a good dog.”