The Big Day: Caution, this is the Real World. If you are squeamish you might want to skip it.
One morning I was doing euthanasia just like every other morning. The night before a 125 pound St. Bernard X Pit Bull was brought in by his owner along with a 14 week old puppy of similar breeding. The adult dog was intact. The owner handled him rather gingerly and gave as a reason for surrendering the dog that he couldn’t control him. Not a big deal. The next morning, however, I decided that we didn’t need either one of them to be adopted. If that sounds cold, it is. For the last three years working in shelters I was killing about a ton of animals a month, personally. I was purely objective about which dogs I killed, when. Full kennels lead to sick dogs so you keep them half-full at most. Each day, strays became adoptable as their owners failed to reclaim them. Strays were impounded daily and there was no way to predict how many might arrive at any moment. To manage a shelter you have to keep it ready to accept 20-30 dogs at any given moment.

Round 1: After putting down about five or six dogs, including a female Corgi in heat, I went to the far kennel and got the St. Bernard X Pit. I never liked rabies poles – AKA control sticks. I preferred not declaring war right off the bat. So I put him on a slip-lead and marched him toward the area we used for euthanasia – a table in a branching aisle that led to the appropriately named “Dead Room.” I was fine for about 20 feet and then he got a whiff of the dead Corgi smelling of all the things that arouse male dogs. The Pit Mix hit the end of the lead and broke free, straddled the Corgi and looked straight at me. I didn’t need my years of experience to psychically tell me what he was saying. It was all over his face as the low rumble of his growl hit my ears. “Well, punk, are you feeling lucky?” I wasn’t, but I had a very big problem on my hands that wasn’t going away unless I figured out what to do.

Megan to the Rescue:

I I apologize for a necessary break in the action. The picture on the right is of the outside of the shelter where this all came down. These two dogs were trained by me to work as animal control dogs. To my knowledge no one else has ever trained urban animal control dogs, but my hat is off to anyone else who came up with the same solution. The dog in the picture on the left and the dog on the left in the right-hand picture is my Megan. She had her own kennel at our shelter for times when I had to be in the office or elsewhere. For more about her and how she caught dogs for a living, go here. http://clickandtreat.com/wordpress/?p=469

When I saw that I was cut off by the St. Bernard X Pit Bull with a very big attitude, I shouted to my fellow officer, Bonnie, to let Megan out of her kennel. Megan headed toward me, wiggling her tail and prancing. The Pit Mix was confused. He smelled “dog in heat” on the Corgi, but it wasn’t moving. Here was a moving dog that didn’t smell like “dog in heat.” He focused on Megan totally – and I slipped up and took the end of the slip lead lying on the ground. (My “now me” starts to get nervous when I relive the “then me” picking up that lead. I know that I did it but I have little memory of that action.) Now I had the dog on a lead, much like the guy who climbed a tree after a cougar and when asked if he’d caught him, replied, “Yes, I caught him, now I’m trying to figure out how to get him to let go of me.” I marched the dog toward the euthanasia area with a plan in mind that we commonly used for dogs that were too dangerous to handle closely.

Round 2: The process of quickly getting control of a very large, very intimidating and dangerous dog in a kennel is to slip the lead through a chain-link kennel door and go inside the kennel, closing the door behind you. If you look at the shackle-latch on the left, you’ll see a cheap version of the mechanism. The curved holder keeps the kennel door shut by clasping the stationary tube secured to the concrete floor. Great concept. As I slipped the lead through the kennel door, the idea was for me to pull the lead to force the dog’s head against the chain link fencing. Then my lovely assistant could put a long needle into his heart. My job would be to keep him from whipping around and attacking Bonnie. We’d done it many times. That is the real world of euthanasia, by the way. Euthanasia is often a euphemism. To quote my first executive director in the humane industry, Doug Fakkema, sometimes it’s just killing. That is what this was shaping up to be. Then Murphy’s Law kicked in.

Knockout in the 3^rd Round: As I pulled heavily on the lead to get the dog to come close to the fence, he pulled a jujitsu move and came with me in an attack. As he hit the kennel door, the shackle on the latch exploded into several hunks of metal flying through the air. Those shackles were much stronger that the one in the photo above, left. The kennel door swung inward, sandwiching me between the door and the chain link of the kennel behind me. It’s not supposed to work that way. The door is supposed to stay shut. Now the only thing stopping this dog from seriously ripping my face apart was my pulling upward as hard as I could on the lead. (That was his target – he was lunging upward repeatedly to bite me through the chain link) The pivot point was at about my waist level. As he jumped up, I pulled up, which pulled him downward. Think of a pulley in reverse. By pulling upward I created tension on the lead and pulled his head downward. That wasn’t necessarily a safe thing to do as it would have eventually given me belly wounds rather than facial wounds.

Now it gets interesting. I somehow pushed the door with my upper body while simultaneously continuing to pull upward with my arms and shoved the door closed. Now I was on the inside and he was on the outside. I jammed my foot under the steel pipe tube at the bottom of the door and was back in a position to be able to do what I started out to do. Bonnie had a kennel worker pull the dog’s hind leg back to stretch him out and I resisted his effort to turn on her. She hit a perfect heart-shot and he dropped like a bean-bag to the kennel floor. There isn’t any decent way to end that sequence with words. It was a day for someone to die and it wasn’t me. If you have never seen Pit Bull ferocity read this again and picture yourself in the same position. The entire sequence probably didn’t take more than two minutes, start to finish and the thrilling conclusion after we blasted into the kennel was likely less than 30 seconds. I don’t recommend living your life that fast. It takes an eternity. In this case the outcome was what I intended in the first place – I lived, he died. I didn’t lose sleep over it because he was simply 125 pounds of the 2,000 I was going to do that month.

One last comment. After she saved my bacon as a decoy, Megan was told to ‘down’ in the kennel aisle. She did throughout the entire sequence. I taught that before I was a trainer. If you are trainer and can’t do that, I suggest library science or fry-cook at Denny’s for a career.