Doodle Doings

I had a recent experience that, while not directly connected to Doodles, is something I feel I must write about.

I was visiting friends in New York City, and had an opportunity to get to know their dogs.  Their female Pit Bull rescue, whom they’ve had for years, is a sweetheart:

A month before, they temporarily added a second Pit Bull who approached them at the park and insisted on coming home with them.  He was suffering from a number of bites that indicated he had been used as a bait dog by someone training dogs for fighting, and was so weak he could hardly make it up the stairs at their apartment.  For those unfamiliar with dog fighting, and my hope is that is most people, a bait dog is used as a victim.  Practice fights are conducted between a ‘bait dog’ and their fighting dog, but they put protective jackets on the dogs they intend to use later for fighting.  They allow the dog they are training to attack and maim the unprotected bait dog; the bait dogs are considered essentially disposable.

By the time I met him, ‘Teddy’ was nearly healed physically.  What a wonderful, gentle, lovely dog.  He had that adorable, loose-limbed, gawky gait that marked him as an adolescent despite his 65 lbs. He loved nothing better than to climb in a lap to have his ears and muzzle rubbed, and I spent much of my time while at the apartment doing just that.

He is a spectacularly beautiful animal.  I prefer the look of Doodles, but I admire any well-built animal and he certainly is that.  He is a brindle, with lovely tuxedo markings on his chest and neck and even white socks on all 4 legs.  His proportions and build are superior.  As I was admiring him one morning it occurred to me that his breeding was no accident.  Bait dogs are bred to be disposable.  They throw together two dogs in order to get puppies that they expect to toss away when they become too damaged to be useful.  But someone carefully planned for Teddy.  The coloration, the markings, the build……there is no way these came together randomly.  I mentioned this to my friend when she came down for breakfast, and there was a stunned silence.  After a moment she told me that during the visit to the vet for the treatment of his wounds they  discovered Teddy was microchipped.  My friends had been waiting until he was healed to follow up on the microchip registration, but were hugely ambivalent about doing so.  They really did not have the time or energy for another dog, so it was not that they wanted to keep him.  But they also did not want to return him to the situation from which he had escaped.  I told them I had an image of him as ‘Buck’ from ‘Call of the Wild’.  He had to have been intentionally born into life as a companion and then been stolen into the dog fighting world.  I knew this by looking at him, and the fact that he was microchipped proved it. No one microchips a bait dog.

I’ve thought of Teddy practically daily since I returned home.  Teddy, Teddy.  What is your story?  Well, this week we learned from the Pit Bull rescue organization that his microchip is registered to someone here in Ohio.  It remains to be seen whether the owner of the registration responds to the rescue organization’s contact.  Teddy has a story and at some point we may know more of it.  But my sense is that most of it will remain locked inside that big blocky sweet head.