Last night, I sat by my dog’s side and gently rubbed the fur on the back of her neck as she took her last breaths. I made sure, the last sound she heard was the sound of my voice. As the life left her body, I started crying so hard, I found it hard to breathe. It feels like I’ve been hit in the chest with a cannon-ball—knocking the wind out of me. I guess I miss that old dog.
Some people know the strange story of how this crazy stray-dog changed my life, 13 years ago. For those who don’t I’m going to share one of my favorite chapters from my book.
HELP FROM ABOVE, Chapter 14
Beware of Dog
One night on the busy streets of Los Angeles, I see a little black dog running in traffic. The stray dog has a collar and tag, so I know it has a home and has probably just gotten lost. I love dogs and think about how much it would mean to the owner to have the lost dog back in one piece.
A car slides sideways, across lanes, as the driver swerves to avoid the hapless dog. Big, off-road tires skip as the driver of a pickup truck slams on his brakes. But, he can’t stop, the giant pickup truck goes right over the dog, who is frozen in fear. The little dog doesn’t understand what is happening. She looks up, terrified, as the truck passes overhead. Various cars swerve and screech to a halt as they encounter the dog, in lanes.
A black dog on black pavement is hard for drivers to see at night. The dog is going to get killed by a car, any second. People are honking their horns, but the dog doesn’t know what car horns are. The little dog is scared and is just standing in the road, wandering a little, left and right as cars and trucks swirl over the dog’s head.
So I stop my car and walk into traffic to save the dog. But when the dog sees me, she bolts and runs into a gas station. Now she’s hiding under a car. Nuts. What am I doing in traffic? This crazy dog doesn’t even want to be saved. I wave at drivers, who are now in danger of running into me, standing in the middle of the road. I scramble off the street and into the parking lot of the gas station.
People walk out of the gas station and the little dog wiggles out from under the car and charges them, growling and snarling. The people run in horror. Wow! That is a mean little dog!
I call a friend of mine, who is an animal expert. I tell him I’m trying to help this stray dog and he comes down to help. He puts on heavy gloves and reaches to drag the vicious dog out from under the car. The dog reacts like a Tasmanian Devil, snarling and biting. My friend has to let go. The little dog wiggles back, under the car. Stalemate.
We decide to ask the car-owner to let us push the car away from the dog, with the engine off, so as not to kill the dog when they drive away. We carefully push the car to reveal a little black dog, covered in motor oil.
This dog did not just get lost. She appears abused and neglected. She has no hair on her back, just scarred, bare skin, covered in scabs. She is starving, thirsting to death and covered in motor oil. The tag I thought I saw is really just a part of the choker chain that has grown tight around her neck. “That dog has been running in traffic all day.”, says a neighbor. Poor animal.
No one has cared enough to try to rescue the vicious beast.
But, now the angry dog is exposed and seems to not know what to do. My friend gets on the phone and tries to get animal control to come capture the dog. But, the mean streets of Los Angeles are busy tonight and animal control is not answering the phone. So as my friend sits on hold, I take a careful look at the mutt.
I don’t want the dog to be sent to the pound, but this dog is vicious and won’t let us get near. I don’t know what else to do, except to get professional animal control on the case.
This dog is going to bite someone and get hit by a car tonight…
But animal control doesn’t answer. So it’s up to me. The only thing I can think of is to offer food and water. I carefully pour some food into a dish and slide it towards the furry monster. The dog inhales the food. She’s starving to death. I pour some water into the dish. “Here you go.” I talk to the dog as if I’ve always known her. She eyes me warily, but licks the bowl dry. And now, she lets me sit…a little bit closer…
“Its ok, sweetheart.” I say to the fur dragon. I carefully wiggle closer to the beast. Her vicious body language eases up a bit and she lies down next to the water bowl I gave her. Now, I can feel that the dog is relaxing and she seems to accept me in her space. It has been two hours since I got out of my car.
“OK. I got them! Animal control will come and get her!” My friend is excited and sounds relieved. He finally has Animal Control on the phone. I look at the vicious dog, who is now, just a few feet away. I know animal control officers will euthanize her tonight.
With thousands of dogs running loose on the mean streets of South, Central L.A., they’re not going to waste time with an aggressive dog. They’ll lasso her like a crocodile and drag her by the neck to a waiting poison needle. She will be euthanized and die alone in a cage…
It’s no big deal, just a wild, stray dog, abused and neglected. There is no way to save this unfortunate beast. Obviously, no one cares for the hostile, mutt. She outgrew her choker chain weeks ago and no one bothered to remove it before throwing her out on the street. Now it squeezes her in a strangle-hold because she continued to grow and now her neck is bigger than the chain.
There is no conceivable happy ending here. But, as I look down at the dog who has been snarling and biting passersby, something comes over me. A voice tells me I have to do something un-thinkable. An over-whelming sense of un-reasonable purpose fills my being.
“Tell them not to come.” I say, with absolute certainty.
“What?!” My friend is dumbfounded. He stares at me in dis-belief for a moment, then covers the phone, so animal control can’t hear my ridiculous plan.
“Really?”, he reasons. “They’ll come out. You don’t want them to come?”
“They’re just going to kill her.”, I say. “Tell them not to come.”
“OK.” He pauses, takes a deep breath and puts the phone back to his ear. “Never mind. You don’t have to come. We’ll take care of it.”
Considering my friend tried diligently for an hour to get animal control on the phone, I’m sure he did not expect to hang up on them. He puts the phone away and stares at me. Now what?
I have no idea, now what? There’s a vicious, biting beast a few feet away, and I just sent away the only people equipped to handle it. I don’t know how to do this. But, I have to do it. So, I move closer. I’m pretty sure the dog is going to bite me.
Now we sit, side-by-side. I stare at the dog who is wary, but relaxing more as time goes by. I do nothing. I just sit and wait. An hour passes. Over time, I move an inch closer to claws and teeth.
I take a borrowed dog leash and cautiously reach toward the snarling beast. But the dog doesn’t bite. She doesn’t even react, although she sees my hand approaching her neck. Expecting the worst, I grab the dog’s chain and click the leash on it.
My breath is taken by what happens next. Nothing. The attack dog doesn’t attack. She doesn’t growl or bite. She acts as if I always put a leash on her, when it’s time to leave.
So, I stand up and leave the gas station. She stands up and walks right beside me, all the way to my car. It looks like the vicious dog and I have been to obedience class a hundred times.
I stop by my car door and the dog stops and sits down. She looks up at me, as if she’s known me all her life and her only purpose is to go wherever I go.
“What are we going to do now?”, my friend asks with trepidation.
“I’m going to take her home.”
“How are you going to get her in the car?”, he gasps.
“I’m going to pick her up and put her on the seat.”
You are?” My friend is right. This is un-thinkable. The dog is a monster. I think there will be blood. But I just don’t know what else to do. I have to get the dog to safety and that means she has to go with me. Although I’m about to be mauled, I feel a strange mixture of excitement and peace. I reach down, pick up the vicious dog and put her in the car, as if that is what we always do. The dog doesn’t bite. She calmly sits down and I believe, breathes a sigh of relief. I can relate. Sometimes when I don’t fit in with the “normal” crowd, it feels good to belong. It feels good to be loved, in spite of my flaws.
We drive the vicious dog to my place and wash the motor oil off of her. What we find under the dirt and grease is shocking—the most affectionate dog, I have ever met.
How can this be? She charged everyone who got near and bit them. My friend was bitten. But, after three hours of patient work, I clicked the leash on the beast and in that moment, she became my best friend. She doesn’t look at me like a normal dog. She looks at me as if she’d chew through a burning building to save me.
But, I can’t keep a dog. I’m a free-lance cameraman. I travel the world for work. I’m not home enough to care for a dog. And I certainly can’t risk keeping a vicious dog, who bites everyone who approaches. I can’t see a way out of this situation. There is no reasonable path forward.
But once again, something comes over me. And this time, I know what it is. That dog is just like me. We are both flawed. We both need help. If you are reading this book, you know I have issues. If I deserve help from above, then this dog deserves help from me. I have no idea how I’m going to make this work, but I will do it.
I take the dog to a vet. After she growls and menaces everyone in the animal hospital, the vet patiently examines her, noting fierce aggression and…hip dysplasia.
“Hip displasia?”
The vet explains that she was born with bad hips. There’s no help and no cure for it.
She’ll never out-grow this problem. Her body is flawed and will only get worse, ending in painful, debilitating, arthritis. She will end up crippled by the hips God gave her.
I have no idea how to take care of a dog with bad hips, who bites.
I decide to name her Switch, because she switched from vicious attack to protective love.
The next day, I have to go to the airport and build a camera to fly over Los Angeles. Gibbs and I work more than twelve hours at-a-time. I can’t come home to feed the dog or let her out to pee. So, I put her in my car and Switch the lame, biting Dog goes with me to the airport.
In between helicopter flights, I put on a leash and take her for a walk. I have food for her in the truck and I pour water bottles into a bowl. It’s a funny, homeless sort of life, but it works. I have no plan other than minute-by-minute, day-by day, what I need to do to take care of the vicious dog.
I worry about the dog, because, although I leave the windows open for her, while I’m out flying, I can’t leave them open all the way, because she’ll bite a passerby. And on hot days, there’s a danger of heat in the car.
So, I decide to do something crazy. I start shopping for a mobile home for the dog. That way, she can live comfortably, without danger of heat exhaustion in my car, while I’m out flying over Los Angeles with Gibbs.
I’m pretty sure the RV dealer never had a customer like me. My little SUV can’t pull Switch’s trailer. So, I have to buy a giant pickup truck to pull the RV trailer. Now, Switch can travel with me to jobs, in air-conditioned comfort. I know what you’re thinking. This is nuts.
It’s strange, but also kind of fun. I drive Switch and the RV to the Super Bowl where Gibbs and I are flying for FOX Network. We shoot the stadium, for the biggest game of the year and, at the end of the day, when people are going to bars and Super Bowl parties, Gibbs and I land and tie nylon straps over the helicopter blades. Gibbs heads to a hotel. And, I walk a few feet from the aircraft to the RV and I’m home, with Switch the dog. I feed her and walk her and I lift her up into the camper bed.
Switch is the most faithful kind of friend. The only thing she cares about is being by my side. At night, I look at the vicious beast, sleeping next to me. I don’t know how we’ll get through tomorrow. But, we got through today and that’s enough.
I do not know how I’m going to make this work. I have no plan to care for the vicious, crippled dog, just a willingness to do it whatever it takes.
Don’t jump in my truck when I’m not there. You might lose a body part.
Where we’ll go and how we’ll make this work tomorrow, I have no idea. In spite of the expense and inconvenience, I feel that in some way, my life is richer. And I am blessed.
Because I’ve never owned and aggressive dog, I spend hours reading books about vicious dogs. I study and practice the steps to safely keep a dog that bites. It’s a lot of work.
Switch does not train easily. I walk her every day, but she resists training. In fact, it takes a year of patient work to teach her to walk on a leash. I’m not surprised she was abused and thrown in the street. Most people would not take the time to do all of this.
If she escapes the house, Switch never leaves, just sits by my door and waits for me to let her back in the house. She’ll wait there all day and night. She doesn’t want to go anywhere else, doesn’t want to be with anyone else.
You know how dogs bark at every little sound? Not Switch. She NEVER barks unless someone is coming.
Some dogs bark at an intruders, but run and hide if someone breaks into the house and the owners aren’t around. So I decide to sneak around the house to see how Switch will handle an intruder.
I’ve tried this with other dogs. When I snuck up, on my ex-girlfriends dog, the dog barked at me, but then pee’d on the floor and ran away.
So I sneak to the front door and pounce, out of the bushes. I’m not wearing normal clothing, but a dark, hooded disguise. But, Switch does not pee and flee. She charges to the end of her rope, like a heat-seaking-missile. It looks like the dog is being shot out of a cannon in an explosion of claws and teeth. Reaching the end of her rope Switch then tries to pull the house off its foundation, so she can get close enough to bite me.
When she realizes it’s not an intruder, but really me, in a hoody disguise, she has a happiness explosion and greets me with her trademark, intense love. She wags her tail with all her might and runs in circles, as if her heart will pound out of her chest.
That’s how I learned that If a threat comes to the house, Switch won’t back down. She will defend me with her life.
A friend points out that when we’re in the house, Switch always faces the door, like a furry gargoyle.
“Look at how she puts herself between you and the door.”, my friend says.
“Oh. I never noticed that.”
“Pay attention. She’s guarding you.”
My friend is right. Switch has been guarding me for eleven years. She’s doing it right now, as I’m writing this book. It makes me wonder, if I rescued Switch or if Switch rescued me. We’ve come a long way since we found each other on the mean streets.
I put my boots on many times a day, but somehow Switch always knows when I’m just going outside, to walk around the house and when I’m going to get in the truck and drive away. That’s when she runs in between me and the door. She can’t talk, but she knows how to make it clear that she doesn’t want me to leave unless I’m going to put her in the truck and take her with me. And that is exactly what I do. I take Switch everywhere I go.
“How did you end up with such a vicious dog?”, my neighbor Suzee asks. I explain how I found Switch on the mean-streets of Los Angeles and it is a herculean task to manage an aggressive dog. For some reason, it brings a tear to my eye, when I tell the story of Switch and me.
I have taken Switch with me for eleven years now. Everywhere we go is a ridiculous challenge. It’s a lot of work. If you meet Switch I will ask you not to pet her, because she still bites. But, after eleven years, I can honestly say, that this crazy dog is the most loyal friend and protector I have on Planet Earth. I’m glad she’s here.
