The Manchester Enterprise
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Caring community helps save pit bull's life
Amanda Hitt
PUBLISHED: March 13, 2008
It all started with a phone call. One of our supporters was very distressed about a sad situation in her neighborhood: a tiny puppy chained and neglected in someone's backyard. Neighbors had complained to all the appropriate agencies, but no one had been able to help.
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While heartrending, it was by no means an unusual situation. Unfortunately, we get calls like this all the time. We try very hard to stand by our mission to provide for the needs of abused, neglected and abandoned farm animals, and so we have to redirect many dogs and cats towards organizations set up to care for them. This case, however, grabbed us by the hearts and didn't let go.
A few days later, Monte Jackson, co-founder of SASHA Farm, took a volunteer with him to the house to try to convince the people living there to either improve the dog's living conditions or relinquish it. No one was home, but what they saw sickened them. A tiny red brindle pit bull puppy no older than six weeks, her tummy badly distended with worms, was tethered on a short heavy towing chain.
She could barely lift her head. In the yard with her was a protective male pit bull, unneutered. The neighbors had no doubt determined that he was her intended mate a few months down the road. He snarled and pulled at his own short tow chain as our volunteers looked helplessly over the fence.
With heavy hearts, they headed back to come up with a new game plan. Dorothy Davies, our director, called and spoke with someone at the Animal Control Agency that services that area, who told her that they were aware of the situation and were keeping an eye on it, but even if they could seize the dogs, it was their policy to euthanize all impounded pit bulls.
Davies pleaded with the agency to allow us to take the dog and protect it, but the answer was the same. It seemed this puppy was doomed to either a life on a three-foot tow chain, being bred to produce dogs with similar fates or forced to fight for their lives in one of the area's dogfighting rings, or being seized and put to death.
A week later, Monte went again with one of the farm's representatives in hopes of catching the owner at home and attempting to talk to him about the dogs' living conditions. It was a long shot, we thought, but we couldn't just give up.
When they arrived, they were pleased to find the homeowner at home. Not only was he home, but he was very receptive to the visit. He was an older man who'd had a stroke and was unable to care for the dogs. The dogs were not even his dogs. The man's 17-year-old son had brought the dogs to his home and dumped them off there, coming home only to feed them once in awhile. The man did not want the dogs, and in fact, he was afraid to go in his own back yard.
Seeing an opening, Monte offered to take them. After all, a 17-year-old cannot legally own a dog and the father would be liable for any damages the dogs caused. The man agreed to relinquish the puppy.
When Monte and a volunteer returned two weeks later to try to convince the man to also relinquish the remaining male, they found that the dog had been starved to death.
For the little puppy, though, life improved quickly and dramatically. Back at the farm, she was making up for lost time. She followed the volunteers and staff around everywhere. She romped with the other dogs and with Stephen, an orphaned pygmy goat. She ate well and made friends with everyone who visited. Of course, pit bulls, like many terrier breeds, have a tendency to grow up and be potentially animal aggressive, so she couldn't stay at the sanctuary, as much as we'd have loved that.
Through a stroke of luck, we happened to know someone looking for a puppy, and within a week or so, the wiggly little puppy, now dubbed Sophie, went to her new home. Instead of a chain and a plot of dirt, she has a fluffy pink bed and dad who watches her sleep to make sure she's still okay.
Happy endings rarely come so quickly, but for Sophie, her life changed completely in less than a week. We only wish that the outcome could be the same for every dog enslaved and abused by underground dogfighting.
Amanda Hitt is farm manager at SASHA Farm. She can be reached at Amanda@sashafarm.org.
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