Reprinted from Cesar's Way Magazine

Jonny Justice, a black and white pit bull, lay on his blanket and kept his eyes on the young boy who was struggling to read aloud from the book. Kids who are uncomfortable reading in front of a class of other children often do much better with a canine audience of therapy dogs. And in this program at the San Mateo, California, Public Library, therapy dogs had been trained to sit patiently, keeping their eyes focused on the book as if following the story being read to them.

Gradually, the boy started to read out whole sentences from Biscuit’s New Trick.

But that wasn’t the only miracle that afternoon. Less than two years earlier, Jonny was one of the 51 dogs that cops had found chained up at Bad Newz Kennels—Michael Vick’s dog fighting operation in Virginia.

For Jim Gorant, a writer at Sports Illustrated, the Michael Vick dog fighting story was at first all about the downfall of one of the most brilliant football players of his generation. But as the weeks wore on, Gorant became more and more curious about the fate of the dogs.

Gorant started making calls, and after a year of investigation, hours and hours of interviews, and several trips crisscrossing the country, he was able to reconstruct the story of Michael Vick’s pit bulls in his book, The Lost Dogs (Gotham Books).

Luckily for Jonny and the other dogs seized from Michael Vick’s 15-acre property, Gorant was not the only one whose mind was on the fate of the dogs.

Mike Gill, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, headed the federal case against Vick and his partners. Gill knew that the dogs, now property of the government, would likely be put down. Even the Humane Society at that time advocated euthanasia for fighting dogs, although in light of what happened in this case, it has changed its position.

Yet Gill kept asking himself if there might be another way. Was it possible the dog fighting dogs could be rehabilitated? He was just one part of the remarkable coalition of dedicated people discovered by Gorant—people who came together to try to save Michael Vick's dog fighting dogs and give them a new life.

Gill got in touch with Dr. Stephen Zawistowski, the ASPCA’s leading expert on dog behavior. Zawistowski’s cautious outlook was that perhaps a few of the dogs could be saved and given new lives. What he suggested was to put together a panel of experts who could meet the dogs, put them through rigorous testing, and then evaluate their chances.

Although the case was getting lots of national attention because of Vick’s celebrity, Dr. Zawistowski worked in secret, because of a court-imposed gag order. His panel included six employees of the ASPCA as well as Donna Reynolds and Tim Racer, who founded BAD RAP, a Pit Bull dog rescue, in Oakland, California, eight years earlier and had saved more than 400 dogs.

As the panel set out to examine the surviving 49 dogs (two had died since the raid), they were acutely aware of the interest in the pit bulls—interest that would backfire if just one of the rescue dogs they tried to rehabilitate turned on a person or another dog. So the panel devised a stringent series of tests to check each animal’s temperament, aggressiveness, and physical condition. They optimistically hoped that 10 percent would pass the tests. However, months in shelters after the raid had left many of the animals nearly unresponsive. Several were brought out from their pens and immediately flattened themselves on the ground, reluctant to budge. A number had to be lured into going through the series of tests.

When the evaluations were completed, it was decided—to everyone’s surprise—that 16 of the dogs could be sent to foster homes for observation before being adopted, two were suitable for law enforcement training, and 30 would go to a sanctuary. Just one, a female who had been forcibly bred to the point that she was now irredeemably violent, was euthanized.

Jonny, the therapy dog, was selected by BAD RAP’s Donna Reynolds who drove him—along with 12 other pit bulls—across the country to California in a rented RV, having charged pens, leashes, and food to their credit cards.

Cris Cohen was one of the volunteers chosen by BAD RAP to foster a Michael Vick pit bull. Although he had fostered several pit bulls before, he was initially apprehensive about taking in a fight dog. But the 35-pound black-and-white pit bull named Jonny Justice soon changed his mind.

“What was great for me was that some of the volunteers, like Cris, kept detailed daily diaries,” says Gorant. Cohen’s journal detailed how he’d set out to establish a regular routine—getting up at the same time every day, walking the same route, grooming and eating at the same times. It also showed that Jonny Justice had small issues, such as his initial difficulty with stairs, which he had never encountered before, and garbage trucks, which completely freaked him out during walks.

As the weeks went by, though, the young dog’s personality started to come through. It took months of patient work, but eventually Cohen felt Jonny Justice was ready to take the American Temperament Test Society exam and the Canine Good Citizen test. He aced them and was now ready to start his training to become a therapy dog who could help kids learn to read.

In all, 28 of Vick's rescue dogs have been adopted. Of the rest, 15 have started new lives at the Best Friends Animal Society, in Utah. Road accidents claimed a couple, ill health a couple more.

Gorant says he learned a lot from the year he spent investigating the story of the Michael Vick dogs. “When I started on this project, I think I had the same perception of pit bulls that a lot of people do—that they can go off in a second—but I came to see that they suffer from guilt by association. Just because you are a pit bull and part of a fight bust doesn’t mean you’re a bad dog.

Gorant made a conscious decision to not interview Vick for the book. “He did horrific things, but there’s more to this story than a guy doing horrific things. It is about what happened afterwards.”

He quotes Donna Reynolds: “Vick showed the worst of us, our bloodlust, but this rescue effort showed the best.”

“I don’t think any of us thought it was possible—the government, the rescuers, the other people involved,” Gorant concludes. “We like to think we have life figured out, and it’s nice that it can still surprise us, that sometimes we can accomplish things we had only dreamed of. We’ve moved our evolution forward—just a little bit, but we have, and I am happy to have been part of that.

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