Adopt A Black Dog Today

On my penultimate "free" weekend in Vegas (I have to spend the weekend before I leave packing and doing a Chef’s Tasting), I tried to mark off as many items on my to-do list as possible, including a visit to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, near the Arizona border.

I first heard about Best Friends in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were the first animal rescue group in New Orleans, and were out in boats rescuing every pet they could find, including pit bulls (whom police were reportedly shooting on sight), days before the Humane Society and other groups even ventured into the city.

They are the nation’s largest no-kill animal shelter, and specialize in giving a home to animals with issues, both physical and psychological. I’ve been supporting them since Katrina, and wanted to see how my money was being put to use.

I’m pleased to say that, with the exception of an awful lot of very tidy and attractive landscaping, I feel they’re spending my money well. They own or lease 33,000 acres in the Vermillion Cliffs wilderness and the different compounds are spread throughout the area, so to take a tour you have to pile into a van with your tour guide.

Our tour guide happened to have one of her dogs with her (she has a total of nine, all Best Friends adoptees). Faith was a coy-dog, half dog, half coyote, and had separation anxiety. One thing she did not have, however, was a lack of chutzpah, and soon after boarding the van with us, she pushed two humans aside to make room on a seat for herself and took a lap nap (see photo).

Before Best Friends bought the land, Angel Canyon, it was used to film a ton of Westerns, including "The Lone Ranger." So we drove past Tonto’s Cave and many a "covered wagon ambush" site, which was kind of cool.

We passed one of the horse paddocks, and saw a horse that just turned 46, unheard of for equines, who usually make it to their mid-30s with good care and some luck. We also saw rescued burros and the bird house, where many of the birds survived their owners and couldn’t adjust to new ones. There was an exotic compound, too, full of flightless pigeons and peacocks with mangled tails.

We toured the special needs cattery, where I found myself in a pleasant, airy room surrounded by a couple dozen crippled, blind, incontinent and/or brain-damaged cats. They all seemed very happy and relaxed and oblivious to their injuries. One, with a yellow cast on his badly malformed leg, dragged it around as he sought out sunny spots (see photo). A black cat named Elvis, who’d been hit by a car and left to die, strutted around on his badly healed back legs which were both lightning bolt-shaped. Two cats born from the same litter, both born without eyes, sat in little kitty cubbyholes beside the door like sentinels, not moving their sightless faces but working their ears like radar dishes, picking up every sound and vibration.

My favorite was a chubby "neurologically-impaired" cat who kept trying to jump to the second level of a kitty condo and misjudging the distance. He appeared no worse for the wear, and would wobble-walk around for a minute or two before trying again.

Something interesting I learned: if a cat loses or breaks his tail in an accident, he almost always becomes incontinent because of how the nerves are connected. Tail-less Manx cats, however, do not have this problem since they are, literally, wired differently.

The only creepy thing was when our tour guide pointed out a very, very thin cat who was chowing down on her food. The cat had just been diagnosed with incurable cancer, and our tour guide said "We’re a no-kill shelter, but that means we don’t kill healthy animals. We don’t let the sick animals suffer. She’s doing fine now, but when the time comes, she will cross."

I know she meant "she will cross the Rainbow Bridge" but it was still kind of an ominous, creepy way to put it.

We drove next to Dogtown, what our guide called the "inner city" of the dog area. We did, as she put it, a "drive by" since Dogtown is where they keep the problem dogs, which you can tell by their red collars. The dogs, all big ones, looked calm and happy as they sat in the shade or loped up and down along the fence.

Our next stop was Dogtown Heights, the "suburbs" according to our guide. Here we met and mingled with dogs wearing green (friendly) and purple (generally friendly but not for a household with kids) collars who were available for adoption. There were two adorable pit bulls, a tan one named Whiskey and a black one named Churchill, that were so sweet and friendly I wanted to take them home (of course, I wanted to take them all home), but I know Wiley would not find them nearly as adorable.

At about this point, one of the people on our tour asked why there were so many black dogs there. I hadn’t noticed until then, but I’d say at least half of the dogs at Best Friends were black. Our guide said a lot of people are afraid of black dogs (well, there was that creepy scene in "The Omen") or feel they "can’t read their eyes," though that’s nonsense, and that, across the nation, black dogs have the lowest adoption rate.

So the next time you’re ready to adopt a dog from your local shelter, think about taking a black one.

As we met the people who worked there, all of whom had adopted several animals (the woman in the dog compound had 21 cats, which, I’m sorry, is just hoarding) and most of whom were vegan or vegetarian, I found I was thinking up a business plan. Buy some land nearby, set up a yurt, adopt a mess of black dogs and open a vegan bakery that also did catering. There are 400-plus employees at Best Friends; if just a quarter of them became regular customers, I’m guessing I’d be in the black (financially, and dog-wise, too, I guess). Nevermind that the sanctuary itself is on the only road into the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and I could capture a healthy flow of tourists for a few months out of the year.

I could totally see myself doing that. But not right now. I still have a lot of the world to see, including the Lofoten Islands, Mongolia and, inshallah, Afghanistan and Iran. But one day, I think that may well be where I end up.

It doesn’t get that hot in summer. I already checked.