Best Friends Sanctuary Stories : Won't you be my neighbor?
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NEW LEASH ON LIFE: Raiders' Cooper dedicates himself to care of abused and mean dogs at animal shelter
The Raiders had started their season without Cooper, while he served a four-game suspension for a positive steroid test. He doubted that he would return the field. It would be so easy to write off a special-teams player, even a great one, if his name was linked to any type of scandal.
He needed something to fill his time, to distract him from the disturbing thoughts that filled his head and to begin building a future without football. So he arrived at the shelter like any other volunteer. The staff members didn't ask too many questions about the heavily muscled young man with elaborate tattoos, but they did find him intriguing.
"He'd drive up in this nice car. He had all this time," volunteer coordinator Megan Webb said, laughing. "We had no idea."
Cooper returned to the Raiders, and everyone at the shelter figured out who he was late in the season, when he got hurt and arrived to volunteer on crutches. By then, he was hooked on the place. He had become the perfect antidote to Vick and his sadistic dogfighting ring - a pro athlete who owned big dogs and, more and more every day, devoted the fierce intensity cultivated by football to the cause of protecting animals.
"When I first came here, I'd see a mean dog, I'd say what's wrong with that dog? And now if I would see a mean dog, I think, 'Who did that to this animal?' " he said. "The dogs only do what you train them to do."
NYT: Given Reprieve, N.F.L. Star’s Dogs Find Kindness
Garrett Davis for The New York TimesPublished: February 2, 2008
Scars from puncture wounds on her face, legs and torso reveal that she was a fighter. Her misshapen, dangling teats show that she might have been such a successful, vicious competitor that she was forcibly bred, her new handlers suspect, again and again.
But there is one haunting sign that Georgia might have endured the most abuse of any of the 47 surviving pit bulls seized last April from the property of the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick in connection with an illegal dogfighting ring.
Georgia has no teeth. All 42 of them were pried from her mouth, most likely to make certain she could not harm male dogs during forced breeding.
Her caregivers here at the Best Friends Animal Society sanctuary, the new home for 22 of Mr. Vick’s former dogs, are less concerned with her physical wounds than her emotional ones. They wonder why she barks incessantly at her doghouse and what makes her roll her toys so obsessively that her nose is rubbed raw.
“I’m worried most about Georgia,” said the Best Friends veterinarian Dr. Frank McMillan, an expert on the emotional health of animals, who edited the textbook “Mental Health and Well-Being in Animals.” “You don’t have the luxury of asking her, or any of these animals: ‘What happened to you in your past life? How can we stop you from hurting?’
Garrett Davis for The New York Times
John Garcia, a caregiver at the Best Friends sanctuary, tries to teach abused dogs to trust people.
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Vick dogs don't look so vicious now
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