Meet the Trainers who are trying to save the 1,000 dogs that are put down every day

Shanna Phillips was a complete loser the day her dog vanished. She ran out mid-shift to search the woods during her first week working at Fairview Bakery, North Carolina. In the three months since she’d found and adopted Sassy, that dog had salved her soul and heart after her mother died young of cancer. Effectively, Sassy had done what counseling alone couldn’t: roll back Phillips’ fear of dropping dead at 22. Now Sassy, who’d come through hell herself, was lost in a town she barely knew. Phillips cried and called her family and friends, forming a search party consisting of eight people. They went to the side yards and streets, put up stop signs and Quick Marts, and set up large-font bulletins for a small beagle mix.

Phillips was not able to sleep or eat for two days. Phillips was chased by 20 others who were trying to capture porch-cam footage of Sassy. Meanwhile, Phillips’ boyfriend cut short a trip to beachfront Mississippi. “I was worried for Sass, but more so for Shanna — she loves that little dog like…”Bryce Myers is a hydraulics engineer in his twenties. “When you know what they’ve been through, you get why they’re so bonded.”

Sassy ran off on Thursday morning. Phillips was near the end of her tether Friday night when she heard a knock at the door. She ran to get it open. Sassy was standing there and flicking her tail. “She walks in all chill, like, ‘How’s your day been?’”Phillips. “I got down on the floor, sobbing — I could not stop hugging her.”Sassy had climbed a nearby mountain to return home and was unharmed. It was another wonder from a magic-dog whose stock in trade seemed to be cheating death.

Sassy’s walk-off happened in the fall of 2020, when she was a year-and-a-half old. She was a young woman I met on the porch at the Craftsman Phillips and Myers rented outside of Asheville in the fall 2021. It was a glorious afternoon in Blue Ridge Foothills. Sassy had the zoomies some fierce. Whoossshhh!The blur of small, brown eyes that was going by carved the corners of their quarter-acre lawn. Skirrshhh!As she spun-cycled through the turns, the leaf pile remained. She stopped to give her belly a rub and to get a stick pepperoni before she set off to scare a rabbit. This was a Disneyland dog, so enthralled by joy that you could call her stoned.

It didn’t start this way when Phillips adopted Sassy in the summer of 2020. Within their first hour together, the dog barfed in Phillips’ car and went to her apartment for a poo. For weeks, she wouldn’t suffer her owner’s affections, but Phillips was prepared to wait her out. She knew enough of Sassy’s history to let time, space, and dog treats do their magic. “They told me she came from a crazy hoarder who had twenty-something dogs in a trailer,”Phillips claims. Actually, the count was 29 — and “crazy” doesn’t begin to describe the owner.

Yellville, Arkansas: A middle-aged woman was living in an unfurnished storage unit with her dogs and piss. The couch on which she slept was stained with urine and the floor was covered in turds. Exposure to the toxic particulates in pet waste had sickened, scarred, or killed the unit’s canine occupants. Dogs that had been dead for a long time were found in a heap with their puppies, who struggled to breathe.

Severe mange, bug bites and feet that have been bleached by urine. Kyle Held, the ASPCA’s investigator in the case, has walked hundreds of such scenes in his day. “You don’t get too attached to footwear in this job,” says Held, a burly giant who delivers lines so dry, you’re never quite sure he’s joking.

This case presented him with a challenge. The unit’s door was broken. He managed to thread his 6-foot-two frame through the rusty window. He grabbed the panicked dogs with a control pole and gave them to staff who were holding crates. The majority of rescues were small, with beagle-mixes under 30 lbs. It got a little gnarlier with the German shepherds, but Held’s done this work for 28 years, the past 12 leading a response team for the ASPCA from his home state of Missouri. “You want a crash course in animal cruelty, Missouri’s your state,”He says. “Tigers, horses, reptiles, dog fights. It’s also the world capital of puppy mills.”

Often after a seizure by the ASPCA — or “the A,” as staffers call it — there are criminal charges pending against the owner and a scrum over custody of the dogs. However, in this instance, the hoarder avoided jail time by agreeing for her pets to be released. (She also signed a binding — or else — waiver that she’d never own dogs again.) The ASPCA already had moved to phase 2 of rescue, installing a temporary shelter in a warehouse. There, the dogs were kept for weeks and then saw vets who operated on the most seriously injured patients. To assess their mental health, the ASPCA flew behaviorists. They were graded on three axes: fearfulness, aggression, hyperarousal, ease in handling and feeding. A few scored in the middle of trauma. This allowed the ASPCA to treat them and train them at the temporary shelter, and then prepare them for adoption.

However, the majority of them were so scared by human beings that they began to soiled themselves and fled in fear. Sassy was one such petrified dog. Besides her sundry ailments — a coat severely scarred by mange; “hookworms, whipworms, a grade-three heart murmur, pain from her skin condition, an ear infection, a low body-condition score (3/9), and grade-two, -three dental disease,” per her intake form — her psyche was so scrambled by neglect and cruelty that she lived in a state of dread. She was so ill that staff had to refuse to feed her. She couldn’t bear being Looked at, let alone touched. Failing an intervention, she’d join the 400,000 dogs put down each year for the crime of being homeless or having behavioral issues. Their fate is almost comical in its cruelty. Cops and rescue teams save them from horrible circumstances, and they are soon euthanized to end the suffering.

But Sassy, along with her friends from the storage unit, had a miracle in store. In the spring of 2020, they were trucked hundreds of miles to the world’s first clinic for severely traumatized dogs: the ASPCA’s Behavioral Rehabilitation Center (BRC) in Weaverville, North Carolina. There, in three transformative months, they’d get a crash course of nurture and training from data-driven teams of pet behaviorists. In tiny blocks of treatment — 15 minutes a day — they’d haltingly push through their fear of people, discover the joy of being creatures at play, and emerge from lives of unspeakable pain to become someone’s wonder dog.

It is amazing to consider how indifferent we are.We have to stop allowing animal suffering to continue. Pigs penned in chutes the size of their bodies on America’s factory farms. Egg-laying hens were kept in 12 cages, with their crests covered by the bird’s shit. From birth to death, breed dogs are kept in puppy-mill crates. They never touch grass or feel sun on their backs. In America, we don’t just stomach cruelty, we license and sell it in aisle three.

There’s another kind of cruelty we turn our backs on: More than a thousand dogs in shelters are put down daily, and virtually all those dogs could have been saved. Roughly one percent of the euthanized pups were sick or posed a threat to someone’s safety. The rest were destroyed because their shelter ran out of space — or because their behaviors put off adopters. Distressed dogs would yell and cry in fear, or pace their crates when they were approached. It was easy to give them up. As for dogs like Sassy, piebald with mange and gnawing at the bug bites on her shins, there was no chance — none — to leave a shelter alive. Until the BRC.

Someone had to first find the dogs and remove them from the harm they did. There are laws on the books banning blatant abuses, but they’re rarely enforced by the cops. It is up to animal welfare groups to eradicate crimes against dogs. “In February 2010, we launched our Field Investigations and Response teams to deal with abuse cases,” says Matt Bershadker, the ASPCA’s president and CEO, who was hired in 2001 and climbed the ranks to become its leader in 2013. The Humane Society of the United States created its own unit in 2009. Its yearslong probes of America’s puppy mills were featured in this magazine in 2017.)

In the years since the ASPCA began tracking abusers, it’s either assisted in or led massive takedowns: the arrests of 10 gangsters in 2013 and the seizure of 367 dogs, the second-biggest dog-fighting bust on record; the rescue of the so-called Missouri 500 dogs — the biggest dog-fighting bust on record — and the arrests of 26 people; the removal, care, and placement of more than 500 dogs from a fetid puppy mill in Iowa in 2021.

But it’s one thing to free malnourished dogs who’ve been chained to trees, scarred and bleeding. It’s another entirely to soothe their souls and teach them to trust the species that abused them. “Not only have they never been held and loved, they’ve never really been dogs,”Kristen Collins, Director of the BRC. “They’ve been widgets for breeders and things gamblers bet on.”

Collins, a certified animal behaviorist, joined the ASPCA in 2007 Collins, a certified animal behaviorist, joined the ASPCA in 2007. After a particularly horrific find in Tennessee, horror and grief led to the creation of the unit. In the summer 2010, Collins and Reid were summoned to an awful scene by authorities. A man lived in an old trailer with his dogs, at the end of a dirt street. “We counted 85 in terrible shape, both physically and behaviorally,”Collins recalls. They were skinny to the point of emaciated — neither food nor water was set out — and there was trash piled everywhere she looked. In those days, the ASPCA had no triage unit, so the team couldn’t house or treat the dogs. After a brief exam, the dogs were taken to local shelters where many, if not all of them, were put down. “It broke our hearts to see so much suffering,”Collins. “For hours, we drove in dead silence.”They had to do more, she decided immediately. “We need to be able to heal them behaviorally so they can go on and live happy lives.”

Reid and Collins formed a roving response team to help in such emergencies. “Those early days, we were trying to MacGuyver with a hair clip and a stick of gum,”She says. They’d rent an empty warehouse, cull vet techs from local shelters, and do the dirty work of triage care. For mama dogs to escape their pups, they would give lime baths to tick bited and ringwormed dogs. “It was all improv, but we were building a framework for the holistic model to come.”

Collins was contacted by a Kentucky district attorney a year later. 120 dogs had just come from Morehead’s puppy mill. The ASPCA already had its response team in place. Collins worked for weeks at its temp site nearby, throwing everything she’d learned in 10 years of training at those dogs. “We tried really simple things, like drive-by treating, where you toss a piece of cheese into a dog’s kennel as you’re walking past it,” says Collins, who holds a master’s in animal behavior from the University of Illinois. “They’re so undersocialized they can’t bear you coming in. But over time, they learn to connect you with something yummy, and start coming closer to the door.”

Another tactic that worked well was to bring in “helper”Dogs: Pairing fearless pups with anxious ones for short sessions. “I can’t overstate the importance of helper dogs,”Collins. “Not only did they help relax the scared ones, they modeled all the stuff that dogs do. Sniffing, chasing, tugging, playing: All that was new to those dogs.”

Collins saw results after weeks of treatment “marked improvement”The majority of cases are successful. Even fearful dogs will start to sniff around their handlers and allow themselves to be touched and fed by humans. This small-batch data provided early evidence that dogs who had been badly abused could rebound. Collins and Reid made their pitch to the ASPCA’s chief; Bershadker pitched his board of directors. He returned with money for a pilot program. It was a temporary clinic that would be used by the patients. “worst of the worst” cases.

Collins and Reid rented space in a shelter in Madison. They did this before opening their doors. “brain-dump sessions,”The group jotted down every technique they could on a whiteboard. These sessions produced the 30-40 protocols that now make up the core of BRC care. “We took the biggest blocks dogs have to getting adopted and broke them down to small parts,”Collins agrees. She gives the example of leashing. It can evoke terror in dogs who’ve never been handled before: “You’ll see them freak out, go into gator rolls. They’ll flop to the floor and roll over and over, trying to get that thing off their neck.”

She and her trainers went at it one by one. They started by giving the dog treats and rations, then they showed it a leash. They let the dog sniff the dragline, a short cord that clips onto collars. They attached it, then played “follow me”, in which the trainer dropped cheese cubes, and then stepped away quickly, inviting their dog to chase. “She feels the weight of the line and gets used to it,”Collins. “Once that happens, we grab it and take a few steps, dropping cheese behind us.”The dog will soon get used to the pressure on its neck. Soon, it’s ready for a real leash — and the next challenge, walking outdoors.

Collins had hoped to rescue half the haunted dogs when she opened Madison in 2013. She was able to rescue nearly 90 percent of the dogs that she took in, and they were able to be adopted within months. Dogs were no longer afraid to leave the kennel. They began to socialize with other dogs and formed attachments to their handlers. They took to being leashed and walked on trails, went for short rides in staffers’ cars, and didn’t melt down in public parks when exposed to new dogs and people. “We knew dogs were resilient, but this was something else,”Collins. “It was an ability to trust — and forgive.”

The clinic’s two-year lease was extended twice. The ASPCA began searching for East Coast states that could provide a permanent home and support the BRC. The site they chose was in Weaverville which is just 15 minutes away from Asheville. Encircled by Trumpland, Asheville’s as much a symbol as it is a city: the promise of an agnostic, tolerant South that never seems to come to pass. It’s a peach-fizz town of gastro pubs and gender-fluid teens rocking dusty Chucks and hair colors unseen in nature. Seemingly everyone’s got a skateboard or a graphic-arts side gig — and dogs are part of the mix. You can’t go a block here without stepping around someone’s rescue in a tie-dyed harness or Pride bandanna.

“Asheville greeted us with open arms,” says Bershadker. “It was a progressive community that loved pets and animals,”A census of twenty-something sentients was taken. The ASPCA purchased a parcel of land in 2014 and constructed a clinic like no other. It is a sleek, low-slung structure in matte-white brick that stretches over 12 acres. Each of the 52 dogs receiving treatment has a kennel that is about the size of an apartment: it houses glass doors and walls and a futon, as well as saloon doors that lead to their own dog run.

The clinic is divided into two pods, A and B. Each pod contains play areas inside and outside, as well as treatment rooms called Real-Life Rooms. There is also a high-gloss cooking area for food preparation. The pods both share a gym — yes, a gym for pups, with tunnels and cones and an obstacle course — as well as a dog park with high, screened walls so the dogs aren’t fazed by passing cars. Play groups of six to seven dogs play out there in the afternoon. They chase hot-dog bits, cheese, and other treats that are thrown at them by trainers. There are 35 staff members on campus and many volunteers who work regular shifts. The dogs also have access to a wide range of enrichment options. However, their daily care takes only about a quarter of an hours. “They’re so undersocialized that it’s all they can take,”Collins. “Push them any longer and they’ll crash.”

Sassy reached the BRC by the time he was ready.Her physical problems had improved after treatment. There were scars on her nose and paws that she’d wear forever, but on a dog so pretty, they looked like freckles, not badges of gross neglect. However, her psyche was quite another story. She was terrified “to the point of extreme”Around staff and “looking for escape routes,”Please refer to her case file. “Especially our male staff,”Darren Young is a behavior specialist who worked closely with Sassy. Shanna Phillips was then involved in her adoption. “That made it somewhat challenging,”He laughed.

Young, who’s 49, is an outlier on staff. Christine Young, his wife, and their IT company owner, volunteered at New Jersey shelters. In 2013, they launched a project to house homeless pit bulls and connected with the ASPCA’s temp site in Madison. They became so involved in the work that they decided to train as trainers. They were hired by the ASPCA and sold their home and company and moved to North Carolina as part of the BRC. They’re older and better established than most of their colleagues, scruffy thirtysomethings who’ve kicked around a while before finding their lane in life. Their uniforms — gray T-shirts, blue cargo pants, and utility belts packed with treats — neatly convey the grunge aesthetic of animal-welfare work. There’s an urgency in their gait as they move about the unit: Dogs are distressed in every kennel.

That panic was strangely mixed with Sassy. As they say, she was. “conflicted.”She was afraid of people on the one hand. On the other, she was curious — and hungry. “Man, that little girl loved to eat; she was so food-motivated,” says Young. To work past her fear, he employed a technique that’s known as “treat and retreat.” Those first 10 days, he’d enter her kennel and soft-toss kibble from a distance. Then, bit by bit, he’d lob it closer and step off while she ate it. She eventually got close enough to grab the food from his hands. When she did that, he’d give her a sly scratch behind the ear, the first bit of handling she’d had. At the two-week mark she was aiming for his palm and touching it with her nose to get kibble.

An affinity was forming — highly unusual in a dog so new to treatment. Young went on to spread the love by transferring her affections to other people. Young and his team did rotations of Sassy with the other five people so she became close to them all over time. Then, they recruited volunteers to clean the kennels as well as do all the laundry. “We’d have them just sit there and say nothing to the dog, maybe toss her cubes of cheese,” says Young. Eventually, Sassy came over to the stranger — first, to sniff them, then to bogart hot dogs from their hand.

“It was amazing to watch her open up,” says Young. “She still barked a lot — they named her Sassy for a reason! — but she came a long way in a short time.”She almost did. Sassy was close to breaking the record at BRC for fastest graduation. Sassy completed her program in five weeks. This is the average time it takes to complete treatment. She received her framed diploma, as well as a green coded name card. This meant she was ready to be adopted. She was about to experience a second shock when life intervened. It was early April 2020 — the country was locked down tight by the first wave of Covid.

Young posted Sassy’s photo on Petfinder and Adoptapet.com, and reached out to several shelters in the region. Phillips was instantly smitten by her photo. “There was something in Sassy’s face,”She says. “She looked like she was smiling. I knew it in my soul: That dog was mine.”

Phillips reached out Young. Phillips reached out to Young, who was saddened to learn that she had lost her first. “Bullshit,”Phillips. She made Sassy three calls within five days. Young led Sassy into the small play yard. Young sat her in the smaller one. The small dog ran to the far end and sat down with her back turned for the majority of the visit. “She hates me,” Phillips thought — but returned to BRC. Young took a dog to help her next time. Sassy was able to relax enough to crawl near Phillips and eat the treats she and her boyfriend had given her. The couple decided to take her on a walk after things went well. Sassy fell to her stomach as soon as they turned a corner. “She’d lost sight of me,” says Young, who’d strolled away on purpose. “I needed to see if she was ready to leave.”It turned out that it wasn’t quite yet.

Phillips was finally able to hold Sassy on their third date. She picked up the dog, and wrapped her tightly around her. They swayed, nuzzling in the wind as they stood. She lifted her head and Sassy gave Shanna the faintest kiss.

Since the ASPCA was founded, nine years have passed.Its pilot site, BRC, has placed more than 500 dogs in what staffers call “rehabilitation rooms”. “forever homes.”None of these pups were ever finished when they left treatment. “We get them far enough to thrive in someone’s house, but the rest is up to that family,” says Young. “The [dogs] are gonna be afraid still, and there’s gonna be behaviors. But if you give ’em the love and support they need, just watch what they become in a year.”

We now reach the many shelter dogs across the country that still have adoptable dogs. We’ve come a long way in “live releases” — the number of pups adopted — over the past two decades. In 2000, 90% of all dogs adopted were from the United States. “pounds”They were killed within days of arriving. This was an incredible, but incomplete achievement. For 40 years, the leaders of the animal-welfare movement have waged a two-front war to save pets’ lives. First, spay-neuter laws were introduced to reduce the number of homeless dogs. A single female unhoused could bear 600 children, the majority of which would have miserable lives and be given pentobarbital shots. “Ten million pets were put down each year: That was the number we used to shock the public into action,” says Tom Colvin, the CEO of the Animal Rescue League of Iowa, who’s been a powerhouse in the field for 50 years. More than 30 states now mandate sterilization, easing — but not eliminating — the crush at shelters.

The second front was changing people’s hearts and minds about where they got their pets. “There was so much stigma attached to dog pounds, which used to be located by the sewage plants,”Colvin says so. The rescue movement was able to educate the public about the virtues and benefits of shelter dogs. Since the early 2000s, adoptions spiked and then plummeted in the last two years. The pandemic resulted in the adoption of 23 million dogs, an increase of 600 percent over the norm.

Despite this, there are still 3 million dogs in shelters. Many of these dogs need to be treated in a clinic. At its North Carolina facility, the ASPCA is able to only care for about 100 dogs per year. It will open the Cruelty Rehabilitation Center in Columbus, Ohio, this fall to treat dogs with moderate trauma. The Recovery and Rehabilitation Center in Pawling will be open by next summer. This is for hyperaroused dog owners who are unable to adopt them. This task is not possible alone. What’s needed is a second wave of rescue pros: a national surge of partners and trainers to prepare those unhoused dogs to go home.

The ASPCA poured its money into building that wave. It also funded a BRC academy to train frontline workers from other shelters. This was in addition to the $40 million it spent on the clinics. It also has a block of dorm rooms that can be used by executives and visiting staff.

“I’ve got a team there now for a core retreat; I’d go every month if they let me,”Alison Reder, vice president of operations at Wayside Wifs, a 200-dog shelter located in Kansas City Missouri, says: Inspired by what they learned, Wayside’s leaders built a replica of the BRC behind their busy shelter. “The difference in the dogs that go through our clinic — it’s night and day,” says Reder. “We had a pit bull named Angelo that no one wanted; he spent 200 days at our shelter. But three weeks at our clinic, he went home with a family. You’ve never seen a dog so happy, or relieved.”

The ASPCA received another call in May:Ohio house-of horrors. Out of a single trailer came 90 dogs, living — and dying — on counters and cabinets and holes they’d dug in the wall. Cheddar was a small, beagle-mix dog who looked a lot like Sassy. Unlike Sassy, that dog was no puppy: He’d gone blind in both eyes from years of exposure to the contaminants in the house. I could go on and on about his other health issues. All that’s germane was the state of his psyche when Cheddar arrived last summer.

“Oh, boy,” says Christine Young. “I don’t know if I’ve had a tougher case. That dog didn’t leave its kennel on its own for at least two months.”

Young, who’s married to Sassy’s trainer Darren Young, was born to treat broken dogs. She’s soulful, soft-eyed, and speaks in spa tones, but you need more than heart for dogs like Cheddar — you need an eye for the slightest sign of progress, and the patience to wait as long it takes. Young couldn’t hear her staffers’ murmurs or her own nagging fear over euthanasia. As long as Cheddar exhibited something to build on — an uptick in appetite; an interest in other dogs — she was resolved to keep pushing.

“With Cheddar, his blindness made it so much harder; dogs learn to trust through body language,” Young says. “He had no visual cues.”Young finally had her breakthrough moment after months of struggle. Cheddar approached Young as she was caring for a second dog. “He could kind of, sort of see that I was loving up that dog — and that made him competitive,”She says. Young got close enough for him to sniff her hand and she gave him an affectionate scratch behind the ears. She gave him another scratch. He enjoyed that. She saw him soften his posture for the first time.

She was only able to walk him to the smaller yards with a leash in the autumn. Often, he’d whip his head at handlers: “He wanted nothing to do with any of us,” says Young. But that tiny tell she’d spotted — his envy of other dogs — proved to be her gateway to Cheddar. When Tibbets — another of the Ohio rescues — presented himself for cuddles, Cheddar would leap on Young’s lap and press against her hand.

The months ticked by; Cheddar’s progress was glacial. No one knew when — or if — he’d make the crucial leap. Eighty-six per cent of dogs treated at BRC make it to the end with enough treatment to graduate. Simple math will tell you that the other 14 don’t; at some point, a decision is made to end a dog’s pain humanely. There are team meetings weekly in either pod, then meetings with pod leaders and the clinic’s directors. Each dog’s progress is discussed in those meetings, as well as their sticking points.

“Do we feel like their quality of life is improving and that they’re able to learn?”Sarah Shively is the senior director for operations at BRC. “Can they do canine things like digging and marking, or do they spend the majority of time in a state of fear?” If the presence of people is still causing the dog suffering at about the 25-week mark, a consensus is reached to terminate treatment and end the dog’s life.

Cheddar’s triumphant turn in December was an exciting moment for everyone. When his trainer came to visit, he stopped hiding in his kennel. Play groups were where he lived with other dogs. However, his idea of fun was jumping on them feet first like Jackie Chan. After 28 weeks of training at BRC, he was ready to graduate in February. He was blind so the ASPCA kept him at home until someone applied to adopt him.

Andy and Jessica Ferguson were mourning the death of their dog, Cheddar, after they had lost her to cancer. “There was a pretty big hole in our house to fill; our other dog, Samson, was grieving, too,”Andy is, like his wife and a high school teacher. “We seem to choose the dogs who choose us,”He says.

It’s been a fortnight since the Fergusons brought Cheddar home. The space left behind by their sweet hound Sarah has been filled with commotion — and squeak toys. Cheddar got a pen in the hallway for the first time after the couple had left their dogs. The pen was flattened when they entered the door and the dogs were snoozing side-by-side. “Samson broke him out playing doggy linebacker,”Andy. “Cheddar is Velcro’ed to Samson.”

It seems that Cheddar only does this at night. He climbs on the bed to snuggle between Andy, his wife, and himself. He’s done that since his second day home. That first night, the couple took shifts on the recliner, catching a few hours’ sleep apiece with Cheddar curled up in their laps. They know little of his backstory and like it that way — their love is such that they cannot bear the details. Their favorite word about their dog is “grateful.”He has tended to their wounds as well as his.