Dog rescued from fighting ring to join police
Dallas’s ear-to-ear grin and bright brown eyes seem to sparkle with joy.
The 3-year-old pit-bulltype dog’s radiance makes it difficult to believe he was once a member of a fighting ring and later the subject of multiple court battles, narrowly escaping a death sentence.
Now Dallas’s demeanor is leading him to a new chapter in life: He is among the first pit bulls ever rescued from fighting to train as a police K-9. Next month, after about six weeks of training to sniff out narcotics, he is set to join the force in the southwest Virginia town of Honaker.
His love for balls was key, said Jen Deane, founder and president of Pit Sisters, a Florida rescue group: “We knew that his combination of ball drive and his wanting of human praise was the perfect combination to be a police dog.”
That would have been hard to predict in 2015, when police and agents from the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals seized Dallas, then a Dallas is finishing up about six weeks of narcotics-sniffing training in Pennsylvania.
puppy, and 30 other pit bulls from a compound in the Canadian province.
According to court documents described by Canadian news media, the dogs were chained to metal stakes in the ground, and evidence of fight training — including schedules, muzzles, sticks, steroids and suture kits — was found on the property.
Five people were charged with weapons and animal cruelty violations, as well as with breaking an Ontario ban
on pit bulls.
Rob Scheinberg, the co-founder of a rescue and sanctuary in Ontario called Dog Tales, said he wanted to save as many of the seized dogs as possible.
“I thought, ‘There is no way there are not a few good dogs,’” Scheinberg said.
Soon he had hired a lawyer, and for two years he waged a court battle in protest of an OSPCA application to euthanize 21 of the dogs, including Dallas, based on a behavioral Dallas, a 3-year-old pit-bulltype dog who was rescued from a fighting ring in Canada, will soon become a police dog in Virginia.
assessment that deemed them dangerous. By this spring, celebrities had gotten involved, and #Savethe21 was circulating on social media.
The court eventually ordered the dogs’ owner to surrender 18 of the animals for rehabilitation. It helped that Dog Tales had pledged to pay for the care of the animals and their transport out of Ontario.
All 18 dogs were sent to rescues or were adopted, and Pit Sisters took in 10. Dallas was enrolled in the group’s program that matches hardto-adopt dogs with prison inmates, who socialize, train and care for the canines.
“When Dallas arrived, he was always alert and attentive to everything and everyone. He would stay standing in his kennel looking around his surroundings and wag his tail when someone would walk by,” Nicholas Ramos, an inmate who worked with the dog at Lawtey Correctional Institution, near Jacksonville, Florida, said in an email. “He loved attention and was very affectionate toward people.”
Deane said it didn’t take long for her and the prison program’s administrators to decide that Dallas would be a great K-9. But K-9 training is expensive and intense.
Enter Carol Skaziak, founder and chief executive of a Pennsylvania nonprofit group called the Throw Away Dogs Project, which says it seeks to “repurpose unique dogs.”
Skaziak and a police K-9 trainer her group works with, Bruce Myers, traveled to Florida to assess Dallas. Myers is working with Dallas to teach him to sniff out narcotics.
“He will save many lives,” Myers said. “If he helps take one brick of heroin off the street, that can save 1,000 people.”