The Lost Dogs (3 page)

The following season Vick did nothing to hurt his reputation, although an injury caused him to miss parts or all of three games, and the Hokies lost the one contest he sat out fully. Still, he guided the team to a 10-1 record and was named MVP of the 2001 Gator Bowl as he led his team to a win over Clemson.

Vick was now twenty and fully grown. At two hundred pounds and slightly less than six feet tall, he was thick yet compact. His large brown eyes and small wide nose were offset by a strong jaw that made it look as if he had an underbite. Topped off with a goatee, the total effect of these traits was to give Vick an appearance that, while handsome, could fairly be described as almost canine.

Although he had two years of eligibility left, Vick decided to skip the remainder of his college career and enter the 2001 NFL draft. He was taken first overall by the Atlanta Falcons, which signed him to a $62 million contract and received an almost instant return on its investment. The next year, Vick’s first as the full-time starter, he made it to the Pro Bowl and led the Falcons to the playoffs for the first time in four years. Vick returned to the Pro Bowl and the playoffs in 2004 and the Falcons rewarded him with a ten-year, $130 million contract, making him the highest paid player in the league at the time. Another Pro Bowl season followed in 2005, and he flourished off the field, too, ringing up endorsement deals with Nike, Powerade, Kraft, Rawlings, Air Tran, EA Sports, and Hasbro worth multiple millions.

Like many young athletes, especially those who’ve grown up poor, Vick spent his money freely. He bought cars and jewelry and toys. There were numerous houses, including one in Atlanta, Georgia; a condo in South Beach, Florida; a place he bought for his mother in an upscale section of Sussex, Virginia; and another house he was building nearby. He paid for his father’s drug rehab in 2004 and gave the old man a few hundred bucks every few weeks to keep him going. He supported a wide range of family and friends, handing out Escalades to his inner circle. He also purchased a fifteen-acre tract of land in Smithfield, Virginia, a small town in rural Surry County. The address was 1915 Moonlight Road.

Dogfighting is everywhere and nowhere. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that there are forty thousand dogfighters in the country, and yet most people are untouched by it. They wouldn’t know a pit bull if they petted one in the park, they never read about dogfighting in the local paper, and they’ve never been anywhere near an actual dogfight. The practice cuts across all sorts of demographic distinctions: age, race, class, economic status, education, profession. Dogfights have been uncovered at Ku Klux Klan rallies and at inner-city drug raids. Busts have netted unemployed urban teens and suburban professionals—teachers, doctors, lawyers.

Some of the mystery results from the varied faces of dogfighting. At the most basic level, it’s a guy with a dog, some wannabe tough who wants to let his pet prove his manhood. These are often random clashes in alleys and empty lots that may have little riding on them but the owner’s pride—and the dog’s life. These owners have probably done little to prepare the dog for the match other than mistreating it to make it aggressive and maybe feeding it some drugs.

The next level up might be the guy who keeps a few dogs, trains them a bit, and puts them in prearranged fights. He’s not running a business; it’s more of a pastime, but he’s trying to make a few bucks on the action. Those first two groups make up the vast majority of dogfighters, which is why they remain so hidden from view—they’re small-time, random, and by their very ubiquity they blend into the woodwork.

Then there are the professionals. They have a full stable of dogs, thirty-five or more, which they raise for the specific purpose of fighting. They use elaborate training methods and equipment mixed with backwoods wisdom. They feed the dogs high-end food, supplements, and sometimes even steroids. When they get a winner, they breed it and sell the pups for high fees, hoping to establish known lines of fighting dogs that can fetch even more money.

The fights, arranged months in advance, ride on significant wagers, up to $20,000 or $30,000 per match, although they can sometimes shoot even higher than that, into the hundreds of thousands. Fighters need the long lead time to train their dogs, a six-week period of seasoning called “the keep,” which not only gets the dog in shape but attempts to prime its aggression. The exact mix of drills and work-outs and even chemical supplementation is where a dog man, supposedly, shows his true skills, and so each man guards the elements of his approach as if they were ingredients in a sought-after recipe.

There are occasional off-the-chain fights, in which two dogs are simply taken off their restraints and allowed to go at it without any preparation or restrictions, but most clashes follow a general set of practices established more than a hundred years ago, the so-called Cajun Rules, which give all the fights a similar form. A neutral party holds a deposit from each fighter, usually half or one-third of the bet. Upon arrival the dogs are weighed and if one is overweight the fight is forfeited and the owner loses his advance. After the weigh-in each handler washes the other man’s animal, to make sure there are no drugs or poison on the fur that could hinder his dog.

The pit itself is usually a square of anywhere from twelve to twenty feet, with low walls around it to keep the dogs inside. A carpet is laid on the floor to help the dogs get traction, and sometimes a light-colored rug is chosen to make the blood more visible. The dogs enter the pit with a referee and one handler for each. There are diagonal “scratch” lines in opposite corners, and the handlers hold their dogs behind the line. When the referee calls “Fight,” the dogs are released and they charge toward each other.

The handlers remain in the ring, urging the dogs on. The dogs fight until one turns sideways or disengages, at which point the handlers take the dogs back to their corners. The dog that turned away is released and if it charges back toward the other dog, the fight continues. If it fails to reengage, or is unable to, the fight is over. Otherwise, the battle goes on until one of the handlers calls the match. It can be over in ten minutes or it can go on for hours. When it’s done the winning dog usually gets immediate medical treatment. The losing dog might. Or it might be killed.

Fights and dogs are celebrated through an underground network of magazines and Web sites. A secret world filled with coded language, clandestine meetings, and black market trade. Such publications are not necessary to carry out the fights, but the participants can’t help but brag. Although many of the sites post disclaimers saying that they don’t promote any illegal activities and that all the stories are fiction, they have provided peeks into the gruesome world of dogfighting. A now-defunct Web site for Keepem Scratchin’ Kennels described a fight between Little George and Virgil: “Virgil started out fast and tore a gaping hole in Little George’s chest. Within the first ten minutes it looked like he was going to put him away.” As the dogs continue to struggle, heat becomes a factor and causes a turn of events. “Little George started coming back into the fight and got Virgil down for a little while. But the more George tried to put on Virgil, the worse Virgil bit him right back into the gaping hole that he opened in the beginning of the fight. As they were standing up battling it out, you could see the blood dripping out of his chest like you turned on the spigot.” Eventually, the blood loss gets the best of Little George. “Little George had weakened and went down. He had a hold of Virgil’s leg. Virgil was chewing on his head to get him off and it sounded like he was chewing on his knuckle bone.”

Here’s another, from the book
The Complete Gamedog
by Ed and Chris Faron, that describes two men trying to treat a dog after a fight, which gives an even more visceral sense of what these dogs are forced to endure:

And this one, from an academic study called “The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights” by Rhonda Evans and Craig Forsyth in
Deviant Behavior
, captures not just the fight but the overall atmosphere: