Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress

By Brian Beker

# 1 Amazon dog category best seller now available at all top book sellers.

A panicked puppy in a Los Angeles shelter is deemed too terrified for adoption and scheduled to be killed. When a rescue volunteer frees her at the last minute, the little girl is 15 pounds underweight and covered with open sores, swollen ticks and thousands of fleas. Her ears are stuffed with blood and wax, her paws filled with concrete. The victim of severe neglect and confinement, her muscles are atrophied - even her tongue lolls in her mouth. It hurts her to walk more than a few feet, and she limps. She has chewed and licked through the skin on her limbs. Physical ailments can heal, but the greatest challenge will be to overcome what life has taught her about humans: that they are to be feared. Named Roo, the puppy is randomly assigned to a volunteer foster parent with neither special skills nor experience with fearful dogs. He writes that he is, "just as scared as she is." Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress is the emotional and inspiring true story of Roo's journey and the powerful bond formed as she and her foster dad develop the trust and understanding to address her fears and problems one at a time. It's the story of an attempt to redeem an unredeemable dog. This series originally appeared online, where it received nearly 20,000 likes, shares and comments, making it the most popular dog series of 2012. It is accompanied by 20 images and links to numerous videos and online resources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Beker
• Release date: Apr 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311628176

Brian Beker

Brian Beker wrote and directed Lines of Fire, the award-winning behind-the-lines documentary about revolution and heroin trafficking in Burma. It is in the permanent film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Brian has published in The New York Times and elsewhere, conducted clandestine war zone investigation for Greenpeace, and recently directed the aviation documentary AERO. He owned and operated an open-cockpit biplane ride company based at Santa Monica Airport that made a lot of people happy. These days he is focused on making Roo happy while working on The Dog in the Clouds, a memoir about his white Labrador Orville, who appeared in the midnight storm clouds over Kathmandu two years before he was born on the Colorado prairie.

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Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress

ABOUT THE VIDEOS

If your e-book reader has web access, click on the underlined links in the text to view accompanying videos.

If your reader doesn’t have web access, the videos are available at www.thedogintheclouds.com/roo-videos, but beware - they are in reverse chronological order. Please be sure to scroll down to down and view them from the bottom up so that the ending isn’t spoiled for you. It is recommended to watch them when their titles appear in the text.

If you enjoy this e-book, please consider reviewing it. It’s a big help.

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Brian Beker’s blog is www.thedogintheclouds.com

Also on Google+, Facebook and Twitter @dog_in_clouds.

Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress, Notes from a Rescue in Progress, text and images © 2012-2013 Brian Beker. All rights reserved.

This story is for Roo, the bravest puppy I ever knew.

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Notes from a Dog Rescue in Progress

1

A beautiful young Golden Retriever is hiding in the dark in my closet. I have seen her eyes in the sunlight, so I know they are filled with fear. By the time I got her, all she wanted was a place where she could hide her head. She scrambled behind the toilet. Eventually I cleared a den for her in the back of a closet. She is shutting out a world in which everything scares her. I hear her shallow panting.

Roo was named by a rescue worker from Independent Labrador Retriever Rescue of Southern California who pulled her from a high-kill shelter in Los Angeles and brought her to an inner-city clinic to be spayed. The first time I saw her, she was trembling at the end of a leash when a tech brought her out into a Saturday morning waiting room packed with pit bulls and Chihuahuas. The tech was downcast about the state the dog was in, or maybe just about the job in general. His scrubs were bloody, and Roo was covered in a week’s worth of what happens when you’re not let out of a small cage. The amount of money vouchered by the county didn’t inspire anyone to rinse the thick wadding of feces and urine off this girl before slicing her belly open. The golden fur bred into her by humans for their luxury requires human grooming. Roo’s was the dirty grey of the LA streets. It was gnarled into dreadlocks made of a hardened mixture of cement and gravel. The sides of her abdomen were sucked in tight. She didn’t walk so much as stumble. As soon as she got outside, she peed for so long that a couple of machos with a pit bull made some cracks her way. I gave them a look that could have made me a gang casualty. Their pit bull looked like a kind dog with his own problems.

She was terrified, but Roo still had her dignity. More than I could say for myself some of the times when I’ve been wounded, scared, filthy, friendless and left for dead. I fell a little in love with her.

Sounds that I couldn’t even hear