The man who talks to dogs

THE San Francisco Chronicle says "author Melinda Roth pens an unforgettable and honest literary portrait of an unlikely hero. The 37-year-old Xanax-popping Randy Grim rescues these unlovable strays from a world were "bombs dropped on a neighbourhood would have caused less ruin".

The Atlantic Monthly says "Roth's is really two books ... the portrait of a young man who has devoted his life to rescuing the street dogs of St Louis; and a harrowing report on the plight of millions of abandoned and stray dogs throughout the United States. These dogs are - literally - our creatures and their heartbreaking condition testifies to humanity's obduracy and, all too often, its sadism."

Enter one very unlikely hero who is trying to call national attention to the scourge. Randy Grim was young, hip, but crippled by panic attacks and phobias (of public places, parties, elevators, driving). After rescuing his first street dog, Bonnie, he couldn't look away.

"How can I?" he asks. "Each one says, 'Don't leave me here'." And so the man who must pop Xanax to walk through an airport refuses to leave a starving, terror-stricken German Shepherd on a dark, icy and stormy East St Louis street, even when a threatening tenement resident has him on the business end of a gun.

Journalist Melinda Roth puts a human, and animal, face on an ignored tragedy playing out in the cities. She gives us beautifully wrought, but too few, scenes of redemption.

Some excerpts from the book are:

The lucky ones just get shot
..."I've found dogs beaten, run on treadmills, fed gunpowder and chained in the sun to make them mean. I've found dogs with broken backs, wrapped in heavy chains and padlocks. I've found dogs with slit throats, or buried alive just to make them mean, only they've been domesticated not to be mean, so emotionally they're all screwed up. Then they get abandoned. They get thrown out of cars, dumped off bridges. The lucky ones just get shot."...

Bait dogs
...Bait dogs are a good portion of the urban stray population. Bait dogs are smaller, weaker animals used to train the fighters. They are marked by missing limbs, numerous scars from the attacks, the wires by which they were tied down, wires now embedded in their legs, and by their conditioned fear of humans and other dogs. Injured dogs are discarded as losers or as leftover bait.

Game dogs
He lay stretched out on the ripped vinyl back seat and raised his head heavily when Randy tapped on the glass. His spine jutted out of his back, his eyes were sunk deep into his skull, his face was as cut up as if he had run through a plate-glass window.

"My God, what happened to him?"

"Dunno. Just showed up here one day all bedraggled and skinny. Got him into the car with some food, poor thing."

"Hey, guy, what happened to you?"

The dog didn't move, even when the old woman tapped on the glass. Randy got out of the front seat and looked up at the bridge, then over to the dogs watching in the woods, then down to the old woman bent over the window.

"They fight them," he said, "don't they?"

The old woman pulled back from the window and manoeuvred her eyes as far from his as she could.

"Don't they?" She nodded.

"Why don't you call the police?"

"Can't," she said, her eyes still searching for escape. "They's in on it too. They shoot the dogs, the police do, just for fun. I seen 'em. Besides - " she looked down the road - "they said they'd burn my house down if I told anyone."

Stories like these are certain to leave the reader with mixed feelings - one can begin to lose faith in the human race - to suspect that the human animal has no decency or feeling left ... then along comes someone like Randy Grimm to prove the opposite.