Paroled Pups

I saw Jared this week. He had to get scarce and lay low, due to pressures from neos and law enforcement. The fact that he is not a weredog is making things more difficult, in terms of his safety.

Anyway, he found a job in prison. Not as an inmate, but as a dog trainer, coordinator, actually. It fits his needs and personality for numerous reasons. He says he does more people training than of dogs.

Back in 2002 Missouri prisons started a program that allows prisoners to adopt and train dogs with behavioral problems or impairments that make their adoption difficult or impossible.

Pups for Parole is the name of the program.

He says they are effective, that close to 300 dogs have been given a second, or third or forth, chance and been adopted because of the program. And all of the prisoners in the program say that it has helped them, restored something in them.

2 cases that Jared told me stick in my mind. One is lifer for multiple murders, former carer criminal, biker gangs, scourge on society and all that, but is incredible with the dogs, especially puppies. He is large and menacing and covered in scary tattoos, but when he gets around dogs he is kind and gentle. With Puppies he talks baby-talk, acts more like a hair dresser. But he is dangerous to any of the other inmates or trainers who he thinks are not kind or gentler enough with the dogs. Last month he nearly ripped some guys head off for holding a puppy up high and playing with it like it was a toy airplane. He got solitary for a few days. But Jared says it is unlikely that there will be anymore flying puppies.

A blind female yellow lab arrived at the prison about 2 months ago. Jared did not give it much chance, tried not to get too attached to it, because he did not to take the emotional plummet when the dog failed. But that lab has become a star pupil, even helps to train and care for the other dogs, especially the puppies. She became surrogate mother for a litter of shepherd-mix puppies who came in who all were too young, and thus at risk. She immediately adopted them, started producing milk, miraculously, and nursing them. They are all fine now, out of the woods, and still run to her when scared or happy. But Jared fears the lab will never get adopted because she is blind.

Since Jared is laying low in prison, others have stepped up to take over the puppy mill teams. More on that later.