The lucky ones

CHINLE, August 16, 2007

W

hen "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" came to film a segment in Piñon Chapter this spring, the crew did more than provide a new home for a Navajo family.

Crewmembers also provided homes for seven stray dogs that had been hanging around their camp.

Paul DiMeo, one of the show's lead designers, and his wife Kelly couldn't resist Nizh—n’, a mottled sheepdog mix with a bum leg.

"There was this little limping puppy hanging around the camp, covered with ticks," DiMeo recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "She had a beautiful, beautiful face."

The DiMeos had just lost two dogs they'd had for nearly 20 years, so Nizh—n’ - Navajo for "pretty" - couldn't have timed her entrance better.

When they took the pup home and got her to the vet, he confirmed what the DiMeos had suspected: Nizh—n’ had broken her leg at some point and it had healed on its own.

"It's about two inches shorter than the others, but it doesn't seem to bother her at all," DiMeo said. "It's just amazing she could have survived in a place like that with a broken leg."

DiMeo described Nizh—n’'s personality as "willful but loving."

"She's the favorite dog of the neighborhood," he said. "She doesn't have a bad thing to say about anybody."

Unbeknownst to the DiMeos, fellow crewmember Kirk Sullivan was also falling in love that chilly week in Pi–on.

Sullivan, of air filtration company IQ Air, first saw Atay "sleeping on the ground, with a little sagebrush for a pillow."

Permission to adopt

It was love at first sight, but Sullivan worried that the cattle dog-heeler mix might belong to one of the neighbors.

"I went around to all the neighbors and nobody knew who she belonged to," he said, "but I was still worried about just taking this dog.

"(Cultural consultant) Elsa (Johnson) had invited some of the local elders over to the camp one night so I asked them, 'Do you think it would be OK if I took this dog?' One of them said, 'If you respect us enough to ask, I think you would provide a good home for her.'"

There was a second obstacle: Sullivan's wife Marianne.

"We already had three dogs at home, so I didn't know how to tell her I was bringing another one," Sullivan recalled. "So, I just didn't."

Sullivan arrived home to L.A. about 1 a.m. and tried to sneak Atay into the kitchen, but Marianne was waiting for him.

"She knew something was up," laughed Sullivan. "Usually I miss her so much I ask her to wait up for me when I get home, but this time I was like, 'It's OK, honey, just stay in bed.'"

Sullivan needn't have worried - Marianne fell for Atay right away. So did the couple's two beagle pups.

"It was like they immediately acknowledged her as their leader," Sullivan said. "I think she tells them stories of her life as a free dog on the rez. She's so smart, she's probably teaching them to carve arrowheads in her spare time."

The only one with mixed feelings about the new arrival is George, the couple's border collie.

"He loves to play fetch, but Atay is so much faster he never gets the ball any more," Sullivan lamented. "It's like cowboys and Indians, except the Indian always wins."

Atay started out as 'At'ééd, Navajo for "girl," but the neighborhood kids immediately took to the pup and corrupted her name to something easier to pronounce.

"It's OK," Sullivan said. "It's easier for us to say too."

Atay has proved a delightful pet, but she has one strange habit: Around 3 a.m., she jumps on the Sullivans' bed and gives them each a kiss, then jumps off.

"We call her 'The Kissing Bandit,'" laughed Sullivan.

Maybe she's saying "thank you."

Sullivan has yet to try Atay for long periods in front of a camera, but if she works out, she might have a new career - as the poster dog for IQ Air's filtration products.

"She's so eager to please," he said. "When you say, 'Stay!' she slams her little butt to the floor."

Armload of pups

An ABC cameraman also took home a pup, but the real hero of this story is Steve Jones, a Seattle soundman on contract with "Extreme Makeover." He saved four dogs from Chinle.

Jones was staying at the Holiday Inn in Chinle when he befriended a pack of dogs hanging out behind the hotel.

"After a week and a half of feeding them, and seeing how hungry they were, I couldn't just leave them behind," he said. "I said, OK, who wants to go away? And two of them stepped into my car."

Jones also scooped up two puppies from a litter he found in the rocks behind the hotel, but he couldn't catch the mother.

He took them to a dog rescue facility, where "they got them healthy," and then to a woman who fostered them and found them homes.

"I could see there were issues of hunger and homelessness on the reservation, and this just seemed like one I could do something about," he said.

The consultant Elsa Johnson reports a similar scenario occurred when the movie "Black Cloud" was being filmed on the reservation. Writer-actor Rick Schroder took home a dog, as did several other cast members.

"Maybe what we need to solve our dog problem is just to film more movies on the rez," she said wryly.

Of course, not all the rez strays can count on a posh new life in Hollywood, but many have gone on to become pampered pets.

While taking her students on an exchange visit to Hawaii, Rebecca Billy, a teacher at the Seventh-Day Adventist School in Chinle, encountered a dog that had been rescued from Many Farms, Ariz.

"This couple came up and asked us if we were Navajo," Billy recalled. "They said they found their dog when they were touring the reservation."

Now Jip the rez dog runs on black-sand beaches and goes camping with his family in Volcanoes National Park.

Lucky dogs

According to Tamara Martin, president and founder of the Blackhat Humane Society, strays being fostered by Blackhat volunteers have ended up as far away as New Jersey, Montana and Texas.

"Someone will see a dog on the Web site and decide that's the dog they have to have," she said. "If they pay to have it flown out, we can usually find someone to do the legwork."

Last year, a European couple wanted Blackhat to fly out a couple of dogs they had seen in the parking lot of the Tuba City Basha's, but Martin drew the line.

"Someone would have had to catch the dogs, get them their shots, take them to Albuquerque, stay overnight and get them on the plane the next day," she said. "That was just a little too much trouble, even for us."

Two loud, homely hound mixes Martin thought she'd never get rid of are now pulling a dogsled in Montana - their owner prefers hounds to huskies.

And Bubba, an odd-looking Chinle mongrel whose genealogy, near as his foster family could guess, includes German Shepherd, Welsh Corgi, pit bull, lab and maybe Shar-Pei, was lucky enough to win the heart of Sherry Gansle, owner of an upscale B&B near San Antonio, Texas.

A creature that might have ended up as a crow-picked carcass on U.S. Highway 191 now gets two walks a day in wooded, deer-filled hills and is allowed on the furniture.

"He is smart, very loving and a very complex dog-person," Gansle reports by e-mail.

Often people who have adopted one reservation stray will come back for another one when it dies, said Martin, because they tend to make great pets.

"They're survivors, so they're usually really smart," she said. "And they're so grateful. When they find someone who is truly kind to them and they don't have to be constantly vigilant, they're like, 'Oh, I'm in heaven!' Whatever you ask them to do, they'll do it."

Martin always loves it when a Blackhat dog goes to a good home, but "the ones that really warm your heart are the ones you think you'll have forever," she said. "The three-legged dogs, the old dogs."

A few weekends ago, Martin handed off Rosie, a plain brown mutt she'd been fostering for six months.

"I thought, 'Who's going to want this basic brown dog that looks like a dingo?'" recalled Martin. "I was just about resigned to keeping her. But finally this family came along who could see past the plain brown fur and the dingo head, who could see her heart."

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