Death row dogs get 'Second Chance'

Old dogs are learning new tricks and getting a new leash, ahem, lease on life at Twin Cedar Ranch.

Otherwise unadoptable canines from Calaveras and Amador counties’ animal shelters have been granted the opportunity of the “Second Chance” program at Margaret Blair’s Jackson ranch.

“It’s immeasurably valuable. Every dog she saves is a life saved,” said Debby Beaufort, of Mokelumne Hill, the dog team leader for the Calaveras Humane Society. “Undoubtedly, these dogs would otherwise be euthanized. It’s such a win-win-win-win situation for everybody.”

Blair helped train Calaveras Humane Society volunteers who do evaluations of dogs at the San Andreas animal shelter twice a week, Beaufort said. Dogs who are determined by CHS to be non-aggressive but too high-strung, or “knuckleheads” — as Beaufort and Blair both affectionately refer to such animals — to be adopted become candidates for Blair’s program.

Blair had already been conducting obedience training for dogs and temperament testing for shelters for many years.

“I grew tired of seeing dogs get euthanized that I truly knew could be saved,” she said.

Candidates for her program are not truly aggressive, biting dogs, but the kind who jump up on people and cannot walk properly on a leash when they arrive at a shelter.

“They’re the ones that could hurt somebody without meaning to. We teach them basic manners,” Blair said. “A lot of times, it’s just telling them ‘no.’ They’ve never properly been told ‘no’ before.”

More than 100 dogs have been saved in the five years of the program, about half from each county. The success stories have included Bugs, a mixed breed Blair adopted as her own; Rowdy, who has gone on to become a disaster search dog for the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District; a pair of registered therapy dogs; and JoJo, adopted by a Sonora couple in October after coming to Twin Cedar six weeks earlier.

In addition to their manners, obedience and socialization training, the dogs are vaccinated and microchipped before adoption. It takes an average of two to four weeks to turn a dog around and prepare it for adoption, Blair said.

She works alongside several volunteers, including Larry and Kazumi Gunion, Cal Schiappa, Judy Brown, Woody Wray, Chris Gandolfi and Ruth Hartley, who walk the dogs, take them for rides in the car and otherwise assist in their training.

Two dogs currently available for adoption from Twin Cedar are approaching program records for their stay. Beaufort said, in recent months, the problem has not been the dogs being slow learners but an economic climate where adopting out dogs has become more difficult. Porsche, a boxer/Dutch shepherd mix, has been at Twin Cedar for about five months. Shane, a Labrador/border collie/hound mix, had been picked up as a stray and spent five weeks at the Calaveras County shelter before coming to Twin Cedar in mid-December.

Blair said she hopes to find them homes soon and make more room for new “recruits” of the successful program.