It was about 11 PM local time Friday night when my brother Kief and I rolled into Kanab. We had left Las Vegas as soon as I got out of work, and we were both tired and ready to start our weekend of volunteering at Best Friends the next morning, so we checked in, settled into our room at the Shilo Inn, watched a little TV and went to sleep.

Kief had been wanting to volunteer at Best Friends ever since he read about my first visit there, and he told me that he wanted to go there with me the next time I went. So I made plans to go back with him on the weekend of April 25, one week after my last visit there with An over the weekend of April 18 (see last blog entry). I didn't know Kief was such a dog lover, but he is, and we planned to volunteer in Dogtown all weekend.

I couldn't wait. I had been looking forward not only to going back to Dogtown, but to spending some time with my brother, who I don't get to see that often. Additionally, I was hoping to spend some time with Dakota, the Siberian Husky who I had filled out an adoption form for. He was still red collar, but now that I was going to adopt him they told me it shouldn't be a problem for me to spend some time with him.

We got up the next morning, ready to go to Best Friends. We cleaned up, got some breakfast and went out to the car. This time, like last time, we brought the essentials; backpack, water bottles, dog treats, towels, cameras. We left the parking lot and went to the Best Friends Welcome Center where we were just in time to catch the introductory video. When that was done, we met up with our tour guide Jeri for the Best Friends tour.

Shoulders: not just for heads any more

I had been on the tour before but Kief hadn't, so he grabbed the front seat in the van for optimum viewing. This time we stopped at the Colonel's Barracks in Cat World where one of the cats was very shoulder jumpy, and predictably, he jumped on my shoulders and purred into the back of my head. We spent about ten minutes there, then we got back in and drove past Angel Village, the bunny house, the peacock and duck pond, and Feathered and Wild Friends.

Our next stop was Amra's in Dogtown Heights, which is just around the corner from Old Friends. Amra's is where the Michael Vick dogs were brought initially, and it as well as its sister building Rhonda next door are unique in Dogtown. They started out as the same type of octagon buildings as The Fairway, The Garden and Old Friends, but they were modified when the twenty-two Vick dogs were brought in. Individual metal enclosures were built inside each run at both Amra's and Rhonda, essentially creating individual homes for each dog. It had to be that way because these dogs could not co-exist with any other dogs at first, due to the fighting instincts that had been beaten and tortured into them. Putting them in an open run together was not an option, for their own safety.

Today, the remaining Vick dogs have all been moved over to the Rhonda building which is still classified as staff only, and Amra's is used to hold the especially dog-aggressive dogs since the individual enclosures facilitate that. Because it's not home to the Vick dogs any more, it has been opened back up to tours and to volunteers, since they do have green collar dogs there. Green collar dogs can still be very dog aggressive, but not people aggressive.

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