Victims of Fashion : Laguna Hills Man Saves Dalmatians Whose Spots Are Out of Style

Heads turn and faces smile when Randy Warner walks down the street with his two best friends--Dalmatians--striding beside him.

“Where are the other 99?” is the inevitable question from people who stop to pet the strikingly graceful black and white dogs.

This is the kind of reaction Dalmatians have been prompting everywhere since the Disney cartoon movie “101 Dalmatians” was re-released last summer at theaters and first appeared in video stores in April.

Children’s pleas for cute puppies since then, and the latest re-emergence of interest in black-and-white Art Deco fashions and interior design, have spurred sales of Dalmatians.

Judging from new American Kennel Club registrations of dogs, last year Dalmatians were the nation’s 15th most popular breed, up from 19th the previous year. They are rising in popularity faster than any other variety.

But Warner, 38, a Laguna Hills resident who has owned and trained Dalmatians for 18 years, contends that too often people who buy the dogs don’t know what they are getting.

“They don’t read up on the breed and think it a is a golden retriever with spots,” he said.

Dalmatians, originally bred to run beside fire trucks and horse-drawn coaches to calm the horses, are an especially energetic and people-loving lot. But if they aren’t trained, exercised and cared for properly, the puppies can grow into unruly adolescents that get dumped at animal shelters.

Warner knows. He is one of a few “rescuers” of Dalmatians who ask shelters to notify them when a dog is turned in. “If one is on death row in a dog pound as far away as Texas or Utah I will take it,” he said.

In all, Warner said, he has found good homes for about 300 dogs that he has rescued from pounds or dissatisfied owners. He said he receives calls about three to five Dalmatians a month. Those who adopt his dogs are charged for the costs he has incurred, which include kennel and vet fees. He throws in training for free.

Warner said he rescued his first Dalmatian 11 years ago. It was a year-old female who was scheduled to be destroyed because she was spotless.

“I took her out of her cage and she was the sweetest thing you ever saw,” Warner said. “She wanted me to join her in chasing leaves and butterflies.”

He adopted the dog, named Aja, who later had a litter of 17 pups that appeared in a puppy food television commercial. “They got a two-year free supply (of the dog food), but they didn’t like it,” he recalled with a laugh.

When Aja died in a train accident on her 10th birthday, Warner said he was “devastated” and went immediately in search of another Dalmatian to be company to Maddy, a female in Aja’s litter that he had kept.

Animal control officers gave him a dog they had forcibly taken from an owner who abused her. Her skull was dented from being hit with a metal pipe. “She was the most vicious and violent dog I’ve ever seen,” he said of Megan, who sat demurely at his side and hugged him whenever he asked.

Linda Stromstedt of Mission Viejo, who recently had three problem dogs under Warner’s tutelage, said he is a “gifted” trainer. When her dogs growl at him, she said, “he grabs them and gives them a bear hug, wrestling them to the ground, and strokes them until they stop growling. Hokey as it sounds, it works.”

Warner said he has calmed once-troublesome Dalmatians that are abandoned at shelters primarily by lovingly teaching them the word “no” while showering them with affection.

When screening those who ask to adopt his Dalmatians, he said, he looks for people who want to pamper them and make them part of their family.

“If you brag about your big back yard, you don’t get one of my Dalmatians, because that is probably where it will be all its life and you will get a high-strung, uncontrollable dog,” he said.

“But if someone says, ‘I want a dog I can spoil and that follows me everyplace and wants to be with me all the time,’ then I say by all means. . . .”

When Dalmatians are treated right, they are very docile, Warner said. His own pair travel without leashes, outfitted in colorful bow ties, to outdoor restaurants and even the Waldorf Astoria in New York, where he said the staff has treated them to chocolate-covered dog biscuits.

Warner said his dogs have appeared in commercials for stockings and orange juice and in a Kool Aid commercial wearing bikinis and seated on lawn chairs. And last year, he said, they were special guests at a black-tie gala of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California.

But Warner is angered when people buy Dalmatians as pets simply because they are intrigued by their spots. Fashion, he noted, comes in and out of style.

He recalled a woman he met three years ago at a San Diego shopping center who had a 10-month-old Dalmatian in her car that she said she was going to have put to sleep.

“She said she had redecorated her living room, and he no longer matched.” Warner said.

“I took the dog out of her car and told her snidely that I hoped she would let me know when she got one that was mauve and mint green.”