Pit Bulls’ Bullish Rescuer

Tia Maria Torres is a patron saint of lost causes -- she rescues pit bulls, dogs so notorious that many shelters immediately kill them.

A pit bull bit off part of a mail carrier’s nose last summer in Los Angeles. Another pit bull mauled a 2-year-old in La Habra, tearing into his face and scalp. It’s also the type of dog that sleeps curled up by Torres’ head, while another snores beneath her feet at night.

Torres provides sanctuary and training in Agua Dulce for about 80 dogs at the Villalobos Rescue Center, one of the nation’s largest pit bull rescue efforts. She takes in dogs no one else wants. She teaches free obedience classes at city shelters. She pairs pit bulls with juvenile delinquents in a program called Pets in the Hood. Courts throughout California send her problem dogs, telling the owner that the animal either trains with Torres or dies.

In Los Angeles, it’s like swimming against a tsunami. Of the 70,000 dogs at city shelters each year, nearly half are pit bulls or pit bull mixes, said Jackie David, spokeswoman for the Department of Administration of Animal Services, which runs the city’s six animal shelters.

When possible, Torres finds homes. A Burbank-based German shepherd rescue group, for instance, places 20 dogs a month. On average, Torres places one.

“We take the animals that people want to walk across the street from,” said Torres. “I give priority to hard luck cases.”

These are dogs like Piglet, who was stabbed and then doused with battery acid. And Peanut, whose face resembled hamburger after being confiscated from a man suspected of staging dog fights. And Poppy, one of 39 emaciated dogs found chained to a barn in Bakersfield.

“Tia shows that these animals can be trained and can be good pets,” said David. But even among dog lovers, rescuing pit bulls is controversial.

“The nicest thing you can do for those dogs is euthanasia,” said Eric Sakach, director of the West Coast regional office of the Humane Society of the United States. “People who think you can rehabilitate these dogs are well-intentioned but naive.”

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Torres is more comfortable with animals than with people. She sees pit bulls as big-hearted animals that are always loyal and, when necessary, fierce. It is how she sees herself.

On a recent afternoon, hearing panicked barking, Torres ran into the kennel of Jack, a border collie with a history of biting. A rattlesnake, coiled and hissing, was trying to strike.

Torres pulled Jack to safety, even as he tried to bite her. With a rake, she prodded the snake into a crate and slammed the door shut. She carried the snake away from the kennels and, to the chagrin of her kennel cleaner, released it by the road.

“I’m very superstitious,” Torres said. “Since I stopped killing rattlesnakes, they stopped biting my dogs.”

Torres, 42, describes herself as the “wild child” of animal rescue. At one L.A. animal services commission meeting, rescuers of different breeds showed off photographs of saved dogs to officials. Torres had no pictures. So she peeled off her shirt, showing the tattoo of her pit bull, Duke, on her right shoulder and one on her back of her daughter’s pit bull, L.A.

Torres occasionally has the foul-mouthed bluntness of a short order cook. Take, for instance, the message on her telephone answering machine, in part:

“Help me remember when I’m having a really bad day that it takes 42 muscles to frown and only four to extend my middle finger....”

On most warm days, Torres wears a jog bra, leopard-print boxer shorts and sneakers. She gathers her red-brown hair in a bun atop her head. She wears no protective gear; she says that in 11 years of rescuing pit bulls, she’s never been bitten by one. She does, however, don leather gloves.

“I don’t want to break my nails,” she said. Torres’ long nails are painted burgundy. When she dresses up, she cultivates a vampish look: thigh-high leather boots, low-cut blouse, heavy eyeliner, dark lipstick and loose hair.

Torres likes her Bad Girl image, though she neither drinks nor uses drugs. Recently, after a presentation on pit bulls, police officers complained to Torres that the dogs seemed to react negatively to their uniforms. Describe your uniforms, Torres said.

Boots, badge, black shirt and pants, an officer volunteered. From a bag, Torres pulled out black leather pants, Spice Girl boots, rhinestone stars and a transparent black negligee. “Something like this?” Torres asked the audience.

“Honey,” one man answered, “you put that on and I’ll get on all fours and bark like a dog.”

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Torres allows no barking in the kennels at Villalobos, which is just behind her home. If a dog barks, Torres barrels out of her office and yells, “Quiet!” Most times, her voice is sufficient. If a dog doesn’t respond promptly, she uses a hose to spray the offender.

Torres believes pit bulls suffer an undeservedly bad reputation. So the dogs at Villalobos receive obedience training. When she places a dog in a home, she wants to know the animal will be a good ambassador for the breed.

Since she began running Villalobos, Torres said, only one dog has been returned because it was too aggressive. Of the hundreds of dogs she has rescued, Torres has had a handful killed for the same reason. And when she cannot place a dog, it remains with her for the rest of its life.

“Tia does the dirty work that no one else will do,” said Cinimon Clark, a Los Angeles dog trainer who specializes in pit bulls and Neapolitan mastiffs. “Her dog runs are spotless, her dogs are quiet.”

Torres’ office is sprinkled with photographs of pit bulls in their adopted homes. Here’s the Christmas shot of Gus and Cleo, wearing red antlers, sitting on their owners’ laps. And a beach shot of Whisper, a deaf pit bull adopted after living with Torres for four years. And Blinky and Brad lounging in their owner’s bed.

Nothing is more gratifying than placing a pit bull in a good home. Torres says. “That’s the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate.”

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Torres’ rose-colored adobe ranch house sits on 10 acres of scruffy high desert, about 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, nowhere near a supermarket or movie theater. There are no green lawns here; it’s a land of dust and sand, chaparral and tumbleweeds. It is home to her two daughters, Tania, 17, and Mariah, 11, as well as two girls whom Torres has taken in. It’s also home to seven black cats, two parakeets, a tarantula named Itsy-Bitsy, and 11 dogs, ranging from a Chihuahua to a 180-pound Fila Brasileiro mastiff. (Because the Fila Brasileiro bit Tania in the buttocks when she was wrestling with her sister, Torres is cautious about inviting people inside her home.)

“Call us the Osbournes,” Torres said, referring to MTV’s series about rock star Ozzy Osbourne’s family, “toned down a notch.”

Family dinners? No such luck.

The living room was stripped bare after Torres had a fight with Mariah’s father some years ago and dumped the furniture in the yard. Torres had a worker cut up the sofas and chairs and put them in a garbage bin. Now, the living room has only dog crates.

Torres no longer sleeps in the house. She spends nights on a couch in her office, a trailer lined with dogs in crates. Although the dust-ridden trailer has no running water, Torres stays there so she can better hear the dogs in case of such trouble as windstorms or rattlesnakes. A chain-link fence encloses the office and the kennels, where most of the dogs stay. Each dog has its own fenced area and a plastic shelter. Only one pit bull, the elderly Tatanka, is permitted to roam freely. The other dogs go out on walks or spend time in a fenced paddock.

Torres grew up in the San Fernando Valley. When her father and stepmother split up, she lived with her stepmother, a horse enthusiast. Torres’ pets included raccoons, a ferret, a bobcat and dogs. As a teenager at Chatsworth High School, she competed in rodeo, specializing in barrel racing, goat tying, and roping. As an adult, she enlisted in the Army, worked as a gang counselor, and managed a country-western bar. Today, she’s estranged from most of her family; but still close to her stepmother.

Torres likes to say that a woman’s children and her dogs say a lot about a person. In her case, Torres is proud of her daughters. Tania has piercings and tattoos, Torres said, but she lives at home, doesn’t use drugs and helps with chores. Torres points to Mariah as a proficient dog handler, who’s appeared on “Leeza,” the daytime TV talk show, to defend pit bulls.

Torres has two personal dogs, Duke and Joe. She trained Joe, a black pit bull, to be a certified narcotics detection dog -- a task she thought was a good challenge for the high-energy dog. When Duke was brought into the animal shelter, his previous owner complained, “Not mean enough.” Duke has been with Torres for five years.

“We’re like Siamese twins,” Torres said. “We don’t go anywhere without each other.”

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Tatanka was the first pit bull Torres rescued. She was 4 years old when she was found chained to a truck axle at the scene of a double homicide at an illegal drug lab in Lancaster. Torres had gone to the animal shelter with a friend who was getting a collie. They spotted Tatanka and Torres asked to see the dog. It sprang free from the handler and charged Torres’ daughter, who was sitting nearby on a bench.

Tatanka reached the little girl and began licking her face. Torres was hooked.

It was clear, Torres said, no one wanted pit bulls. So she stepped up. And since she rescued Tatanka 11 years ago, Torres’ kennels have grown. So, too, have expenses. She spends $22,000 a year for kibble alone.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 last year, donations dried up. Torres was left with only one reliable sponsor, John Chambliss, president of the Simon Wolf Organization, a company that makes X-rated films.

When Torres started doing rescue work in the early 1990s, she began with wolves and wolf hybrids. The first came from her brother. Today, at the top of the hill behind her home, cages hold 20 wolves and wolf hybrids.

Torres’ wolves and pit bulls are periodically used in films and videos. Her dog Duke, for instance, has appeared in videos with Snoop Dogg and Jagged Edge, as well as a Nike commercial. Torres met Chambliss two years ago, when he needed a wolf as a background prop for a film.

“Tia can be very gruff; you dig through that and she’s one of the sweetest, most wonderful people on earth,” said Chambliss. “I don’t have a great need for money and I wanted to help these animals and Tia. I couldn’t turn my back on her or the animals.”

Although Chambliss professes a special affinity with the wolves, he was also interested in the other animals that Torres keeps. Midway down the hill, three tigers pace in separate cages. Torres got them when a friend left town and had no other place to put them. And when a person has 20 wolves, how hard is it to tend three tigers? Not a big deal, apparently, although it requires 300 pounds of raw meat a week and the proper federal permits.

Torres credits the tigers and wolves with honing her skills as a trainer. After working with them, she said, pit bulls are a piece of cake. Soon, she expects to house a black leopard and three bears, including a 600-pound male grizzly.

Torres has big plans for renovating Villalobos into something that looks like a medieval castle. She’s begun installing a waterfall fountain and erecting sheets of wood that will be painted to look like castle walls. She wants a wrought iron fence with gargoyles.

“I want people to say ‘This is like a garden paradise; pit bulls live here?’ ” she explained.

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“Pit bull” is a generic term used for American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, and pit mixes. Greyhounds were bred to run and Labradors to retrieve. The American pit bull terrier has been bred to fight other dogs. They are agile, powerful and determined, generally ranging in size from 50 to 80 pounds.

It doesn’t mean that all pit bulls fight; it means that if a fight breaks out, a pit bull can inflict serious injuries. Even with training, socialization and a loving owner, Torres says, “Never trust a pit bull not to fight.” Pit bull owners need to be more vigilant than others, Torres said, and should never allow their dogs to run free or off-leash.

Why bother with the hassle of a dog like this? They are loving, loyal and humorous, Torres said. Aggression toward humans, shyness and instability are not typical traits.

Problem pit bulls are a result of breeding and owners who don’t understand how to handle these animals, Torres said. One woman adopted a white 3-year-old pit bull she found tied to a tree in a Northern California neighborhood. The dog recently got loose in a parking lot and bit a man. After a judge labeled the pit bull a “potentially dangerous dog,” her owner came to Torres.

Torres taught the animal such basic obedience as walking on a leash without lunging for other dogs. The harder part of her assignment: trying to get the dog’s owner to understand her animal’s limits. Midway through training, the owner asked Torres to train her dog to obey commands off-leash. “This is a dog that should never be off-leash,” Torres said.

Well-bred pit bulls are not usually the ones that make newspaper headlines. Experts say problem pit bulls often come from backyard breeders raising fighting dogs. Some owners like having a pit bull snarling at the end of a chain, said Sakach of the Humane Society, which can be as effective at scaring people as carrying a gun.

And dog fighting, while illegal, is flourishing. Winners can net tens of thousands of dollars. At the upper echelon, good candidates for fighting can sell for $3,500.

Owners have several ways of preparing pit bulls to fight -- such as administering steroids or putting hot pepper in the anus to make dogs more vicious. Losers are sometimes killed outright. Others are mutilated and set loose.

In the case of a gray brindle named Jeffrey, animal control officers discovered the dog bleeding from slash wounds on a San Fernando Valley street. His nasal passages were severed and his vision was damaged. Despite blood loss and extensive injuries, Jeffrey wagged his tail at the animal control officer, who phoned Torres.

“You’re looking at a breed that’s so tortured, bashed and physically abused,” said Torres. “Yet they are so forgiving; they don’t hold a grudge. They’re silly and goofy. These dogs are all heart. They don’t even blink at putting their lives at risk.”

Torres believes in second chances. The love of her life is a man in jail awaiting trial on charges of drug trafficking and murder.

Torres met him by accident, while trying to find the jailed owner of a white pit bull in an animal shelter. They exchanged letters and telephone calls over two years. Torres has visited him in Florida three times. And having reviewed some of the evidence in his case, Torres has become convinced of his innocence.

Now they talk several times a day. Torres said she is in love. He knows her so well, she said, that he knows she likes white cheese and hates yellow cheese. She’s hoping he’ll be cleared by December and move in with her. She’d like him to get involved with her Pets in the Hood program, in which pit bulls visit a juvenile detention camp to give kids something to care about.

“I feel like I’m adopting another pit bull,” Torres said. “The bark is definitely worse than the bite. I call him my poodle.”

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Torres’ number is unlisted. Even so, she continually gets calls from people wanting to give up a pit bull. Sometimes it’s because the dog owner’s insurance company canceled their homeowners policy after learning they have a pit bull.

Torres tells callers the kennel is full. She has a waiting list of people willing to pay to have their pit bull boarded for the rest of their lives. Torres finds it difficult to pass up a hard luck case.

Recently, a dog trainer arrived at Villalobos with a 3-year-old chocolate pit bull named Twister, with a blue-silk kerchief tied around its neck. Twister no longer got along with the trainer’s four Rottweilers.

Torres sighed. She’d already said she had no room. But Twister looked up at her with big brown eyes and clamored for a tennis ball.

Torres escorted Twister into a crate in her office. Later, she would shrug and say, “It’s a cute little dog.”