ANIMALS: Maverick & the Hunt

In the scrubby, arid eastern edge of San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Animal Regulation Department set out one day in 1954 to pick up a stray dog. The dog was a fine-looking animal, a sleek, year-old abandoned Doberman pinscher that had been tipping over garbage cans, stealing food, mating with purebred bitches, howling to the whines of fire sirens. He was also fast and smart. Time after time, beginning in the summer of 1954, Inspector Roy L. McGowen drove out to the trailer camp area where the dog foraged. Usually, McGowen could pick up a stray inside of two or three weeks. But not Maverick, the Doberman. Says McGowen: “Hell, whenever we thought we’d outthought him, he’d go a different way—over a fence or under, or just plain dang through. He’s the most intelligent animal I’ve ever encountered.” For four exasperating years the chase continued. The capture of the outlaw dog became an obsession.

The Attack. After each failure of McGowen and his crew, the neighborhood became more outraged. Complaints piled into department headquarters; the pressure increased. The dogcatchers tried every trick they knew. They loaded ground beef with dope tablets; Maverick found it, ate the meat, left the pellets on the ground. They mapped out the streets he used, staked themselves out in concealment with lassos, but Maverick, 80 Ibs. of muscle and speed, trotted new avenues. They even set out a trap baited with a boxer bitch in heat, but Maverick and the bitch tore the trap apart and loped happily off together to the hills.

In the four years of hunting, Dogcatcher McGowen had come to think of Maverick as something special—a symbol of sorts. “He kind of got under my skin,” he said. Last month, when McGowen got orders to shoot the dog, he refused: “Get somebody else.” Then McGowen planned his biggest push. One morning two police cars and three of McGowen’s cars cruised the tightly netted area. Neighbors took up positions near by. One of McGowen’s men, armed with an air rifle loaded with a nicotine-tipped needle, climbed to the rooftop near the spot where Maverick liked to laze. Soon Maverick appeared and stretched out in the shade. For two hours the man with the gun maneuvered to get a bead. Then he shot.

The Hero. Maverick lay stunned for five minutes, but as the hunters approached, he struggled to his feet. Blindly, he staggered to a metal-plated gate, clawed at it, stuck his nose into a crack, scrambled, scratched, pushed. Then, in utter, bewildered defeat, he slumped to the ground, and was carted off.

By this time Maverick had become a hero. Newspapers cheered him. A thousand dog lovers wrote and phoned the animal shelter begging for him. So great was the demand that the shelter agreed to auction him off, and last week at the auction Mrs. Doris Crown, wife of a Van Nuys aircraft-parts manufacturer, bought him for $134.88, drove him away in her red convertible Cadillac.

Inspector McGowen never claimed a victory. Like most people in the area, he figured that the victory rightly belonged to Maverick.