Dexter’s Tale to Become a Film A
16 4 Legs & a Tail
compelling tale of the rescue and rehabilitation of a neglected canine stranded in the Adirondack Mountains is in the beginning stages of becoming a Netflix film. The 208-page true story titled “I am Dexter,” published this year and co-authored by Steve and Dr. Dru Pollinger and Helayne Rosenbaum, encompasses the journey of Dexter from being a lonely, 17-pound stray to a domesticated animal with a strong sense of identity, purpose and belonging. The story is told uniquely in three perspectives over a three-year span, with first-hand accounts from the Pollingers and the attempt to get inside the mind of Dexter on his new endeavor and comeback story. For 40 years, the Pollingers have owned and operated the Fair Haven Animal Hospital in Fair Haven, Vermont. Thousands of animals have been treated, diagnosed and assisted over the years, but none like the newest member to their family of five dogs, Dexter. In the summer of 2018, Steve Pollinger received a phone call from a representative of the Upstate New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) about the potential of he and his wife taking in Dexter, who had been located and captured by a coyote trapper and animal rehabilitator named Mark Laske. Laske had informed the SPCA that Dexter displayed overwhelming signs of fear and was very difficult to approach. “The chances for adoption for a dog so distressed are impossible,” Steve Pollinger said. The Pollingers assumed this was due to years of abuse by either humans, animals in the wild, or maybe worse, both, ultimately resulting in post-traumatic stress. “As the authors of this book, it by no means gives us permission to call ourselves ‘experts’ in the term others might use to describe Dexter’s condition,” Dr. Pollinger said in the book. “Forty years of handson-experience with dogs, our extensive reading and discussions with academics should qualify us to equate this dog’s behavior to PTSD, a human condition. “But we cannot do that, nor should anyone. There isn’t a way to translate an unknown past evil event in this dog’s life into words. He can’t tell us. Going even further, those words are not easily come by in humans.” However, Steve Pollinger, who is known for training and rehabbing dogs that have been abused, decided to take the challenge despite knowing how testing and time consuming it would be. “He (Dexter) showed us through his body language and startle response that there had never been any good touch in his life – only physical abuse,” Dru Pollinger said in the book. “Another major accomplishment occurred when he was finally able to be properly leash walked. As awkward as it appeared initially, it meant to us that eventually he would learn how fulfilling that could be.” The “state of helpless connection” Dru Pollinger described Dexter being in for a substantial period of time made the task even more challenging. The “baby-steps” of regimented structure in leashed walks, crushing food for Spring 2022
