Katrina survivor Smoke plays with owner Karen Betzold at their home
in Glendale, Calif. (photo by Nardine Saad)

Karen Betzold's dog Smoke jumps on her bed at 6:30 every morning to rest his head on the pillow beside her. He opens her refrigerator door, takes out a beer, and closes the door on command. He can play the piano, jump through a Hula Hoop and rebound a basketball. But Betzold said her dog's tail didn't always wag so easily. 

Smoke, a Weimaraner mix, was abandoned in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. Betzold, 43, said he was locked in his New Orleans home for five weeks when his family's insurance adjusters came. The adjusters found him standing on a table trying to stay out of the water, she said. But they couldn't take him out of the home.

Rescue and reunion, almost

When the military returned to save the animals, Betzold said they only broke the windows to throw food inside.

"It was like being in an apocalyptic city," she said. "And the only thing that was left was dogs or cats."

The clothing designer joined the Sun Valley-based Friends for Pets shelter team, which worked to reunite abandoned pets with their owners. After she spent a few days in a Winn-Dixie camp rescuing animals for other shelters, Smoke arrived.

"That beautiful, emaciated, sickly dog walked up to the check-in desk," Betzold said.

He was about seven months old, traumatized by the hurricane and uneasy to strangers' touch. Despite his visible rib cage and waterlogged nails, Betzold said the smoky-colored dog was smart, polite and gorgeous.

"I fell in love with him."

Friends for Pets was rescuing his specific breed, and Smoke was the first dog to fit the description even though he had an uncharacteristic white face, dark nose and bluish eyes. The shelter attempted to return him to his owners, but the I.D. tags on his collar had rusted. He was too sick to spend the night in the kennel after making the trip back to Los Angeles. So, Betzold took him home and nicknamed him "Goose" because "he had such bad dysentery."

A few days later, Smoke's description matched an alert placed online by his family. They identified him by tiny patches of hair on his neck.

"I knew immediately that these people love, love, loved their dog because only they would know there's those five little white hairs there," Betzold said.

Post-traumatic development

Betzold agreed to foster Smoke until the family found a home. When they finally did, they couldn't afford to take him back, she said. Smoke remained in her two-bedroom home along with her own dog Shyla and another Katrina dog she rescued. The three dogs continued to grow and Smoke became even more difficult to manage because of his size.

"My house was a living hell," said Betzold. "All three of them turned three at the same time and a three-year-old dog is like a teenager with keys and a car." She even began looking up dog property laws fearing that her three-foot-tall weimaraner would attack someone.

"Smoke consumed Karen's life," said Betzold's friend Torry Morgan. "When she brought him home he was completely psychotic, crazy, out of control and a maniac."

When guests came over Morgan said Smoke and the two other dogs "would freak out for 20 minutes, spin circles, jump up on you and smack you with their tails." And Smoke was possessive of the house and his new owner, despite being a "peacemaker" between the two female dogs.

"Because I never thought they were going to be mine, I didn't train them," Betzold said.

More latent problems surfaced in Smoke's second year with her. He showed aggressive signs by barking when people came close and lunging at anybody walking by. He chased after fluffy white dogs and tore up rugs and furniture. Betzold said his fear-based aggressive personality came about because he was abandoned. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

One day she returned to her Glendale home to find her contractor cornered by Smoke, afraid of what the dog might do. But Betzold speculates that Smoke was more afraid than the contractor. She wanted him to learn that "just because there's thunder, there isn't going to be five feet of water for you to swim through." So she made an appointment with Steve Brooks, a trainer who teaches dogs "real life manners" at K9U.

"The training was a little scary at first," said Brooks. "He was a very macho, dominant dog."

He didn't trust Smoke because he was so unpredictable.

Brooks took the dog through a three-week boot camp, which he runs from his home, and used a reward-based training method to manage him. "He learned to work for rest, food, water, everything. We made things valuable so we would pay him rather than force him."

Even though Smoke became manageable, Betzold still takes the precaution of locking Smoke in the backyard or in his crate when guests come over. But her dog learned quickly and responded well to training despite his age. He learned how to jump through a Hula Hoop in five minutes.

"I don't say he's fixed. I just say he's a management case forever," Brooks said. "I think some of that stuff did come from Katrina. He obviously has a fear when people bend over and touch him."

Both Betzold and Morgan believe the training helped treat Smoke's trauma.

"The goal with him was to get rid of those fears and that took longer," Brooks said after training Smoke for about a year. "This could have easily gone the other way."

Brooks said all Smoke needed was a job to keep him busy. But Betzold has never seen her dog's ears perk up or his tail wag so often when she gives him a task. "That's new," she said.

But she admits that Smoke still surfs her countertops when he thinks she isn't looking.

"My goal isn't to train my dog. My goal is to stimulate him and mentally exhaust," she said. "I'm so lucky that he's so brilliant."