Part 2: Some Kids Found a Pit Bull Wired to a Concrete Pillar in an Abandoned Lot. When My Son Told Me Why Those Boys Had Tied Him There, I Called My Brothers and We Brought the Tools.

PART 2

I need to tell you about my club, because the whole point of this story turns on who we are and what people think we are, and I want you to sit with both.

We are, by appearance, exactly what you’re afraid of. Six of us core guys, all big, all tattooed, most of us with beards going gray now. Leather vests with the club colors. Loud bikes. Some of us have done time. Some of us have hard pasts — addiction, prison, violence, the things that land a certain kind of man in a motorcycle club because it’s the only family that’ll have him. We don’t look like the good guys. We look like the guys the good guys warn you about.

And here’s the thing people don’t know about clubs like ours, the real ones, underneath the look: a lot of us came up hard, came up hurt, came up as the kind of throwaway kids and broken people the world decided weren’t worth much. And when you’ve been a throwaway, when you know in your bones what it’s like to be the thing nobody protects — you develop a very particular, very fierce thing about protecting whoever can’t protect themselves. Kids. The weak. The abused. Animals.

It’s not a contradiction. It’s the opposite. The men who look the most dangerous are sometimes the most dangerous to the right people — to the ones who hurt the helpless — precisely because they remember being helpless themselves.

So when my son told me there was a dog wired to a post to be used as target practice, and I called my club, I did not have to explain anything. I said where, and I said what, and within twenty minutes there were six bikers and a pile of tools loading up, because there is nothing — nothing — that lights the fuse on men like us faster than someone hurting a defenseless thing for fun.

We brought bolt cutters. Wire cutters. A first aid kit. Water. A blanket. We did not, despite what every part of this might make you assume, bring anything to start a fight, because the point was the dog. The point was always the dog. Whoever had done this could be dealt with by the law; our job was to get to that dog.

We rode over to the site.

And I want to tell you what six large, leather-clad, tattooed bikers looked like, walking into an abandoned construction lot toward a wired-up dog, because the dog saw us coming, and I’ll never forget it.

PART 3

The dog was right where the kids said.

A Pit Bull, brown and white, maybe two or three years old, wired by the neck to a concrete pillar. And the setup around him was exactly what my son had described, and it turned my stomach and lit something in all six of us — the cans, the bottles set up downrange, the casings on the ground. Somebody had been there, had set this up, had wired a living dog to a post as a target. They just hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. We’d find out why later.

And the dog.

When six big bikers came walking across that lot toward him, the dog did not bark, did not lunge, did not do any of the things people expect from a Pit Bull. He pressed himself back against the pillar as far as the wire would let him, and he shook, and he watched us come with the eyes of an animal who has learned that humans approaching means pain, who had no reason on earth to believe these particular large loud humans were any different from whoever had wired him there.

He was terrified of us. And I don’t blame him. We’re a frightening sight on a good day, and he’d just been left to be shot.

So we did the thing you do. We got small. Six big men, and we all got low, got slow, got quiet. The biggest, scariest-looking one of us — a guy we call Tiny, who is six foot five and built like a vending machine and has done real time — Tiny is the one who’s best with hurt animals, always has been, and Tiny got down on his knees on the broken concrete a few feet from that shaking dog and just started talking to him. Low. Soft. The kind of voice you would never believe came out of a man who looks like that.

It took a while. The dog didn’t trust us, and the wire was tight and any movement near his neck made him flinch. But Tiny stayed down there talking, and the rest of us stayed back, and slowly, slowly, the dog stopped shaking quite so hard, and let Tiny get close enough to look at the wire.

It was bad. The wire was twisted tight and embedded into the swollen, raw skin of his neck. We were going to have to cut it carefully, and it was going to hurt him, and there was no way around that.

Tiny held the dog’s head, gentle, murmuring to him the whole time, and another brother worked the wire cutters, and we cut that dog free of the pillar as carefully as six pairs of big rough hands could manage. The dog cried out once when the wire came away from the skin, and then it was off, and he was free, and he didn’t run — he was too hurt, too scared, too far gone for that.

So Tiny picked him up. This enormous, terrifying-looking man gathered up a wired, wounded, shaking Pit Bull against his leather vest like he was holding something made of glass, and he carried him to the truck one of the brothers had brought, and we wrapped him in a blanket, and we drove him straight to the emergency vet, six bikers and a broken dog, and on the way I called the police.

PART 4

The vet took him in and went to work, and we waited — six bikers filling up a veterinary waiting room, which I promise you is a sight, and the staff were a little nervous of us at first until they understood why we were there, and then they couldn’t have been kinder.

The wounds were bad but they were survivable. The wire had done real damage to his neck, would leave scars, but it hadn’t hit anything that wouldn’t heal. He was dehydrated, scared out of his mind, but structurally he was going to be okay. He’d live. The vet said with care and time he’d recover fully, physically. The other kind of recovery, the trust kind, would take longer, but it would come.

And while we waited, the police pieced together what had actually happened, and it’s a story with a piece of grace in it that I hold onto.

A group of young guys — not kids, young men, old enough to know exactly what they were doing — had taken that dog (we never fully learned where they got him, probably a stray or a stolen pet, the investigation couldn’t nail it down) and wired him to that pillar specifically to use him as a target. To shoot a living, tied-up dog for entertainment. They’d set up their other targets, the cans and bottles, and they’d brought guns.

But they hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Because somebody had seen them. Somebody — we never knew who, some neighbor, somebody passing — had seen what was being set up at that abandoned site and had called the police, and the young men, hearing sirens or getting spooked, had bolted before they could do the thing they’d come to do. They’d run. And in the gap between them running and us arriving, the kids had found the dog, and the kids had run home, and my son had told me, and here we all were.

The dog had been minutes, maybe, from being shot. Saved by a stranger’s phone call and a pack of eight-year-olds who went to play somewhere they weren’t supposed to.

And the police caught them. That’s the part that matters. The investigation, helped by the witness and by the evidence all over that site, led to arrests. The young men who’d wired a dog to a post to shoot him for fun were caught and charged. I’m not going to pretend the justice system always does right, but in this case it did — animal cruelty charges, real ones, consequences. They didn’t walk.

So there we were, six bikers, with a recovering Pit Bull who’d been wired to a post as a target, no owner, nowhere to go.

You already know what happened.

PART 5

I took him. Of course I took him. There was never a question among any of us — the only debate was which of us got to, and since it was my son who’d found him and my call that brought the club, the brothers agreed he was mine.

I named him Target.

People have pushed back on that name over the years. They think it’s grim, that I should have given him a fresh name that left the past behind, something hopeful. I understand the impulse. But I named him Target on purpose, and I’ve never regretted it, and here’s why.

I was not going to pretend the past didn’t happen. That dog was a target. Somebody wired him to a post to shoot him for fun, and that’s the truth of where he came from, and erasing it with a soft new name would have been a lie. I don’t believe in lies, and I don’t believe in pretending the worst thing didn’t happen.

What I believe in is what you do with the worst thing.

So he’s Target. And on his collar, I had a tag made, and the tag says: “I was a target. Now I’m a survivor.”

That’s the whole philosophy of my club in one line, honestly. Most of us were targets of one kind or another. The world aimed at us — poverty, abuse, addiction, prison, all the ways the world takes shots at the kind of people who end up in a motorcycle club. And we survived it. We’re survivors. And we decided, a long time ago, that surviving means you turn around and you stand between the world and whatever’s getting shot at now.

Target was the most literal possible version of that. A creature who’d been an actual target. And now he was ours, and he was going to be a survivor, and he was going to help us protect the next ones.

Because here’s what we did with Target. We didn’t just adopt a dog and call it a nice story.

We built something.

PART 6

Target healed. The neck scars stayed — you can still see the marks where the wire was, faint now under his fur, and I’ve never minded them, because they’re the truth, they’re the was in “I was a target.” But he healed, and more than that, he came back. The trust came back. It took months, lots of patience, lots of Tiny, who Target bonded to almost as hard as he bonded to me. But the shaking, terrified dog pressed against that concrete pillar became, over time, the most confident, joyful, people-loving dog you ever met.

He became the club’s dog. The mascot, officially. And he loved it — loved the bikes, loved the noise, loved the leather, loved being surrounded by six huge men who would have died for him. We rigged up a sidecar, and Target took to it like he was born for it, sitting up front, goggles and all (yes, goggles, doggles, whatever you want to call them, he wore them and he loved them), riding with the club.

And here’s where it became bigger than one dog.

Because the thing about being a club full of former targets who’d just saved an actual target — it gave us a mission we didn’t have words for before. We started doing charity rides for abused animals. We’d organize a ride — dozens, sometimes hundreds of bikes — and we’d raise money for animal shelters, for anti-cruelty organizations, for the kind of places that take in the wired-to-a-post dogs and the box-in-the-woods dogs and all the rest of them.

And Target led every single ride. From the sidecar. Goggles on, tag gleaming — I was a target. Now I’m a survivor — at the head of a column of the scariest-looking men in three counties, riding to raise money to protect animals from exactly what almost happened to him.

You want to talk about an image that rearranges what people think they know. A pack of huge, tattooed, terrifying bikers, thundering down the highway, and at the very front, in a sidecar, a grinning Pit Bull in goggles with scars on his neck. People would line the route. People would cry. Because it told them, in one image, something true and something they needed: that the men they’d been taught to fear were the men riding to protect the helpless, and that the breed they’d been taught to fear was riding right up front, the survivor, the proof.

We did that ride every year. And then more than once a year. And it grew.

Over ten years, my club’s charity rides — all of them led by Target in the sidecar — have raised over five hundred thousand dollars for animal shelters and anti-cruelty organizations.

Half a million dollars.

All of it starting with one dog wired to a concrete pillar to be used as a target.

PART 7

Let me lay out what I’ve come to understand, because ten years gives you time.

A group of young men decided, for fun, to destroy a defenseless creature. That was the intent. One dead dog, shot tied to a post, for entertainment. That’s the entire darkness at the start of this.

And here’s what came out of it instead.

That dog lived. Healed. Became beloved. Got a family of six men who’d die for him and a whole community beyond that.

But it didn’t stop at one dog. Because of Target — because of what almost happened to him and what we decided to do about it — half a million dollars has gone to shelters and anti-cruelty groups over ten years. You cannot count how many animals that money has saved, fed, healed, rehomed. Hundreds. Probably thousands, over a decade. Every dollar of it traceable back to one dog wired to a post by people who wanted to end a life for fun.

They aimed at one life. They missed. And the miss multiplied into the saving of thousands.

And there’s the other thing, the thing about my club, that I think this story is really about underneath the dog.

For years, people looked at us — at men like us — and saw the target’s shooters. Saw danger, saw the guys to be afraid of, saw exactly the kind of men who’d wire a dog to a post. That’s the assumption. Big, tattooed, leather, scary — must be the bad guys.

And Target, riding up front in his goggles at the head of our column, became the answer to that assumption, made flesh. Because the men everyone feared turned out to be the men who showed up with bolt cutters. The scariest-looking pack in the county turned out to be the ones who got down on their knees on broken concrete and talked soft to a shaking dog and carried him out like glass. The world looked at us and saw shooters; we looked at a wired-up dog and saw ourselves, and we cut him free, and we spent ten years and half a million dollars proving which one we actually were.

Target wasn’t just a dog we saved. Target was the proof of what we are, riding at the front where everyone could see it.

I was a target. Now I’m a survivor.

It was on his collar. It was true of him. It was true of every man riding behind him.

PART 8

Target’s older now. Gray on the muzzle, the wire scars still faint on his neck, slower to climb into the sidecar than he used to be. We go a little slower on the rides for him now. Nobody minds. The whole column slows down for Target; that’s just how it is.

He still leads every ride. Still wears the goggles. Still wears the tag.

The young men who wired him to that post — I don’t think about them much anymore. They had their consequences. They’re a footnote. They aimed at a life and missed and accidentally launched the best thing my club ever did.

People still line the routes when we ride. They still cry when they see him up front. New folks ask about the scars on his neck, and we tell them, and we point at the tag.

I was a target. Now I’m a survivor.

Half a million dollars. Ten years. Thousands of animals.

All from one dog some cowards wired to a post.

They should’ve remembered something before they did it.

You aim at the helpless, you’d better hope the scary-looking men get there first.

We did.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones the world aimed at — and the unlikely people who got there first. And if Target’s story reached you, leave the name “Target” in a comment and I’ll make sure you see the rest of it — and the ones that come after.